by: James E. Powell
Today's word processors come packed with so many features, it seems unlikely anybody could squeeze more in. But Lotus got out its shoehorn and slipped scores of new features into Ami Pro. The perennial third-place holder among word processing's Big Three even has a new name: Word Pro.
The new name is fitting given the application's overhaul. Word Pro is essentially a new product, rewritten from the ground up and focused on team computing, integration and productivity. Despite the heavy dose of new features, the beta version of the program that I tested retained the nimble feel that distinguished Ami Pro, even with numerous interface changes that range from subtle to radical.
Team Computing is Lotus' term for a set of features in Word Pro that lets a group of people work collaboratively. The features are outstanding, and you don't even have to be part of a workgroup on a network to take advantage of them.
Version control is one of Word Pro's essentials. You can retain multiple versions of a document within the same physical file, with each iteration easily available. You can include separate sets of comments with each version, and Word Pro automatically adds your initials, the date and the time to the version description.
Word Pro also makes it easy to consolidate multiple sets of revisions. TeamConsolidate lets you incorporate several edited documents into one. Word Pro marks all changes, notes who did what and lets the document originator accept or reject the edits. A review bar helps you find each of the modified passages. You can accept or reject all edits of a particular type, such as those made by a particular group member. You can set colors and styles to highlight each reviewer's changes, displaying deletions with red strikethrough text, for example, or insertions with blue italics.
TeamReview provides a step-by-step approach to establishing and granting viewing or editing rights to your document. You first list the names of the reviewers who will have some level of access permission. Then you indicate what each person can actually do with the document. You can also display a greeting message, so a group member who opens up the document will see your directions or requests. You are able to limit someone's activity to specific versions, prevent your text from being copied into another document and prohibit others from saving your document. The final step in TeamReview is choosing a method of distribution for the document, including routing it via VIM or MAPI e-mail systems.
You can insert notes anywhere in your text. And the notes will look just as good as your document's text, because Word Pro lets you format notes with font styles, graphics or even tables. You can drag and drop text between the note and the document itself. There's an electronic highlighter pen, which can be set to automatically trigger creation of a note whenever it's used.
Like other products in Lotus' SmartSuite, Word Pro has SmartMasters to automatically create standard documents. It has 100 SmartMasters, and they are categorized by documenttype such as letter, memo, newsletter, report and so on. SmartMasters work like the automatic templates in Word and WordPerfect. When you select one, you're prompted for more information to fill in the blanks on the template. This is similar in operation to the click-and-type approach that's used by most presentation packages.
If you tend to hop around documents, you'll like the pop-up Page Gauge that works with the thumbbox in the scroll bar. As you drag the thumbbox to move to a new position within the document, a small box pops up to tell you the page number, name and section you're in. This is especially helpful when working with long, multichapter documents. The addition of tabs significantly improves bookmarks. You can create a tabbed document and jump to predefined locations by clicking on the tabs.
Word Pro has borrowed the InfoBox from its sibling app Approach. Right-click on text and the InfoBox pops up, with tabbed sections that let you set text characteristics. As with Approach, the changes are applied immediately, so you don't have to close the dialog box or peer into a small preview window to see the results of your changes. From the InfoBoxes, you can set line spacing, adjust alignments and select fonts. You can also set shadows, indents, bullets, tabs and paragraph breaks. InfoBoxes are available, too, for frame and page layouts.
The Page Sorter makes it easier to work with multiple pages. It's like a presentation program's slide sorter, with multiple pages displayed as thumbnails on a single screen. You can jump to page or rearrange the thumbnails.
Ami Pro's user interface has changed significantly in its transformation to Word Pro. There's a toolbar that adjusts according to what you're doing and a status bar at the bottom of the page for quick formatting functions such as changing fonts, adding bold or italics and so forth. New toolbars include one that's dockable for adding comments and highlights. Function keys play multiple roles and can cycle through a list of attributes. For example, you can select text and press the F3 key to cycle through several fonts, or F4 to cycle through bold, underline and italic. Each function key--F2 through F12--has up to six features for its cycle. There's OLE 2 support and in-place editing and you can now simultaneously open multiple documents--a frustrating omission in Ami Pro.
Some of Word Pro's features are less remarkable, but they help it catch up with its competition. You can bold a word by placing the cursor inside the word and clicking on the Bold icon, and you can select a word with a single click. When you drag and drop text, the spacing adjusts appropriately around the word or phrase in its new location. SmartCorrect turns "(C)" into the copyright symbol and makes corrections as you type, such as fixing mistakenly typed consecutive capital letters at the beginning of a word. It can also add smart quotes (curved, rather than straight, quotation marks) and expand user-defined abbreviations into full text.
Word Pro's spell checker is a sight to behold. Rather than walking you through spell check results word by word, it highlights all misspelled words in the document at once. You can click on an error and fix it, skip it (and, optionally, all other occurrences of the same "misspelled" word) or add it to your QuickCorrect user list. The most impressive feature of the spell checker is the option to have it highlight misspelled words as you type. This tends to slow your typing down a bit, but these "fixes on the fly" will ultimately save time. Language is no barrier for this spell checker, either. You choose from Word Pro's different language dictionaries and can use more than one at the same time to check a document. The Format Check can read through your document and automatically clean it up by adding or removing spaces between words and sentences. It will replace dashes and asterisks with bullet graphics, turning your best intentions into a professional-looking document.
NotesFlow lets you customize workflow applications by adding commands to Lotus Notes version 4 and Word Pro menus, a feature that will be of interest to Notes applications developers. You can also share data between Notes and Word Pro via Notes F/X, as you could with the last version of Ami Pro.
Word Pro also supports LotusScript, the BASIC-like scripting language found in other Lotus products that can be used to automate a variety of processes.
Word Pro offers abundant help, and you can ask the Word Pro Expert in your own words. You don't need to know any special terminology. You can type a question like "How do I put a line above my text?" and Word Pro consults its list of over 1,500 word processing terms to figure out exactly what you want to do. It then displays the appropriate help window. Even the early beta I tested showed remarkable "smarts" in determining my needs and providing the appropriate assistance. For a more dramatic dose of help, there are 50 feature demonstrations that are shown using the program itself.
Word Pro can import and export text in most popular formats, including the latest versions of Word and WordPerfect, and will save your document in its original format automatically. Although not included in the beta, the final product will have an SGML parser for importing and verifying SGML documents.
Word Pro is ample evidence that there's plenty of life in 16-bit (Windows 3.1) programs. Lotus will have a Windows 95 version with the same features later this year, but you can still reap Word Pro's considerable benefits even if you're not ready to make the jump to Windows 95. If teamwork is a cornerstone of your operation, Word Pro offers almost instant productivity gains. This isn't just a revved-up Ami Pro.
--Info File--
Word Pro
Price: $105 (street)
In Brief: A powerful word processor rebuilt from the ground up, providing excellent team collaboration tools and outstanding productivity improvements.
Lotus Development Corp.
800-343-5414, fax 404-698-7653
By: Dave Gabel, Jonathan Blackwood and Phil Albinus
WordPerfect has a history of perfecting major new releases incrementally. Version 4.0 for DOS was okay, 4.1 was better, and 4.2 was amazingly good for its day. Version 5.0 broke new ground, but it became mature in version 5.1. Version 6.0 for Windows marked a new high, but 6.1 adds the finishing touches. New features, though few, are ones you're likely to use. And there's a brand-new, much-improved interface that matches the other members of the PerfectOffice suite. The new interface includes a toolbar with new, smaller icons; a powerbar with formatting commands like fonts, alignment and styles; and a status bar at the bottom that lets you know the date, time, insertion mode, position and printer selected. Incidentally, WordPerfect is now an OLE 2.0 container and server, so you can drag and drop across applications and embed an Excel worksheet in your document.
Most of the improvements center on what Novell is calling "PerfectSense'' technology. If you think that sounds an awful lot like Microsoft's IntelliSense technology, you're right. WordPerfect has matched Microsoft almost feature for feature, serving up QuickCorrect against Word's AutoCorrect and so on. In many cases, though, WordPerfect has seen the bet and raised the ante. WordPerfect's Find and Replace function and its Thesaurus function, for example, know word forms. Tell it to replace "buy'' with "purchase,'' and it will replace "bought'' and "buying'' with the appropriate replacements as well. Where Word's AutoCorrect ships with a paltry nine terms supplied, WordPerfect raises that number to 127.
One of the best examples of WordPerfect's improving a common feature, though, is its "QuickFormat with AutoUpdate.'' Basically, it's just the same old "Copy Format'' command that Word and Excel have--except that it lets you tie the paragraphs you copy with the formats of the original paragraph, much as you would set up a style. When you change the formatting of the original paragraph, the changes ripple through the dependent paragraphs as well. There are new features unique to WordPerfect. Its file-management capability--though shared with other PerfectOffice apps--is unequaled. You can copy, move, rename, delete, change attributes or print files, and create, remove or rename a directory. You can even print a list of the files in a directory. (What a strange universe we Windows users inhabit if that feature alone seems remarkable.) The QuickFinder function lets you search your entire hard disk (and network disks as well) for files containing particular words or phrases--even concepts, provided you can guess related terminology well enough to make a stab at it.
Novell has made the program accessible to new users and its new features easy to learn for existing users. There are 25 new Coaches, which walk you through procedures from defining bookmarks to embedding watermarks. They're simple, they're easy, and they're robust--they work with existing documents, and the changes you make while learning them take effect immediately. WordPerfect has always had legendary product support, though italienated some users this past year when it limited free support to the first 180 days. The phone call is still toll free, however. By comparison, Microsoft provides unlimited free support, but you pay for the phone call.
The one weak spot is that WordPerfect is a memory hog. The program requires a minimum of 6MB of RAM, 8MB recommended. In our tests, the program ran very well on a Micron 90MHz Pentium with 16MB of RAM. It was excruciatingly slow, however, on an AST 33MHz 486 with 8MB. In fairness to WordPerfect, many of the new-generation programs--Word 6.0, for instance--seem to like a lot of RAM and processing capacity.
WordPerfect 6.1 is a terrific release and a joy to use. If you're using an earlier version of WordPerfect, you'll do well to upgrade. If you're making the move to Windows, WordPerfect is well worth considering. If you're a dyed-in-the-wool Word user, there's probably not enough here to make you make the switch. But if you do make the switch, you'll find no reason to go back.
Info File
WordPerfect 6.1
Price: $395; upgrade, $99; competitive upgrade, $129
In Brief: The ugly duckling of Windows word processors is finally a swan. It offers power, features and performance in a robust, practically bullet-proof package.
Disk Space Required: 32MB (14MB minimum)
System Resources: 13%
RAM: 6MB minimum, 8MB recommended
WordPerfect, the Novell Applications Group
800-451-5151, 801-225-5000