Book an office suite - Microsoft's Office for Macintosh 4.2.1 and Office 97 Small Business Edition, Lotus's SmartSuite 97 and Corel's WordPerfect Suite 8 Professional - includes related articles summarizing results and on how to shop for an office suite - Software Review - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, July, 1997 by Rick Broida

Despite this drawback, Office 97 SBE remains our favorite suite. Its applications integrate seamlessly with each other and the Internet, affording unbeatable speed, power, and simplicity. Although the other Windows 95-based office suites are impressive, Microsoft breaks from the pack with a superb suite.

SmartSuite 97

RATING: *** 1/2

WIN 95

It's time to give Lotus a sheepskin. SmartSuite has graduated with honors, evolving into a robust, finely tuned, and eminently useful collection of applications. Now designed for Windows 95 from top to bottom, SmartSuite 97 remedies the handful of quirks found in last year's version and adds a raft of Internet and groupware features.

Five heavyweights are seated at SmartSuite's software roundtable, starting with the totally revamped 1-2-3 spreadsheet. No longer an aging Windows 3.1 application, 1-2-3 now compares favorably with Microsoft Excel, the king of the spreadsheet hill. For word processing, database management, and presentation graphics, SmartSuite offers Word Pro 97, Approach 97, and Freelance Graphics 97, respectively. A capable contact manager comes in the form of Organizer 97, and ScreenCam 97 lets you record onscreen computing actions for use in presentations or training.

The glue that bonds everything together is SmartCenter, the omnipresent taskbar that provides two-click access to all of SmartSuite 97's applications, calendar, address book, and Internet sites in easy-to-use dropdown drawers. This versatile tool, which outclasses anything offered by the competition, is one of our favorite things about SmartSuite; it puts loads of valuable information at your fingertips. Just having your address book and calendar instantly available is worth the price of admission. And the new Internet drawer offers immediate access to news, stock information, search engines, and virtually anything else you wish to cull from the Web.

Nearly every part of SmartSuite incorporates some new features, but the common bond is the Internet. An Internet toolbar now appears in each application, providing not only quick links to search engines and Lotus's support sites but also pushbutton Web document publishing.

As a whole, SmartSuite makes an excellent Web publishing tool. Word Pro is the launchpad for designing and managing Web pages, though you can publish documents and data directly from the other applications too. Microsoft Publisher is the more flexible site designer, but its supporting cast isn't nearly as diverse as Word Pro's. With Freelance Graphics and Approach at your disposal, you have the tools to create richer Web content.

SmartSuite's coveted collaboration features have been expanded to include document sharing and editing via the Internet. This "team computing" is one of SmartSuite's strongest suits, for either a multiuser office where three to 20 coworkers use SmartSuite or for the single consultant working for a larger company. Although you can share and edit a document over a network or the Internet in Word 97, SmartSuite 97 is, hands down, the collaborating computing solution.