Corel WordPerfect Lightning - a simple note taking and file viewer

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Posted by Dominik Holenstein
Aug 9, 2007 at 10:51 AM

I haven’t tested it yet but it seems to be a good idea:
http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/us/en/Product/1171919679811

Dominik

Posted by Graham Rhind
Aug 9, 2007 at 12:25 PM

Well, one good thing about it - it’s free! It’s quite feature-poor, but might be useful for people only requiring a basic note-taking and file-linking software.

It’s still in beta. A quick test (of features I might use) shows:

Pros:

- Good editing possibilities within the notes (rtf features, graphics, tables)
- Screen area capture to note utility (similar to OneNote’s)
- Send documents from it by e-mail (thorough the default e-mail application)

Cons:

- Only supports reading of 3 file types (Wordperfect, Word, Acrobat)
- Annoying message section at the bottom of the window which is probably designed to show advertising at some stage
- Lightning by name, not (on my machine) by nature.
- Its viewer for MS Word documents does not properly reproduce the Word layout
- Its viewers only view - no editing possibilities within the program

Graham

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Aug 9, 2007 at 02:57 PM

Graham,

I concur with your conclusions about Lightning. The best thing about it is the notes editor, which is quite robust for a tree-based PIM. Other than that, however, Lightning seems a sad and late attempt by Corel to get into this arena… what’s the point of this software? They do seem to want to integrate Lightning with the web, especially blogs… the program features a “Send to Blog” function—which only works with WordPress at this stage.

Reading the Getting Started PDF that opens on first start up supplies this piece of instruction:

“First, create a note by clicking the New Note button in the upper-left corner of the Navigator. Type a few words in the note. Notice that these words become the note’s title. Next, open a Web page. Select the text and images that you want to copy, right-click, and choose Copy. Now, right-click in the note, and choose Paste. The content that you copied is now pasted in the note.”

Is this 21st century technology at its best, or what?

Steve Z.

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