Lotus SmartSuite Millennium Edition V9.8
 Creating a map with Lotus 123 |
The installation of Lotus SmartSuite (LSS) was one of the simplest and quickest we have seen.
Of the four suites tested, LSS is the closest competitor to MS Office in terms of bundled applications with Lotus Word Pro, Lotus 123, Freelance Graphics (presentation), Lotus Organiser (PIM), and Approach (relational database). It is worth mentioning that while Organiser does a great job of looking after your schedules and contacts with a "Filofax" graphical layout, the e-mail button actually launches Outlook Express if it is present on your system.
In general, the applications in the suite are quite fast. While Lotus Word Pro imports an MS Word document very rapidly--the first page appearing in around four seconds--the whole document was not available for navigation for about 50 seconds. Importing a native Lotus Word Pro document of a similar size and complexity again only required four seconds but we were then able to then access any part of the 76-page document almost immediately.
As far as word processing is concerned, LSS is the most frugal of the suites we tested with Lotus Word Pro requiring just 10.3MB of system memory and with a large 76-page native documents open just 18MB, around half the other suites. Of course loading an MS Word document into the application bloated the memory requirement out to 134.8MB, but hopefully you are in a position to then simply save the document in native format and work on it.
Arguably of the four packages, LSS would be the most difficult for users migrating from Microsoft Office. Quite simply the layout and locations of the button bar and buttons between LSS and its Microsoft Office equivalents differs markedly. The legends on quite a few of the buttons are also not immediately decoded and so navigation, at least initially, is relatively uncertain. There is a button bar just under the menu bar and also some buttons such as Bold and Italic located on the "status" bar at the bottom of the screen.
The pull-down menus are also quite different with very different main menus and locations of functions, as an example "Bullets & Numbers" in Lotus Word Pro are located under the "Text" menu. Admittedly when you stop to think about it, in general the menus and the location of functions are very logical, just that they differ markedly from MS Word.
And once you familiarise yourself with one of the applications the rest will not be a problem as the user interface is consistent throughout the suite.
Lotus Word Pro is not quite as happy loading MS Word documents as say StarOffice or OpenOffice. Not only did Word Pro manage to lose formatting with graphics at times and stack them one atop the other, it also failed to reproduce the table of contents, or so it appeared. However, the TOC was actually present as we found when we tried to insert a new one and were presented with the option of "updating the existing TOC". When we selected this option the original TOC appeared although formatting had run amuck and Word Pro froze and refused to respond--we had to reboot the system. Inexplicably the problem with the application hanging only occurred that one time during testing.
Creating a new TOC is a bit of a chore, you cannot simply go with a sensible default but must manually select what style headings are to be included, also finding the TOC option in the menu requires a bit of snooping around as it sits under the "Create/Other Document Part" menu.
The first incarnation of Lotus 123 saw light of day well before MS Excel and the maturity of the application certainly showed when we were able to load the XLS format spreadsheet with almost total compatibility. The only difference between the original and Lotus 123's interpretation was that the X-axis labels were vertically aligned rather than slanted but at least they were readable and to format them as slanted is a snap in Lotus 123.
The application has all the functionality you would expect with some perhaps useful additions such as the "Create Map". Using this function you can for example show sales in each state as a particular colour linked to a colour legend as shown in the screen grab above.
Our PowerPoint presentation lost all its transitions and animations when imported into Freelance Graphics, although fonts and formatting were maintained. Since Freelance pretty much supports all the transitions and animations present in the original file it simply looks like no attempt at matching is made and any of these features are simply stripped from the file. We were able to animate our text to fly across the screen and add each of our transitions so the final result matched the original very closely, but this was very time consuming. Naturally if you are creating a presentation from scratch then this is not a concern and the tool set provided to create the presentation is extensive.
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| Product | Lotus SmartSuite Millenium Edition 9.8 |
| Price | Single user: $476, volume licences negotiable |
| Vendor | IBM |
| Phone | 132 426 |
| Web | www.lotus.com/smartsuite |
| Interoperability |  ½ |
| Runs on Windows only. | |
| Futureproofing |  |
| Solid support for a wide range of file standards. | |
| ROI |  ½ |
| Arguably the most complete collection of applications in the group but a good deal more expensive as well. | |
| Service |  |
| 12 months support is included as part of software maintenance. Phone, fax, e-mail and Web site is available 24 x 7. | |
| Rating |  |
Database access http://dba.openoffice.org/