This article was published in PC Plus issue 153 (Jul 99), and is reproduced here for information purposes only. This is the original copy which was sent to the magazine, not the subbed version which appeared on the page. |
Microsoft Office 2000 - the competition.This is a section from my review of Microsoft Office 2000. It gives a brief overview of the product's two main competitors.
|
|
|
|
[BEGINS]
<mini-strap for page> Office has two major competitors, Lotus SmartSuite
and Corel WordPerfect Office. Here's how they shape up against Microsoft's
2000 release. Lotus SmartSuite £410 (including database) Contents: Lotus is largely responsible for denying Microsoft total dominance of the suites market, having kept Smartsuite in the race by means of steady development, keen pricing (especially when bundled with hardware) and integration with its Notes groupware system. SmartSuite Millennium was launched last autumn and is due for a minor update soon. It comes in just one version, which includes a database (the outstanding Approach) but not a full-scale Desktop Publisher. Its word processor, Word Pro, is a modern, highly graphical product with a Word-like feature list and the bonus of IBM's ViaVoice speech recognition. However it's fairly slow, and awkward to use in places. 1-2-3 is Lotus's classic spreadsheet, now made thoroughly modern and equipped with limited, template-based ViaVoice capability. It's a solid Excel challenger, although not quite as easy to use. Approach is SmartSuite's secret weapon - the best desktop database at any price, and far more suitable for end-users than Access. Freelance is another strong performer, less powerful than PowerPoint but more friendly. Organizer, the digital Filofax, is arguably the most friendly business application of all, while ScreenCam is simply unbeatable - if you want to record Windows screen movies, that is. The SmartSuite applications are programmable via Lotus's VBA-like LotusScript language, which is even more developer-only than Microsoft's offering but kept better hidden from end users. The suite integrates with Lotus's eSuite and a range of parent company IBM's mainframe offerings, and is strong on document-to-Web publishing, though it lacks Office 2000's round-trippable HTML files. Verdict - Better value than Office, with a far better end-user database, although the rest of the suite lags just behind. Well worth considering. Rating 7/10. WordPerfect Office 2000 Price TBA, around £300 for Professional version. Contents: Voice-powered Edition Professional Edition This suite has a colourful history, starting life with WordPerfect Corporation, which was bought by Novell, which promptly lost its nerve and sold it on to Corel. The Canadian graphics giant, a calmer parent, has been plugging steadily away at a new 2000 version, due for release very soon. The early Corel days of 'everything including the kitchen sink' bundling (the massive Corel Draw was once included as an accessory) are gone, and WordPerfect Office editions now contain very Microsoft-like lists of applications. The WordPerfect word processor is a pleasant cross between Word Pro and Word with good graphics support, while the Quattro Pro spreadsheet, originally a Borland product, has caught up with Excel and 1-2-3's worksheet sizes and collaboration tools, but is still a little slow. Corel Presentations handles both slide shows and bitmap/vector graphics design, doing both surprisingly well. Corel Central, redesigned in this release, has a conventional interface like Outlook, and lacks email capabilities like Organizer. WordPerfect's achilles heel is its database, Paradox, an impenetrable relational heavyweight which is even less suitable than Access for inclusion in an end-user suite. Like SmartSuite, WP Office lacks Office 2000's round-trippable HTML files, compensating with its Trellix documents-to-website generator. However it doesn't lack Office's VBA 6.0 programming language, as Corel, with typical pragmatism, has licensed it for inclusion in its applications. If you like supporting plucky underdogs with refreshingly open-minded design approaches, this could be the suite for you. [ENDS] (C) Paul Stephens 1999. All rights reserved.
|
|||
