MultiMate 4.0 Works With Existing Software

MultiMate 4.0, the latest version of Ashton-Tate’s word processing software, is offering its users something that could be described as software glasnost .

The openness that I’m talking about isn’t political, of course. What MultiMate 4.0, which has a suggested price of $565, seeks is peaceful coexistence with most other software for IBM and compatible personal computers.

Rather than try to persuade users--particularly businesses--that they should adopt MultiMate 4.0 in place of word processing programs they already have, Ashton-Tate hopes to sell MultiMate 4.0 to be used alongside users’ existing software.

Among more than 150 new features are these:

- Automatic conversion of files created by upwards of 20 other brands of word processing.

- Ability to instantly suspend editing to run nearly any other program and automatically return to the same page when finished.

- Commands to insert, re-size and edit a variety of graphics images including the 72 clip art images included with the program.

- A built-in electronic mail system to keep in touch with others, either on a local area network or a dial-up messaging system.

High-quality fonts from Bitstream Inc. also are included to help you achieve typeset-quality printing.

While the editing screen does not show you what the type will look like, you can quickly preview pages any time, seeing either a reduced-size simulation or a full-size rendition.

A document comparison feature, commonly known as “redlining,” allows two versions of a report to be merged into a final draft that draws portions from both. There is, of course, a spell checker, which checks and corrects words in a single pass through a document.

Also there is a thesaurus as well as a grammar checker, the popular Grammatik IV program that can trap commonly confused words such as affect and effect and make a host of judgments about writing quality.

Document size has been greatly increased from previous versions, to a maximum of 1.5 million characters or 254 pages.

(MultiMate 4.0 replaces MultiMate Advantage II. An even earlier version, MultiMate 3.30, which runs on PCs with as little as 256 kilobytes of memory, is still available.)

Line numbering down the left side of the page, required on many legal documents, is an option and it works properly whether single or double line spacing is used.

A table of contents can be automatically created. Either footnotes or end notes can be formatted.

Index creation is another option, as is preparation of a table of authorities such as would be used in a legal brief.

Pages can be divided horizontally into columns, which can either be independent of each other or newspaper style where the text wraps from the bottom on one column to the top of an adjacent one.

Lists of information entered into columns can be sorted alphabetically. Math computations can be performed either horizontally across a line of numbers with the result on the right side, or vertically with the result at the bottom of a list of numbers.

Data from a variety of sources, including all versions of Ashton-Tate’s dBASE database programs, can be automatically inserted into documents.

You can create a special data entry template screen in MultiMate 4.0 to create your own mailing list to merge into your correspondence files.

All of this has been done while maintaining the same basic look and operation of the old MultiMate, which itself was modeled on Wang’s dedicated word processing system.

That is partly a blessing and partly a curse. It will make it easy for the 750,000 current users of MultiMate to move to the new program.

But it results in a lashed-up look in which new parts seem to have been pasted on wherever they could be made to fit rather than being integrated seamlessly.

For instance, the most successful way to present program command choices to users is with the use of pull-down menus arrayed across the top of the screen.

MultiMate 4.0 has pull-down menus, but you have to issue a two-keystroke command to display them, and then they remain visible only until you pick a choice and then disappear.

Because MultiMate 4.0 cannot display different type fonts while a document is being edited, the editing screen quickly becomes cluttered with a series of special symbols to mark various formatting and font indicators.

It would take a real expert to decipher these hieroglyphics, which also interfere with reading and editing the text.

There also tends to be a bewildering series of choices offered every time a document is opened or printed, some of which are coded in ways that are unnecessarily difficult to understand.

You may have to know a lot about the hardware you use to properly navigate among your files with MultiMate 4.0.

I was surprised to find that it did not recognize the existence of the logical subdivisions into which I have divided my large hard disk, which I call drives C, D and E.

The program would only recognize drive C until I modified a program configuration table to name the other drives as well.

On the other hand, MultiMate 4.0 does a very nice job of displaying the subdirectories of a hard drive in a graphic “tree” structure from which files may be selected by pointing with the cursor at the desired location.

Compared to the latest versions of WordPerfect, Microsoft Word and, especially, Samna’s Ami Professional and Microsoft’s new Word for Windows, I would judge MultiMate 4.0 to be a step behind in development.

It is however, a very powerful and full-featured package that would seem adequate to virtually any word processing task. And it runs fine on an ordinary PC/XT or AT-class computer.

MULTIMATE 4.0: A $565 heavy-duty word-processing system.

Features: Support for more than 400 printers including Postscript laser printers, built-in fonts, graphics, E-mail communications, document comparison, database merging, page previewing, a thesaurus, grammar checker, spelling checker, multiple columns and math computation.

Requirements: IBM PC or compatible with at least 384 kilobytes of memory and a hard disk (full program shipped on 23 floppy disks). Graphics monitor needed for print previewing.

Publisher: Ashton-Tate, 20101 Hamilton Ave., Torrance, Calif. 90502. Phone: (213) 329-8000.