A guide to office suite software packages. Includes a review of Microsoft Office 97 Professional Edition, Microsoft Office 97 Small Business Edition, and Lotus SmartSuite 97.
Techniques: Off the Shelf
Which of the latest office suites is the small businessperson's best friend?
Even a sales rookie knows that the real customers for a product are rarely swayed by fancy features. But that simple truth has not deterred the developers of the latest office suites from Microsoft Corp. and Lotus Development Corp. These companies have loaded their releases with so many attractions that the fainthearted might easily be overwhelmed before they learn to work the tools they need.
Don't get me wrong: these are good products, and the suite concept is great. For one thing, if you use several applications, it's cheaper to go with the coordinated collection than to purchase the components separately. For example, buying Word 97 and Excel 97 from one of the major mail-order catalogs would cost you $659.98. That same distributor charges only $549.99 for Microsoft Office 97 Professional Edition, which also includes three other programs that, if purchased separately, would bring your grand total to $1,409.95.
The suites are coordinated to reduce the complexity of cumbersome office tasks. I, for example, customize the slides I use for presentations to my client The Executive Committee (TEC). A few weeks before I address a group of TEC CEOs, I survey the members about their use of business technology and then incorporate their responses into my slides. Consequently I need to redo maybe 10 of 50 PowerPoint slides every time I deliver my presentation. With Office 97, I simply compile the survey results in Excel. Because the two programs are linked, PowerPoint automatically updates my slides.
For this article I auditioned Microsoft Office 97--the Professional Edition and the Small Business Edition--and Lotus SmartSuite 97. (Corel Corp. released its WordPerfect Suite 8 last summer. Because its Netscape Communicator piece was not scheduled to be available for several months, I didn't put that lower-priced collection through the same paces as its competitors.)
Whichever product you choose, you will need plenty of disk space on a powerful computer running Windows 95 or Windows NT. These applications are demanding: Word 97 alone swallows 46 MB of disk, while the full Professional Edition devours from 73 MB to 191 MB. All the Lotus SmartSuite applications are supposed to work just fine with only 8 MB of memory, but you'll have to be content running just one program at a time and willing to forfeit the benefits of an integrated suite. Otherwise, plan on 12 to 16 MB.
Microsoft and Lotus, like the rest of the civilized world, are caught up in a heady love affair with the Internet, and their software handily converts documents into HTML, the Web's lingua franca. I experimented with that feature using slides I was preparing for a presentation at Coca-Cola about intranets. Using PowerPoint, I simply clicked on "Save as HTML," and the program led me through six simple layout steps that even sized the graphics. Following my responses, the program then created a group of Web-ready HTML files; the whole process took less than five minutes. I tried the same thing with an Excel spreadsheet, and that was even easier. Already Office 97 has changed my life. Instead of mailing a hard copy of my presentations, I now refer people to my Web site, and I'm saving a bundle on postage and copying.
Ubiquitous Microsoft already owns so much of the market that for many the decision boils down to which of its offerings to buy. Don't base your choice on the product names though. The Small Business Edition may be great for some companies, but others--equally small--will find it lacking. On the street the small-business version sells for about $450, and the professional version is going for about $550. Low-priced upgrades from earlier versions are also available.
Both editions include Microsoft's word processor, Word 97; its spreadsheet program, Excel 97; and the calendar program, Outlook 97. Only the Professional Edition includes the presentation -graphics tool, PowerPoint 97, and the database program, Access 97. In their places the small-business package provides a desktop publishing tool, Microsoft Publisher 97; Small Business Financial Manager 97; and disappointing location-mapping software called Automap Streets Plus.
As far as I can see, Small Business Financial Manager 97 is not much of an asset. Rather than a discrete program, it's a compilation of Excel macros that let you play what-if games with data you import from your own accounting program. Many of the financial manager's reports--actual-to-budget comparisons, balance sheets, and the like--we already get from QuickBooks, so I played around with a lease-versus-buy scenario. The interactive slider bars, graphic representations of different variables, eliminate the mystery of each variable's impact on results. But because I wasn't actually in the market to lease or buy anything, for me this application--although a cool concept--was so much window dressing.
As a consultant and professional speaker, I make more than 100 presentations every year, and PowerPoint is one of the most valuable tools of my trade. PowerPoint Central, a feature new with this release, acts as an on-line tutor and resource center. If you activate it while you are on the Web, it automatically checks your software and allows you to download PowerPoint updates, tutorials, clip art, sounds, and photographs from Microsoft's Web site. When, shortly after its introduction of Office 97, Microsoft issued a service release that fixed program bugs, it was PowerPoint Central that alerted me to its existence.
I had always assumed that database programs like Access 97 were meant for companies much larger than my virtual business, so initially I agreed with Microsoft's decision to leave it out of the Small Business Edition. We'd been satisfied with a stand-alone contact manager to conduct daily business and manage our customer list, but I decided to give Access a try. On-screen instructors called Wizards provide step-by-step directions that guide the construction of mailing lists, inventory files, order -entry systems, and other databases. In a matter of minutes, a Wizard had helped me design a new mailing list. Suddenly, I understood why a great many small businesses might not want to do without.
Outlook 97--a hybrid calendar, personal-information manager, E-mail client, and contact manager--replaces Office 95's clunkier Schedule+. I initially found Outlook's E-mail package time-consuming because each time I composed a message, I would wait for Word to open. I later discovered that the program does have its own E-mail editor that I had somehow managed to overlook.
