Office suites sell for bargain-basement prices, but whose bundle--Microsoft's, Lotus's, or Borland's--gives the most bang for the dollar?
Bill Lawrence
Office application suites are a runaway hit. According to a recent Dataquest survey, an office bundle, Microsoft Office, was the top software seller for the first time ever, generating $762 million in worldwide revenue in 1993. Meanwhile, Lotus pulled in $68 million from sales of office suites, while Borland took in another $14 million. All told, sales for the category grew more than 200 percent, for a total revenue of $844 million. What started as a simple marketing strategy has blossomed into a full-scale war for your entire desktop.
The success of office suites is in part due to the outstanding bundles offered by the three major providers of Windows software: Borland Off
ice 2.0, Lotus's SmartSuite 2.1 for Windows, and Microsoft Office 4.0. In this review, I'll take a look at these bundles and determine which one does the best job of delivering an integrated set of desktop applications.
Dollars, Yes; Sense, Maybe
Cost alone makes each of these office suites a head-turning temptation. While each bundle is officially priced in the high-three-figure range, as of this writing upgrade offers are available (for which virtually everyone qualifies--you only need to own a single competing application) that reduce your purchase price to between $200 and $300. For about what you'd pay to buy an upgrade for a Windows word processor and spreadsheet, you get a box full of software.
Obviously, the office application bundles are a very good financial deal. But Microsoft, Lotus, Borland, and WordPerfect want to convince you that a suite of applications from a single vendor provides you with functionality that somehow makes the whole much greater than the sum of the parts.
If having a consistent interface among your applications is important to you, buying an office bundle will deliver instant results. In varying degrees--depending on which bundle you choose--your applications will have consistent icons and menu commands as well as shared tools, such as spelling checkers and charting modules. If you've invested a lot of time in becoming an expert with a particular bundle's word processor or spreadsheet, you can make use of that experience as you tackle the bundle's other applications. Office bundles are particularly appealing to corporate software buyers who need to manage sparse training and support resources.
When it comes to advanced interapplication and workgroup-exchange tools, having a same-vendor application suite today is only nominally better than having your own selection of full-featured Windows applications. Standard Windows tools such as DDE and OLE do much to keep the playing field level. New tools, such as Microsoft's OLE 2.0 and VBA (Visual Basic for
Applications), Lotus's Notes FX, and Borland's Object Exchange, show considerable promise, but for now they are implemented unevenly and in rudimentary ways.
However, these new tools do portend a very interesting picture for a few release cycles from now. Our applications may ultimately become so integrated that we stop thinking in terms of individual programs, such as word processors, spreadsheets, and database managers, and instead regard our digital desktops as "information processors" that we build and fine-tune by mixing and matching our favorite software components.
Meet the Office Staff
Without a doubt, word processors and electronic spreadsheets are the two most popular desktop applications, so it's not surprising that each of the three suites is anchored by a world-class word processor and spreadsheet. Microsoft Office includes Word 6.0 and Excel 5.0, while Lotus's SmartSuite offers 1-2-3 for Windows 4.01 and Ami Pro 3.01. Borland Office provides Quattro Pro for Windows 5.0 and WordP
erfect for Windows 6.0.
Naming the best of breed among these titans is a futile exercise. The most recently released word processor or spreadsheet is guaranteed to be the most feature-rich (and the most bug-laden) in its category, and each new release is sure to leapfrog its competition. As Daniel Gasteiger aptly put it when evaluating the latest round of Windows spreadsheets (see "The Big Three Square Off," December 1993 BYTE), "If you like a feature in one of the Big Three's programs, wait a bit and it will be in everyone's software." Competition is wonderful.
The suites begin to differentiate themselves when you consider the third most popular application category: the database manager. Borland Office takes the prize for giving you the most database management capability by including Paradox for Windows 4.5 as a standard offering. Microsoft's flagship Windows database manager, Access, is available only if you purchase the Microsoft Office Professional Edition (which costs $149 more). Both Par
adox and Access are full-featured, fully relational databases that let you build sophisticated applications. Both also feature a comprehensive programming language.
Lotus's SmartSuite includes Approach, a database manager that is best described as a personal query and data management program. It focuses on making basic personal database management tasks--such as producing form letters, mailing labels, and reports--easy, but in the process it leaves out advanced development tools, such as a programming language.
Lotus and Microsoft also bundle popular presentation-graphics packages, Freelance 2.01 and PowerPoint 4.0, respectively. With either of these products, you can produce first-rate on-screen slide shows and printed presentation graphics. For its part, Quattro Pro has some excellent presentation features.
By weighing in with five bundled applications, Lotus's SmartSuite wins by a nose the race to provide the most software that you can use right out of the box. SmartSuite's fifth membe
r is Organizer 1.1, a PIM (personal information manager) with one of the best interfaces around. Organizer's super interface enables you to get up to speed in minutes. Over the long haul, however, you may find it a bit too basic. The program has the right mix of features, but each one will only take you so far. The appointment scheduler, for example, does not let you log two appointments for the same time period.
Microsoft Office also includes an additional application, Microsoft Mail 3.2, but to use it you must own the program's Server Edition and have a Microsoft Mail post office installed on your network. The program is obviously included to entice corporate buyers to make the mail package their standard. Lotus originally included cc:Mail in SmartSuite but made a decision to take it out, because the company claims its customers evaluate and purchase communications products separately from desktop applications.
Summing the Parts
A key to evaluating an office suite is determining how well th
e applications work together. Each of the three office bundles comes with basic tools that help you integrate program features and switch among applications with a few mouse-clicks and keystrokes.
One of the cleverest is SmartSuite's collect-and-copy feature, an interesting extension of Windows' copy-and-paste capability. From within Ami Pro, you click on an icon that transfers you to 1-2-3, where you can highlight and paste multiple cell ranges into Ami Pro in one step. This process is much more efficient than copying and pasting multiple ranges one at a time. In addition, you can select another icon to quickly tile two SmartSuite applications side by side to make the collect-and-copy feature even easier to use.
You can also type text in Ami Pro's outliner and click on an icon to automatically convert the outline to a series of bullet slides in a Freelance presentation. Or you can click on an icon to build an attractive month-at-a-glance calendar within Ami Pro, based on a schedule created with
Organizer.
Conceptually similar features in Microsoft Office let you do tasks such as typing the text for a presentation in Word and transferring it into a PowerPoint graphical presentation with one click. With Borland Office, you can press a button within Quattro Pro to launch WordPerfect's text-art tool and place curved text in a spreadsheet.
Lotus's SmartSuite includes the longest list of these simple but clever application integration tricks, but it builds them on the weakest foundation. For the most part, SmartSuite's tools are constructed using Ami Pro macros. While the tools are certainly a tribute to the capability of Ami Pro's scripting language, as macros they run sluggishly and are not as bulletproof as they should be.
In each application bundle, you can employ a special icon palette at the top of your Windows display to easily launch and switch among programs. The palettes from Microsoft and Borland, affectionately dubbed MOM (Microsoft Office Manager) and DAD (Desktop Applic
ation Director), respectively, are stand-alone programs to which you can add icons to launch nonmembers of Microsoft Office or Borland Office. Lotus's LAM (Lotus Application Manager) is an Ami Pro macro that includes a fixed group of icons. Microsoft's MOM also includes the Find File feature included in Word and Excel. With Find File you can build advanced queries that locate and list files on your hard disk according to the criteria that you specify. These queries can be named and saved for reuse.
Crossing Applications
Thanks to standard Windows tools like the Clipboard, DDE, and OLE, exchanging information between two Windows applications is not overly difficult. For the most part, the main players in the Borland, Lotus, and Microsoft application bundles are fully OLE aware, with the capability to operate as both OLE clients and servers (see the table "Integration and Workgroup Features" for particulars about each bundled application). Thanks to these capabilities, creating a compound document com
posed of text from your word processor, an embedded table from your electronic spreadsheet, and a chart created in your graphics package is neither arduous nor uncommon.
With the advent of OLE 2.0, using the Clipboard, DDE, and OLE as we now know it may soon become old-fashioned. OLE 2.0 heralds the next wave in interapplication awareness, and three applications in Microsoft Office--Word 6.0, Excel 5.0, and PowerPoint 4.0--showcase the new capabilities that OLE 2.0 makes possible. Representatives from both Lotus and Borland stated during interviews that future releases of their Windows applications will aggressively support OLE 2.0. Customers can expect many useful implementations of OLE 2.0 features to appear this year.
OLE 2.0 manifests itself in several ways in Microsoft Office. The simplest benefit is the ability to drag and drop information between applications. For example, if you need to use a range of cells in an Excel spreadsheet as the basis for a table in a Word document, you simply d
isplay Excel and Word together on the same screen, highlight the appropriate cells in your spreadsheet, and drag their contents into your document. The resulting table in your Word document is an embedded Excel object.
The second up-front manifestation of OLE 2.0 is what Microsoft calls Visual Editing. With traditional OLE, clicking on an embedded object automatically launches the application used to create that object, and you have the opportunity to edit the object in its native environment. With Visual Editing and OLE 2.0, clicking on an Excel object inside Word changes the menus and icon palette to those for Excel, but the nonspreadsheet portions of your Word document are still visible.
This capability is another good reason for having a consistent interface across applications. When you click on the Excel object from within Word, the same menu structure is still available but with Excel-specific options, making the process much less confusing.
Workgroup Awareness
Microsoft Office
enjoys a good head start with regard to its implementation of OLE 2.0-derived features, but the company has no corner on innovation. Lotus and Borland leave Microsoft in the dust on another front: workgroup features.
Most applications in the Borland, Lotus, and Microsoft bundles are mail enabled, allowing you to send a document, spreadsheet, or presentation as a mail attachment without leaving your application. Borland dramatically expands this concept with a tool called Object Exchange, or OBEX. OBEX lets you distribute, or "publish," information (e.g., a spreadsheet or a spreadsheet notebook) to users who "subscribe" to the information. As you prepare to publish information via OBEX, you specify the version depth, or how many revision levels of the information are retained for subscribers' use.
OBEX can distribute information via MAPI- or VIM-compatible (Vendor-Independent Messaging) mail systems, using LAN disk space, via MCI Mail, or with any combination of these methods. When you use OBEX i
nside a Borland Office application, you activate a special icon palette with buttons that enable you to publish new information or poll for subscribed information.
Lotus gives information-sharing an interesting twist of its own. Using technology called Notes FX (short for Notes field exchange), Ami Pro, 1-2-3, and Freelance can intelligently store information on a Lotus Notes server. (Notes is Lotus's popular groupware product--a Notes server is an "object warehouse" that has the ability to intelligently store, index, and retrieve information in virtually any combination of formats.)
Notes FX lets you use a Notes server as an intelligent document management and revision-control back end for Ami Pro, 1-2-3, and Freelance. Notes can store data files from these applications, and the Notes database can attach fields to the data files, so you can catalog and index documents. For example, with Notes and Ami Pro, you can create a document library and management system to track the revision history of d
ocuments and index them by last revision date, description, size, style-sheet type, and other categories that you specify.
Notes FX supports bidirectional data exchange. For instance, data contained in a 1-2-3 field can act as a field in a Notes form or view. The Notes view is updated each time you enter data into the spreadsheet, or you can update the spreadsheet from a Notes form. Notes agents and macros can use the spreadsheet data in a Notes field to build a dynamic chart or to control a workflow application.
Obviously, to use Notes FX you must have a Notes server installed on your network. Unfortunately, neither the Notes server nor the client software is included in the SmartSuite bundle. But clearly, Lotus includes Notes in its vision of the future of automated office software.
Coming Soon: Global Scripting Languages
The average full-featured word processor or spreadsheet includes a macro language that lets you automate repetitive tasks and build custom applications. Because mac
ro languages tend to parrot the menu and command structure of the programs they come with, the macro syntax of one application is likely to vary dramatically from that of another.
If a macro language that can automate tasks within a single program is good, then a language that can do the same thing across program boundaries should be even better. Microsoft and Lotus both seem to think this is the case. Lotus has announced LotusScript, a BASIC-like scripting language that is rudimentarily implemented in Improv for Windows, Lotus's alternative spreadsheet. And Microsoft has weighed in with VBA, which premieres as the new macro language for Excel 5.0.
While neither language can yet be considered global (since each one works in a single application for now), both companies have committed to scripting languages that will work across all their major Windows applications. Both companies suggest that these languages will be phased in with major new releases of their Windows applications. Since recent ma
jor new releases of Word and PowerPoint have just occurred without internal support for VBA, it is probably best not to hold your breath. Microsoft has promised that Visual Basic will be integrated across the Office product line by 1995.
Microsoft's implementation of VBA in Excel is particularly appealing. When you use Excel's keystroke recorder to build a macro, the keystrokes are captured as Visual Basic code. You can edit the macro with a built-in code editor and use the capable debugger to detect and correct errors. If you're a Visual Basic programmer, your learning curve will be very slight.
Combined with OLE 2.0, VBA will ultimately enable you to write applications built from the prefabricated parts of your favorite Windows programs. For now, you will have to settle with Word 6.0's WordBasic and Microsoft Access Basic. With these tools, you can make calls to the macro languages and return results, instead of controlling the applications directly from Visual Basic.
Lotus plans the sa
me type of strategy for LotusScript as Microsoft has announced with VBA. The language will be scalable, supporting a wide range of functionality, from simple record-and-playback techniques for easy macro creation to the ability to call DLLs created as external C routines.
OLE 2.0 compliance will give LotusScript the same type of access to application objects as VBA has, allowing you to create custom applications from components of the Lotus suite (or from any other OLE 2.0 server that exposes software objects). LotusScript will also be compatible with other BASIC languages; this will allow a LotusScript application to be incorporated into other BASIC programs, including Visual Basic.
With these cross-application languages, you could build a front end to an application and then use components of the office suites to perform specific tasks. For instance, you could populate a spreadsheet with customer account information held in an external database, create a data file of overdue accounts, and prin
t personalized letters requesting prompt payment. The applications would perform specific functions in the background. The spreadsheet would pull in data and perform calculations; it would then pass the table on to a word processor, which would use the table as data for a mail-merge operation.
The user would see only the front end; the application components would be totally invisible. The end user would deal only with the significant data and the controls needed to accomplish a particular task.
As a result, each corporate desktop would be customized, iconized not with a set of software applications but with a set of specific tasks that a particular worker performs. The applications become, as they should be, a means to the end of getting work done, not the central focus of the desktop.
Taking the Plunge
Is the purchase of an office application suite a good move for your organization? Taking only the up-front costs into account, the answer is an easy yes; such a collection is the best
way to legally get your hands on a lot of good software at a very reasonable price.
In the corporate realm, however, true costs are seldom so easy to tally. For example, if your organization has invested considerable effort into building value around a particular group of programs (e.g., you've got thousands of pages of extensively formatted documents in WordPerfect format, or you have a body of critical engineering calculations built into macro-laden 1-2-3 worksheets), rocking the boat to achieve lower initial software costs and a consistent user interface may simply not be worth it. In the short term, buying a suite will deliver improved cross-application integration, but over time, tools such as OLE 2.0 will enable all applications to integrate easily.
If you've concluded that buying an office application suite is a good idea, which one should you choose? Lotus's SmartSuite clearly delivers the most programs for the money and is the best among these near-equals in terms of value. If you use N
otes or plan to implement it, SmartSuite is an even sweeter deal.
But if you've already got strong ties to a particular word processor or spreadsheet that is contained in one of these bundles and want to extend your software arsenal inexpensively with a minimum of relearning, pick the bundle that includes the highest percentage of your favorite programs.
No matter which bundle you choose, you can rest assured that with future releases, the individual programs in your collection will become more feature-rich and better equipped to collaborate with each other. And if past trends are a true indicator, they'll also continue to go down in price.
Cross-Application Scripting
Microsoft and Lotus will implement an advanced application language in future releases of their office-suite products. Both languages will do the following:
-- Operate across all major office applications in the vendor's suite
-- Access and control OLE 2.0 object components
-- Work with standard languages, inc
luding Visual Basic
-- Call DLLs
-- Support scalable capabilities, from record and playback to custom applications
The Facts
Borland Office 2.0.....................$595
Upgrade and competitive upgrade........$299
Borland International, Inc.
100 Borland Way
Scotts Valley, CA 95066
(800) 331-0877
(408) 461-9000
SmartSuite 2.1 for Windows.............$795
Upgrade and competitive upgrade........$595
Lotus Development Corp.
55 Cambridge Pkwy.
Cambridge, MA 02142
(800) 343-5414
(617) 577-8500
fax: (617) 693-0968
Microsoft Office
Standard Edition 4.0...................$750
Microsoft Office Professional Edition..$899
Upgrade................................$259
Competitive upgrade....................$299
Microsoft Corp.
1 Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052
(800) 426-9400
(206) 936-8661
fax: (206) 936-7329
What's In The Box?
All three application suites are anchored by a world-class word processor and sprea
dsheet. Borland offers the best database manager by including Paradox for Windows. To get Microsoft Access, you need to pay an additional $149 for Microsoft Office Professional Edition.
BORLAND LOTUS MICROSOFT
OFFICE 2.0 SMARTSUITE 2.1 OFFICE 4.0
Word processor WordPerfect Ami Pro 3.01 Word 6.0
for Windows 6.0
Spreadsheet Quattro Pro 1-2-3 for Excel 5.0
for Windows 5.0 Windows 4.01
Database Paradox for Approach 2.1 Access 1.1
manager Windows 4.5 (Professional
Edition only)
Presentation None Freelance PowerPoint
manager 2.01 4.0
E-mail None None Microsoft Mail
3.2
PIM None Organizer 1.1 None
Integration And Workgroup Features
Microsoft has a head start on OLE 2.0 integration, but all three vendors have pledged strong support of the open standard in 1994. (X = yes; O = no.)
OLE OLE OLE MAIL- WORKGROUP
CLIENT SERVER 2.0 ENABLED FEATURES
Borland Office
WordPerfect 6.0 X X O X OBEX
Quattro Pro 5.0 X X O X OBEX
Paradox 4.5 X O O X OBEX
Lotus SmartSuite
Ami Pro X X O X Notes FX
1-2-3 X X O X Notes FX
Approach X O O O
Freelance X X O X Notes FX
Org
anizer O O O X
Microsoft Office
Word X X X X
Excel X X X X
Access X O O O
PowerPoint X X X X
Microsoft Mail X O O X
Illustration: One advantage of an office suite is interface consistency across the bundled applications. Microsoft Office's three flagship applications provide the same first 11 icons, as well as menus that are identical in all but one command. Lotus's SmartSuite ranks second in consistency, offering similar--but not identical--patterns of icons and menu commands. Borland and WordPerfect have combined icon palette styles to achieve interface similarities between Quattro Pro and WordPerfect, but the common look has not yet extended to Paradox.
Bill Lawrence is part of a team that manages a 3000-node network and
related computing services for a major Western utility. He has been actively involved in networking and PCs for the past 10 years and is the author of Using Novell NetWare 4 and Using Novell NetWare, both from Que Corp. You can contact him on the Internet or BIX at
blawrence@bix.com
.
Three Suite Deals
