| ★ APPLICATIONS ★ BUREAUTIQUE ★ MINI OFFICE ★ |
MINI OFFICE (Popular Computing Weekly) | MINI OFFICE (Home Computing Weekly) |
Beginners At such a bargain price for 464 software you can't really go wrong, especially when you consider that you get four programs for the price of one. However I can't help wondering what it could have been like if, at twice the price, it had been made twice as good because the four utilities - word processor, database, spreadsheet and graph drawer - are restrictively simple in their present form yet ooze potential and show some excellent touches. I found the word processor the weakest, bemg little more than a simple text editor. It allows insertion and deletion but nothing sophisticated like justification, block movement, etc. However it has some positive, if unusual features, most notably a count of typing speed and the ability to work with large letters on screen, useful for the poor sighted, which can also be printed on some dot matrix printers in large form as well. I suppose this is for leaflets etc. but really the program is more suited for letters than anything requiring control over page layout. The database is extremely good, allowing quite complex, and reasonably fast searches for different field combinations, strings, part strings and so on in the data such as 'find all people called Smith of less than 30' and this jrstifies the price in itself. The spreadsheet is also super for the money and many people will find that it contains everything they need for home use, although the formulae linking each row and column are pretty simple in their scope. The graph drawing program uses data obtained from the spreadsheet files, is fast, graphically attractive and produces hard copy on a range of printers but again is limited by a lack of flexibility in layout and control of scaling, etc. An ideal package for club secretaries I should imagine, or beginners who want a taste of what all these utilities can do - but not for a real business. Tony Kendle , Popular Computing Weekly |
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