Lotus 123 Millennium Edition 9.5

Brand: Lotus

Format: CD-ROM

Details: Amazon.com

The spreadsheet that started it all offers powerful new ways to work with numbers. First, take your hands off that keyboard! With IBM ViaVoice in 1-2-3, you can use dictation to enter spreadsheet data. Check out 1-2-3 Web tables that let you bring in live Web information and perform analysis on it. SmartLabels and SmartFill are features that know what you want to do even before you type in the commands.
Spreadsheets are indispensable to business for forecasts, budgets, and bottom-line reports. That’s why you need the business world’s first and best spreadsheet. Many years of innovative thinking and hard work have gone into today’s Lotus 1-2-3, to make everything you do with numbers easier and more powerful, whether those numbers come from the Web, corporate databases, or even an associate’s Microsoft Excel files.

Review

Since version 9.0, Lotus has spent its time in maintenance mode. It doesn’t advance the suite in version 9.5, but in many ways that’s OK, too. It offers the easiest to use PIM (Organizer), a great utility (SmartCenter), FastSite (for quickly creating intranets), and top-notch collaboration tools.
The company focused on several key areas, including compatibility, Internet integration, and ease of use. For example, the package now comes with a conversion utility for getting Outlook 97/98, ACT 3.x (though 4.0 has been the current version for more than a year), Sidekick 97/98 and Day-Timer Organizer 98 files into its Organizer R5 PIM, while 1-2-3 can read and write Excel 4 through Excel 2000 files and Word Pro reads and writes all versions of Word files (through Word 2000).
There are a few ease of use features scattered throughout the suite. A new Date Navigator moves you through dates in the Calendar section of Organizer. Lotus expanded custom fields (now there are 20), added a Day Planner view, and provided synchronization tools for PalmPilots. As you’d expect, there’s integration with Lotus Domino and Notes (FastSite, for example, can move the sites it generates to your Domino environment). There are HTML output filters for 1-2-3, Word Pro, and Freelance Graphics. Lotus 1-2-3 has long had the ability to pull data from an HTML page into a worksheet, though with ever-changing Web page layouts, this sometimes isn’t as elegant as you’d like, but it’s the best (and so far only) solution I’ve seen in a suite.
For corporations, there’s now SuiteUpdate, a self-deploying service pack that automatically updates users from one SmartSuite release to the next via the Web, due this summer. Sadly, there’s no Web-update feature for individual users, something Lotus is working on for a future release.
SmartSuite offers most of the functionality you’re likely to need on a day-to-day basis, at an attractive price. FastSite and SmartCenter (a desktop utility that puts appointments and Web data at your fingertips) are little gems in their own right.
While SmartSuite 9.5 doesn’t break any user-productivity ground, neither has it become bloated. — From Winmag®

UPC: 098594540026

Package Dimensions: 61x244x771