Suite Dreams Office suite upgrades: Do we need them? Are they worth it? Which one do we want?

Do I have to upgrade? Should I? It's hard to missMicrosoft's full bore marketing campaign in support of its newOffice 2000 suite, so you've got to be wondering if this issoftware you need. And the answer is: It depends. Most softwarereviews are of a "gee-whiz; it's new; it's great"variety, but that doesn't always work for homebasedentrepreneurs who want reliable no fuss software that doesn'tnecessitate huge expenditures for new hardware just to run thestuff. With that caution in mind, let's dissect not only Office2000, but also its chief rivals, Corel WordPerfect Office 2000 andLotus SmartSuite Millennium Edition.

For starters, how old is your computer? On anything slower thana 200MHz CPU with 64MB RAM, these suites are plain pokey.They're also big. A full installation of the premium edition ofOffice 2000, for instance, gobbles up well over a half gigabyte ofhard drive real estate. The others aren't as greedy--probably200MB will do for loading most of the features--but with any ofthese suites, you need a reasonably powerful box with a spacioushard drive before even thinking about upgrading.

Another determining factor is how old the suite you're nowusing is. If it's Office '97, or Corel WordPerfect 8.0 orLotus SmartSuite '97, you probably have all the power you need,because those programs are plenty slick. The latest editions of thesuites are mainly tweaks. However, if you depend heavily on theWeb, take note that the new breed suites are thoroughly"Webcentric," meaning they're designed to make iteasy to import and export information (documents, spreadsheets andso forth) to the Web. So if you spend a lot of time convertingdocuments into HTML, an upgrade might be in order. All three of thesuites make it fast and simple to edit Web documents and to put upalmost anything you create on the Web, without much (if any) lossof features or formatting.

Expect to pay street prices of about $200 for the standard MSOffice upgrade, about $100 for the Corel upgrade and about $100 forthe SmartSuite upgrade. Here's what they offer:

• Corel's WordPerfect Office 2000 (www.corel.com/Office2000/index.htm)builds in WordPerfect for word processing, Quattro Pro forspreadsheets, Corel Presentations for creating PowerPoint typeshows and CorelCENTRAL for keeping calendars and to do lists.CorelCENTRAL remains awkward and unlikable, but the othercomponents are first-rate and offer high levels of compatibilitywith their Microsoft counterparts. It's a solid package,offering terrific value and usability.
• Lotus SmartSuite Millennium Edition (www.lotus.com/smartsuite) isa strong package, with WordPro; 1-2-3; Approach, a bang-up databasemanager that's easy to use; Freelance Graphics, a PowerPointclone; and Organizer, a spiffy time and work organization tool.That's a lot of software for $100, but, frankly, it's notespecially aimed at you or me. The Lotus target market is anetworked office--particularly mega corporations. Many file sharingand group work tools are built in and I'm sure they'regreat, but those of us in home offices don't need them. Anotherdrawback: The WordPro file format ("lwp") isn'twidely supported--MS Word, for instance, opens those files asgibberish. However, Lotus is often bundled free of charge withparent company IBM's laptop and desktop computers. If a freebiecopy comes your way, use it and know you're using the same appsthat folks in Fortune 500 companies use.
• Microsoft Office 2000 (www.microsoft.com/Office) hasto be acknowledged as the leader of the pack. The barebonesstandard edition (consuming about 200MB of drive space) includesWord, Excel, PowerPoint and e-mail applet Outlook--all top choicesin their niche--and that makes Office 2000 the suite to beat if youhave the willingness to shell out an extra $100. Buy it and younever have to explain why--with millions of others using it,you'll have plenty of company.

Want more definitive answers? The happy fact is all these suitesget an "A" on any report card. While you're thinkingabout that, chew on this: In '84, I bought WordStarProfessional, a word processing program that included a(revolutionary) spelling checker and a couple of other neatfeatures. The price? About $500--five times what a full suite canbe bought for today. So know whatever you buy counts as a bargain,a very suite deal indeed.

Robert McGarvey works out of his home office in Santa Rosa,CA. Visit his website at: www.mcgarvey.net.