Lotus Smartsuite

A word processor, spreadsheet and database all in one program, but thats not all...

Price: £225.6

Manufacturer: Lotus

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Verdict

Pros:

Will run on a minimal Windows 95 system.

Cons:
Falling behind the times.

Verdict:
Unappealing to all but those locked in to Lotus.

Tim Nott, Personal Computer World 30 Apr 2004

Lotus Smartsuite comes well-equipped: as well as the word processing, spreadsheet and database trio of Word Pro, 1-2-3 and Approach, you get Freelance Graphics, Organizer, Smartcenter, Fastsite and 17 proofing languages. You can buy this on CD or save money by downloading it.

After installing Smartsuite and restarting Windows, you get a set of seven icons in the Windows System tray, known as Suitestart. We found the icons too small and indistinct to serve any purpose than clutter up the tray and, after a brief struggle, managed to get rid of them.

The Smartcenter, which stretches across the top of your Windows desktop, is more useful. Eight buttons each open a drawer that gives access to various parts of Smartsuite and your PC in general.

An Internet drawer contains your Favourites and a mini-browser, and other drawers are for your calendar, address book and reminders.

The Business Productivity drawer contains shortcuts to more documents, spreadsheets, presentations and other templates covering topics, from loan amortisation to order tracking.

A reference drawer contains a dictionary and thesaurus and, finally, there's a drawer for off- and online help.

Individual tools
Word Pro descends from Samna Ami, the first real word processor for Windows, which appeared in 1988, a year before Word for Windows.

It doesn't follow the Microsoft look as closely as any of the other contenders.

Instead of multiple toolbars you have a single row of Smarticons along the top of the screen: these change according to context, so you'll have different sets for typing text, working with graphics and so on.

At the bottom of the window, the status bar houses buttons for fonts, formatting and styles. Spelling checkers, grammar checkers and so on appear in a large toolbar and there are the usual options of autocorrecting common mistakes and highlighting misspelled words.

Word Pro scores well on document automation, with useful features such as 'Click here' boxes to enter text into preformatted placeholders for titles, headings and the like.

For the more demanding, there's a macro-scripting language, with plenty of useful sample scripts and, like Microsoft VBA, this is a lingua franca for automation in other components of the suite.

Teamwork is also emphasised, with tools for group reviewing, and creating or consolidating multiple versions of a document and attaching the current document to an email message. Word Pro will create web pages as well as standard documents, and documents can be opened from and saved to an FTP site.

As well as a small clipart collection, there are tools for creating drawings, charts and equations. Another feature we liked is the way Word Pro handles section breaks in a document. If you create a section break or insert another document into the current one as a 'division', then you have the option to view these on tabbed pages.

Although version 9.8 has updated import filters for Word 2000 and XP, it won't render Unicode characters. If you use special symbols or non-Latin character sets, then you'll have to use the supplied symbol fonts and embed them in the document for non-Lotus users to read a document.

Lotus 1-2-3 was the company's flagship product in the days of Dos, and it has come a long way since. The interface is broadly similar to Word Pro, with a row of Smarticons along the top and formatting tools at the bottom of the screen.

This version has similar team features, but there are a few irritating differences - the FTP Save and Open is in a different place in the menu structure, for example.

These minor annoyances are outweighed by some useful touches: type 'Total' beside an empty cell below a column of figures and you'll get that very thing in the cell.

Each sheet contains up to 65,536 rows and 256 columns. You can create groups of sheets, and members of the group will take all their formatting attributes from the group 'leader'.

Approach, the relational database manager, follows suit, with tabbed pages allowing access to the various tables, forms, menus and queries in a database. Again the Smarticons at the top control actions such as switching views, adding fields, and sorting or filtering data, with formatting controls at the bottom.

Also on the status bar is the title of the current page: click on this and you'll get a list of all the forms, tables and so on, which is useful if there are too many to fit in the tabbed section above. There are sample databases, plus Smartmasters for creating specific databases such as employees or music collections.

Easy-to-use graphics
Freelance Graphics is an easy-to-use presentation creator, with a similar interface to the other main members. This time, the tabs take you through various views of your presentation - single page, thumbnails or an outliner overview.

It has templates for both content and style, though the latter are starting to look rather dated.

One excellent feature - also in Word Pro, 1-2-3 and Approach - is the Infobox. This is a small, free-floating, tabbed palette that can be hidden or rolled up into its own title bar that provides one-stop access to all the properties of the selected object.

The Infobox is tabbed so you can access font properties, alignment and spacing, bullets and numbering, and colours and borders when editing text. It's also context-sensitive, so you get other options - such as headers and footers for pages or colours and patterns for drawing objects.

Organizer was originally developed by British company Threadz, and was acquired by Lotus in 1992. It looks like a tabbed loose-leaf book, with sections for contacts, planner, notes and so on. It doesn't have a built-in mail client, but will summon Outlook Express.

Finally, Fastsite is the most recent addition to the suite, and extends the HTML and FTP facilities in the other applications extensively.

It has an easy interface and you can create a new site by specifying an output folder. You then add Smartsuite files in their native format. Having done that, you choose a 'look' for the site and click a button to convert the files to HTML or Jdoc pages.

Two tabs let you switch between viewing your new web pages and carrying out further tasks. Results can be previewed in a browser before uploading them to a local or Internet server. It's fairly painless, apart from the irritating fact that it would not remember the server details from the FTP function in the other modules.

Overall, Smartsuite is friendly and well featured but hasn't staggered out of the 20th century. Parent company IBM doesn't seem interested in keeping this product up with current technology such as XML and Unicode and the product has a general air of neglect - many of the support files, documentation and other resources date back to 1996, with some even earlier.

Contact: Lotus 0800 169 1458
www.lotus.com

System requirements: