AmiPro Pushes Windows War Further
The battle for supremacy in the Windows word processing market has advanced another notch with the introduction of AmiPro 3.0.
The third version of this powerful $495 word processing program from Lotus Development Corp. introduces several new ease-of-use features plus some others borrowed from rivals.
One of the strongest aspects of AmiPro 3.0 is its ability to graphically display on the screen exactly what you’ll see on the printed page, a function known by the acronym WYSIWYG--or “what you see is what you get.”
Naturally, that encourages you to experiment with the look of a document more than you might with other programs. The latest version makes it particularly easy to change appearance with something called Fast Format. Let’s say you sprinkled several different ideas through your report and you decide that a few descriptive words in each should be bold-faced, italicized and underlined. Each change would require four steps in other Windows word processing program.
With AmiPro 3.0, however, you need execute those four steps--select text, choose bold, choose italic, choose underlining--just once. Then you invoke Fast Format from a pull-down menu and apply that same formatting elsewhere in the document by using a mouse to highlight the text.
For people who do bulk mailings, one of the most useful word processing features is mail merging, which allows you to combine name and address lists stored in a database with a form letter to personalize each with an address, greeting and other information. It is also one of the more difficult tasks to master in most programs.
AmiPro 3.0 helps ease that burden with SmartMerge, which walks you through the mail-merge process with a series of prompts. You can use lists created in most database programs. Or you can use AmiPro 3.0’s own database creation feature, where you enter information into an on-screen form that resembles a Rolodex card.
You don’t have to mail to everybody on your list either, because the program makes it easy for you to set up conditions that will determine which names on a list are merged with a document. For instance, you could set a condition so that only those customers with payment balances of more than $1,000 will be selected, or only those people with birthdays in October.
Smart Icons, a feature introduced in the last version of AmiPro, is now improved. The icons are small graphic depictions of various program functions--a picture of a printer for printing, for instance. When you point to an icon on the screen with the mouse and click the mouse button, the program feature depicted is executed.
In the latest version, you can create multiple custom groupings of smart icons tailored to particular tasks. Built-in groupings include those for working with long documents, for working with tables of text and numbers, for editing previously composed text, for working with graphic images and others. With 152 smart icons to choose from, it is a definite improvement to be able to collect them into functionally-related groups of 24, which are called palettes. The group can then be displayed anywhere on the screen.
Clean screen is a new feature that lets you hide most of the program’s menus and icon buttons to reclaim more of the screen for your text.
Still, on a normal computer screen, you can only see about half a page of text even with Clean Screen invoked. If you want to see what your document really looks like, you can choose the “full page” view. AmiPro 3.0 allows editing in the full-page mode, so that you can move graphics around, change type size and layout and, believe it or not, actually type new text. Two handy preview modes let you see what kind of page design each of the style sheets will produce. You can also look at the first page of documents stored on your hard disk, just in case you forget which file is which.
Features borrowed from Microsoft’s Word for Windows are quick envelope printing and “drag and drop” text manipulation.
AmiPro 3.0 has essentially the same drag and drop function, but it provides important enhancements in envelope printing. You see images of the various size envelopes to choose from. You can enter a return address to print on all your envelopes. Unfortunately, control of the font style and size for the address and return address is hidden in an obscure portion of the program where it isn’t easy to change.
