What Suites your Office?

You can’t live without a good office suite in any organization today. It’s

one of those essential elements needed in an office, much like furniture. An

office suite is made up of a bunch of applications like a word processor,

spreadsheets, a database, and software to create presentations. Other common

productivity tools are also usually thrown in for managing day-to-day tasks,

like an e-mail client, address book, organizer, scheduler, and calendar.

OFFICE XP: Microsoft Office has a tradition of introducing new features. And with every release, it makes you wonder how you ever managed without them in the first place

While an office suite has tons of applications, not everyone uses all of

them. Different companies and even different departments of the same company

have varied expectations from an office suite. For instance, one company might

be heavily into spreadsheets, while another wouldn’t survive without a good

presentation- making program. Choosing the right office suite can thus have a

significant impact on the overall organizational productivity.

The choices



There are a number of office suites to choose from, both free and

commercial. Among them, Microsoft Office is usually the first one that comes to

mind, as it commands the largest market share. Its latest version–Office XP,

is available in four editions, called Standard, Professional, Developer, and

Small Business. The other ones available are Lotus SmartSuite and Corel

WordPerfect Office 2002. The SmartSuite is in version 9.5, and is called the

Millennium Edition. Besides the commercial ones, some prominent free office

suites available are StarOffice 5.2 from Sun Microsystems, and EasyOffice

Freeware by e-press corp. (www.e-press.com). StarOffice can be downloaded from

Sun’s website, and used by any organization free of charge. The software takes

up around 174 MB of hard drive space for a standard installation. The next

version of StarOffice is 6.0, which is currently in the Beta stage. The final

version is expected sometime during the second quarter of this year. EasyOffice

is also available as a commercial edition with additional components.

What should you look for?



A good office suite can have significant impact on employee productivity and

your business. So choosing the right office suite is both a business decision,

and a technical one. From the business perspective, the price you pay for a

product becomes a prime concern. For instance, a single copy of Microsoft Office

XP Standard edition costs around Rs 20,500. So even if you’re a small

organization with a requirement of 10 copies, you’ll have to shell out around

Rs 2 lakh. This does not include the discounts being offered. With this kind of

pricing, it becomes essential to map your needs against different products, and

find the closest match. For basic work like typing letters and creating simple

spreadsheets, etc even a low cost/free solution like EasyOffice would do. For

more advanced work like spreadsheets with complex formulae, high quality

presentations, or collaboration, etc you need a better office suite equipped

with all the features.

EasyOffice: This is also available in a paid Professional edition, which contains more functions and applications

In large or medium-sized companies, requirements vary from department to

department. In case of a print media company, the accounts department would

depend heavily on spreadsheets for applying complex accounting formulae that can

link to multiple documents. The editorial team would rely on word processing for

filing in stories. The technical team would need a combination of both, where

the spreadsheet is used for doing basic statistical analysis and word processing

to create test reports. Similarly, the marketing team would need a powerful

presentation package to create sophisticated presentations for client servicing.

They would need Excel to create pivot tables, etc for analyzing sales data. With

such varying needs, a feature-packed Office suite becomes essential.

The other factor that affects the choice of an office suite is

interoperability. This becomes an issue if a company uses multiple office suites

or exchanges heavy documents with clients who use different office suites. So

imagine an Excel spreadsheet filled with complicated formulae reaching a person

using, say EasyOffice. If the latter does not recognize some of the formulae, it

could lead to critical data errors. Standardization is essential in such a case.

Ease of use is another point to keep in mind when choosing an office suite.

If an office suite takes up a lot of system resources, then it would become slow

to work with, thereby reducing productivity.

EasyOffice: It is pretty simple and easy to use for regular work. Most of the basic operations in it are similar to those in other popular office suites like MS Office

EasyOffice freeware



This is a light office suite with all the essential productivity components

like a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation software and a text-to-speech

conversion utility. It also has a few extras like a calculator, file compression

utility like WinZip, a Bookkeeper for managing your finances, and some

additional pictures and clipart. The complete installation takes up about 44 MB

of hard drive real-estate, and is quick and simple. The installation wizard

recognized the Windows 2000 installation on which we installed it. It was pretty

smart in the sense that when it found certain files on our system it advised us

not to replace them with the ones being copied by the EasyOffice installation.

All applications in EasyOffice run in two modes, Easy (and Advanced) for

beginners and seasoned users. Every application in Easy Office has an ordinary

help file and a tutorial to quickly help you get started.

EasyOffice as the name suggests, is pretty simple and easy to use for regular

work. Most of the basic operations in it are similar to those in other popular

office suites like MS Office. For instance, calling menus in EasyWord uses the

same Alt+key combinations as those used in MS Word.

However, we also found a few annoyances. For instance, if you’re used to

pressing Ctrs+S intermittently to save your document, you’ll have difficulty

in EasyWord. That’s because in EasyWord, this command stands for Save As, so

every time you press it, it will pop up a box asking you to provide the saving

details. Similarly, there’s no Right Click context menu in EasyWord. What pops

up instead is a whole bunch of toolbars containing buttons of just about all the

functions in EasyWord. Spell check is another problem with EasyWord, as it let’s

you do it to the entire document, and not to specific words. It does indicate

misspelt words by underlining them in red, but you can’t fix them ‘on the

fly’.

While EasyOffice uses all standard file formats, it can have some

incompatibility issues when used in conjunction with other popular office

suites. For instance, it doesn’t support comments, so if you open a MS Word or

Lotus Word Pro document containing lots of comments using EasyWord, it will not

be able to read any of them. Similarly, if you try to open an MS Excel sheet

full of formulae with EasySpreadsheet, it may not recognize all the formulae.

EasyOffice is also available in a paid Professional edition, which contains more

functions and applications.

Lotus SmartSuite 9.5 Millennium Edition



Installation is not an issue with SmartSuite and a typical installation with

all the components takes up about 145 MB of hard drive space. On a PIII machine

with 256 MB RAM and Windows 2000 Professional, it took around 10 minutes for the

complete installation. All features of SmartSuite are easily accessible through

the SmartCenter, which is basically a bar that gets added on top of the desktop

screen. The nice thing about SmartCenter is how well it’s organized. It has

multiple sections called drawers, each containing some aspect of the office

suite. For instance, the Addresses drawer opens up a diary kind of interface,

allowing you to enter addresses in alphabetical order. It automatically sorts

all names by their last names, and even let’s you directly write a letter to a

person, send an email, or even make a phone call. It calls upon other

applications from this interface for the job.

Office XP with Smart Tags: Smart Tags work as extensions of the AutoCorrect feature found in earlier versions, being more customizable

SmartSuite can do everything you’d expect from MS Office, but if you’re

used to working on the latter, it would take time getting used to. Fortunately

the help provided is pretty good, and divided into regular and expert sections.

The latter is where you type a question and it gives you an answer. For

instance, we were having difficulty finding out how to do a word count in a

document in Lotus WordPro. We asked the expert on how to do this in plain

English, and it gave the right response.

The pricing of SmartSuite is based on IBM’s Passport Advantage Program and

is inclusive of a year of software upgrades and support through the web. For a

single user license, it costs Rs 10,682 for the paper license, and the media is

another Rs 940. The shrinkwrap pricing is different and costs Rs 11,515 for the

full pack. This however, doesn’t include upgrades and support.

So who’s the best?



The decision of which office suite to go for actually depends upon what kind

of functionality you really want from it. All commercial office suites come with

a plethora of features, half of which you may never use. But how critical are

the ones you will use is what decides which one to go for, and whether the price

you’re paying for those features will give you your ROI. The same argument

holds when you have to decide on an upgrade. Are the new features of an office

suite worth the investment you’ll make in them? Only your personal experience

will convince you on this!

Anil Chopra/PCQ Labs in New Delhi

Microsoft Office XP

Microsoft

Office is no doubt one of the most widely used office suites. Every new version

of this suite has had phenomenal success, and it has a tradition of introducing

new features in every release that make you wonder how you ever managed without

them in the first place. Surprisingly Office XP is the first one in a long

series of MS Office releases that doesn’t boast of a huge number of

enhancements. The enhancements are there, and they are just as ‘unlivable

without’ as features introduced in other versions — except that there are

just not that many of them.

The Office XP installation can be made very simple if you want, in fact, you’ll

never need to do a custom selection unless you really need to know exactly what

is installed. It can check if an older version is installed or not and

configures the setup routine to match the existing installation. All apps have a

new cleaner and flatter look. Toolbar icons and menu items do not jump out when

you mouse over them. They simply get colored in a nice shade of blue with a hint

of a shadow behind them.

One new feature of Office XP is the task pane, which is similar to the ‘Explorer

Bars’ in Internet Explorer 4.0 and above. It lets you perform various actions

without leaving sight of your current document. Appearing on the right side of

the screen, it replaces many of the dialog-box based actions you would perform

in previous versions. The most useful feature of the task pane is the control it

gives on document formatting. The first, ‘reveal formatting’ allows you to

quickly see document settings like margins, layout, alignment, etc and changes

them with a single click. The other styles and formatting, lets you see styles

used in the document, the template or all styles available. You can select a

portion of text to see the style applied to it and change it by simply selecting

the style you wish. You can also modify the style itself throughout the document

if you wish.

Another across-the-board feature is Smart Tags, which enhances the

interaction and intuitiveness of all apps. Smart Tags work as extensions of the

AutoCorrect feature found in earlier versions, being more customizable. For

example, when you type in a date like April 8, 2001, a line of small red dots

underlines it. Moving your mouse over it reveals a small icon, which on clicking

provides a menu to customize the selection. You can do this for umpteen number

of things — from people’s names, to e-mail and URL addresses, to dates,

spelling and auto corrections.

The collaborative features in Word have always been pretty useful. This

version makes the tracking much more intuitive and useful, as the changes are

marked not only by different colors but also by ‘callouts’ — just like you’d

do it on paper. This is very useful when taking printouts of edited text and

wanting to make changes.

Security



Macro viruses have been the bane of MS Office users around the world thanks

to ‘Melissa’ and the ‘I Love You’ viruses. This version of Office is

much more security conscious, and by default, prevents all digitally unsigned

macros from executing. Outlook XP also ensures security by prompting you

whenever an external application tries to access its address book, which was

what viruses like Melissa and the Love Bug did. This will ensure that programs

like Documents To Go for my Palm can synchronize without interruptions. In any

case, this small inconvenience is much better than the possibility of a virus

attack. Outlook will also not execute attachments with EXE, BAT, CMD, JS, VBS,

HTM extensions, etc automatically preventing virus propagation.

Office XP can also produce lighter HTML documents without any proprietary

extensions, which wasn’t the case in Office 2000. Similarly, there are many

other smaller featuers such as the long overdue feature of doing multiple

selections of text in different parts of the document simultaneously. Pasting

information into any of the Office XP apps shows a small icon below that lets

you immediately apply formatting to the pasted information based on the original

source, current document or keep the text without any formatting.

Vinod Unny for PCQ Labs