It's hard not to have some sympathy for Corel's WordPerfect Office suite. For some time it's been delivering a set of tools that at worst tend to equate to those that rival Microsoft puts out, usually wrapped in even more considerate clothing.

Yet thanks to issues of cost, brand and a fast-growing free rival (OpenOffice), you can't help but feel that WordPerfect Suite's time is coming to an end. Even this version's modest cash saving over the Microsoft juggernaut isn't likely to be enough to turn the tide in Corel's favour.

Certainly in the boxed software arena, it's a product that doesn't easily get a foothold, and yet it deserves more. Because version 14 of the Suite - which keeps, for classic WordPerfect owners, the option to work in blue screen 5.1 mode - is an accomplished and mature toolkit that's very good to work with.

In the box you get WordPerfect X4 (word processor), Quattro Pro (spreadsheet tool), Presentations X4 (that's the Powerpoint rival), Visual Intelligence SE (a data analysis product), WordPerfect Lightning (a Web note-taking utility), and WordPerfect Mail (that's, as you'd guess, the mail client).

It's a broad and powerful suite with a lot to commend it. To be fair, Microsoft Office 2007 gives it a mighty run for its money (it's certainly seen Microsoft raising its game in this sector), and in some cases eclipses what Corel has to offer, particular in the case of Excel, which is clearly superior to Quattro Pro, not least for the way it deals with charts and visual elements.

The big new thinking this time around is far tighter integration with the PDF file format. The program now lets you import a PDF and edit it, although we found this to be a limited and time-consuming (at times, very time consuming) feature, even if it did let us pull text out of a PDF document. It looks good on the box, granted, but take it as a useful tool to dip into every now and then, rather than something you'd rely on.

What appealed to us immensely - although this is a holdover from the suite's ancestors - is the clean and uncluttered look and feel of the software. It manages this without compromising the power of the features underneath the surface, but for most of your working time with Corel WordPerfect, it just lets you get on with the job, with the bare minimum of fuss (and WordPerfect itself remains our favourite tool in the package).

It helps, too, that file support is so wide and instinctive, although while ODF is supported, we were disappointed to find we couldn't save into it. That said, any of the constituent WordPerfect Suite programs seemed happy to open up a broad gamut of file types, from the dim and distant past right through to the present day, and that's a big tick in its favour.

The problem here is that, strong though the applications are, the competition is as tough as it's ever been, and there's not enough here to convince devotees of Microsoft Office or even OpenOffice to switch sides. That leaves X4 appealing to the WordPerfect devotee, who is likely to find that not much of practical use has changed since we last met the software. It's still very good, but you can't help wondering if it's fighting a losing battle.

A strong office suite, and in many ways it easily matches Office 2007. But there's not enough to tempt newcomers and not enough innovation to satiate the suite's longer-standing users.