Office suites are now far more than simple wordprocessor, spreadsheet and database sets. Manufacturers have competed to load in feature upon feature and turn them into whole computing environments. Many users will do all their work within one and see nothing but their (or their company's) chosen suite on screen, apart from brief glimpses of the desktop.
The upside of this feature-bloat is hugely increased power for the programs themselves. On the downside, users now rarely use more than a fraction of the tools in a particular suite. And having gone through the pain of learning one suite very few will willingly set about learning another.
This is one of the reasons that vendors fight so hard for market share in this area; once won, customers are likely to stay loyal. Another reason is that the suites themselves are expensive programs and big business, with up to half of Microsoft's revenue coming from its office suites.
Microsoft is king of the market, followed a long way back by Lotus and with Corel trailing with well under 10 per cent market share. Against this background all three players have new, updated versions of their products ready to do battle.
Office 2000
Microsoft's upgrade from Office 97 to Office 2000 is due for release in the coming weeks, after a long period of expectation, hype and testing.
The main improvement in functionality across the suite lies in the ability to save documents in HTML format, in which they can be posted to a website and accessed by anyone with a suitable browser. Furthermore, if a browser is COM enabled (such as Internet Explorer 4 or 5) the posted documents will retain their functionality in the browser window.
This means if someone saves an Excel spreadsheet in HTML format on an intranet or on the Internet, formulae and basic what if calculations may be carried out in a browser window, just as if the user were in Excel itself. The possibility of "round tripping" also exists, as the altered data in the browser version can be returned to the full Excel program. Word, Access, and PowerPoint also have this capability.
Apart from web-working, there are plenty of other new features. The clipboard, for example, can now accommodate up to 12 separate items - a bonus to anyone who spends a lot of time on document surgery.
For output, there is a very welcome print zoom capability. This offers the option of having more than one page on a single sheet (up to as many as 16). In addition, the print dialogue box will scale documents up or down to non-imperial paper sizes, if required.
Another interesting feature is intelligent tracking of a user's choices from the menu options. Each menu reveals a small selection of the available options. The remainder are hidden, but may be viewed by clicking a symbol. Over time, menu options are not chosen regularly are relegated to the hidden list. If the list is frequently expanded to choose a particular menu option, then that option will be promoted to the displayed list.
There are hosts of other updates, from more clipart to complexities which will be of interest only to the most advanced users. All in all, the move up to Office 2000 has been far more impressive than the move from Office 95 to 97, where backward compatibility with older versions caused problems.
Price: Several versions will be sold. Upgrades are likely to cost £200-plus, with full-price top versions over £500.
FG
SmartSuite Millennium
LOTUS emphasises Internet-related features when listing what's new in the latest SmartSuite. These include the ability to add hyperlinks to documents in any application, to embed tables of information from the Web in files in the spreadsheet 1-2-3 and to quickly post single documents or collections of documents to the Web or a company intranet with FastSite. While FastSite offers convenience, this is balanced by very limited control over the look of the finished site. Those who want the online versions to replicate the look of the originals can opt for the jDoc format instead of HTML. This keeps the feel of printed originals, rather like Adobe's pdf format, but the files can be displayed by any Java-enabled browser. FastSite offers limited support for non-SmartSuite files, including. Microsoft Word.
Across the board, SmartSuite applications now work with many competitors' file formats. As well as the basic ability to open a nonnative file there is roundtrip editing of Microsoft Office files which means they can be opened, edited in SmartSuite, then saved back to their original formats automatically. The WordPro wordprocessor has an option to use alternative menus and colleagues without the target applications can use a Lotus viewer to see, copy and print files.
The emphasis on being able to share files is typical of Lotus, which pretty much invented collaborative software, or groupware, with its Notes software. SmartSuite includes hooks to its Notes and Domino servers and a range of other tools for teams to share documents, review work and control versions of documents.
The included personal information manager Organiser is one of the best of these products, with powerful features and a clear, easy interface.
Finally, one huge jump forward for SmartSuite is the advent of usable speech recognition. Using ViaVoice from IBM (which owns Lotus) text can be input into WordPro with continuous speech, rather than one-word-at-a-time. After training, it offers a surprisingly good means of text input.
Price: £452, or £139 as an upgrade
FOM
WordPerfect Office 2000
COREL has just released the 2000 version of its WordPerfect Office, although the suite has been out in beta form for testing since November. Once the leading wordprocessor, WordPerfect has slipped badly in market share, although it retains huge loyalty with many users. In particular niches, including some education sectors and the legal market, it is still dominant - but often in its older DOS form with users who have not upgraded for several years.
Corel has teamed up with voice-recognition specialist Dragon Systems to include continuous speech input to WordPerfect. This was not available in the beta, but Dragon's Naturally Speaking software has already established a strong reputation for dependable speech recognition.
Of course there is Internet with everything; exporting documents in HTML, embedding of links in documents and the ability to run queries on the Web from inside the Quattro Pro spreadsheet. For bulk document publishing the suite includes the powerful third-party Trellix package (see www.trellix.com) to turn suite documents into simple formatted and navigable webs. Additionally Corel's own NetDocs server package accepts a wide range of document formats for conversion into web-friendly formats.
As with Lotus, compatibility with a wide range of file formats is a priority in this release. Major Microsoft and Lotus file formats are supported and some can be set as the defaults for a program, which means someone who works daily in WordPerfect can open and save documents in a non-Corel format in the background. Advanced document file formats supported in WordPerfect include XML and SGML, and Corel has adopted Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications alongside its own PerfectScript as a means of extending and customising the programs in the suite. The release of WordPerfect for Linux last year also offers the possibility of a similar wordprocessor for users on Windows or Linux machines.
Corel has been through the mill financially, and the release of this suite is seen as a key test of its recovery as a mainstream software company.
Price: To be announced. Up- grades are likely to cost £150, with the full price about twice that.
Fintan Gibney (fintang@mailcity.com) has worked as an IT consultant on the development of courseware for Microsft Office 2000.