Hi Steve,
welcome to the forums. Honestly I don´t know much about DPP because I have used other software ever since I used digital cameras. I just watched an intro video sugested by studio101, showing the available tools above to get an idea about the options it offers.
That said - if you take the time to learn a software, you might consider investing the time into something that is more industry standard and commonly used so that people can give you tipps, etc and you can watch tutorials on. PLUS: has more tools and options.
The most used software among photographs is adobe lightroom. One thing that I missed, looking at the interface of DPP was the use of presets - not just white balance or crop presets, but complete presets (or even parts, like white balance plus brightness plus contrast without all the other settings) you can copy not only from one image to another, but save as a preset. You can even get presets in the web that you can import to achieve a certain look that you can finetune for your needs.
That said, lightroom isn´t a free software, so if you will only use it occasionally it might not be worth it. If you are not sure, there is a 30day free trial. The costs are US$ 140 for the stand alone version you can own/buy, and then there is a rental version for $10 per month (that includes photoshop).
To give you an idea, I just did a google image search for "
Canon DPP before and after" and another one for "
Lightroom before and after" while the first search didn´t return too many results at all, the examples are rather underwhelming compared to the latter.
Just the 2c of somebody who invested a lot of time into learning and then changed software

.