Alternative Office Products 

Here I will mention just two Lotus SmartSuite now at V9.8 and Word Perfect Office V12. If you are old enough – like me – to remember the pre Windows days then Word Perfect was then king. Mr Gates came along with Windows and even though Word Perfect adapted everyone seemed to like the way he did things.

Lotus SmartSuite is now part of IBM and those of my generation remember where if you said IBM your job was safe however this seemed to apply mainly to hardware. Regular readers will know I have long used a component of SmartSuite namely Organiser.

Firstly WordPerfect, this product has gone through several owners but the current owners Corel have at last noted what they have and started to develop it. Of course they are well behind and a good first move is to make it easy for disgruntled Microsoft users - plenty of them about - to emigrate and this they have done by having lots of wizards. They also accommodate those who will still need to use Mr Gates software in another environment by making saving in the Microsoft formats easy.

There are three modules, WordPerfect the word processor, Quattro the spreadsheet and perhaps the best presentation (Power Point beater) around Presentations. All parts of this package work well together and perhaps most importantly they can all be used by Microsoft users easily and even to the point of having very similar menu structures.

Lotus SmartSuite is the package that you can often pick up for only a few pounds, the SRP is still high but bundling deals mean that OEM customers can emblazon their hardware with ‘software worth £xxx for free’. In fact a visit to your local computer fair will find some people unbundling the package and selling it for £20 or even less.

Lotus 1-2-3 was the standard spreadsheet package and long after Microsoft had won over the Word Processor sector people still clung to Lotus probably because they had lots of macros written that did not convert correctly into Excel. WordPro - for the older amongst us AmiPro - is a perfectly acceptable word processor. Freelance Graphics hardly ever gets a mention in the same breath as Power Point but again it does the job. Something that both WordPerfect and Microsoft leave out of their basic offering is a database but here – for no extra cost – you get Approach a database I know lots of people have built their business around, and importantly they are still in business. Lotus also include FastSite an Internet document publisher, SmartCentre a Internet Information Manager and my favourite Lotus Organiser that can be far more than just a PIM for instance the latest version has the ability to list up to six different emails addresses for a single person. Even today this may seem like overkill but I remember parts that seemed as unlikely a few editions ago that are in everyday use today.

I will give links below to both packages but especially with SmartSuite look around and you can pick it up for a price that bears no relationship to the SRP.

Links :

http://www.corel.co.uk/servlet/Satellite?pagename=Corel2Uk/Products/Home&pid=1047023082709
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/info/ecatalog/en_GB/products/U105945Z10099Y00.html