Never mind all that stuff going on in movie theaters. In word processing the evil Empire is Microsoft Word, and the Rebel Alliance is WordPerfect by Corel. Now, WordPerfect has released Office 2000, the latest round in a never-ending contest for desktops. And the gimmick here is voice recognition, now part of WordPerfect 9.0 and provided by Dragon Naturally Speaking. Which, for the time being, puts WordPerfect Office 2000 one up. Microsoft Office Professional isn't shipping until June 10, although CompUSA is accepting online pre-orders for $549.97. Over at online merchant Buysoft, the WordPerfect suite is available for order at $314.95. This column is being written mostly by speaking into a microphone. Editing it is being done by keyboard mostly because I'm too lazy to learn two pages of Voice Commands. Besides, I've been a WordPerfect fan for years, and the keyboard commands are second nature to me. How well does voice recognition work? So-so. In the first sentence of this article, the computer thought the words ``Rebel Alliance'' were ``rubble lines.'' And it thought the manufacturer of the software was ``Cornell'' not Corel. But for a $315 package that includes the voice recognition, plus presentation, spreadsheets, database and Web publishing software, and thousands of clip art images and fonts, those glitches can be overlooked. And if, because of physical impairment, you have been unable to type, the voice recognition could be a godsend. And the Dragon Naturally Speaking software does learn automatically and over time, so I expect recognition to become steadily better. Speaking of time, budget at least 30 minutes of your installation time just to train the voice recognition. You do that by leading from a prepared text that the software already knows, until it has learned to associate your particular command station correctly. The talk-to-type feature aside, WordPerfect 9.0 includes the ability to preview formatting changes before they are made. Seeing stylistic disaster before it happens is lots easier than undoing it after it's too late. And it allows you to publish a document as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file, the de facto standard for gross-platform document sharing. The software has improved document-reading and browsing control as well. The other software components of the package have also been improved. Quattro Pro, for example, can now handle a worksheet of a million rowns and 18,000 columns, not that any human being would need such a thing. With the voice-recognition software installed, system requirements are stiff: WordPerfect Office 2000 wants to see at least a 133-megahertz Pentium processor, 48 megabytes of RAM for Windows 95 and 64 megabytes of RAM for Windows 98 and Windows NT 4.0, and, of course, a 16-bit sound card. A headset microphone is included. Installation takes a minimum of 220 megabytes and a typical installation is 330 megabytes. Corel Products are widely available at retail and online. ------ Questions and comments are welcome. E-mail via the Internet to lblasko(at)ap.org, or send regular mail to Larry Blasko, AP, 50 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10020. -=-=- 