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.