Review of excellence! v3.0 and ProWrite v3.3.1UK   By John Varcoe Perth   || 33 ||| 33 ||| 33 ||| 33 ||| 33 ||| 33 ||| 33 ||| 33 ||| 33 ||| 33 ||  When I casually mentioned to Tim that I would do a review of these programs I had no idea of what was infront of me. It included:- Trying to run two wordprocessors at once, who use different font formats. Being forced to finally install version 2. of Amiga Dos to get the best out of the latest versions of these programs. Doing a crash course in AREXX programming - phew I've been busy. The cause of all this action was twofold. I found that excellence! v3.0 was not happy in a 1.3 environment, (despite what Micro-Systems Software say) and Prowrite had macros that required AREXX before they could be used. So I had version 2.1 installed. I have used excellence! since version 2.0 came out everyday in my business and it is connected to a Postscript printer. That's really why I used the program, as it was one of the few programs that had a simple interface to Postscript. ProWrite I have only used since Christmas, when New Horizons very kindly sent me an evaluation copy of ProWrite.  Features It 's interesting that over time, both programs have become very similar. I have thought hard and long about how to write this review and have decided that rather than going into the basic features in great depth, I would highlight the unique features o f each program and how they handle them. On Megadisc 32 there was an exhaustive article written by Leigh Murray in the Articles Drawer entitled Graphics&Text_WPs on these programs and how they handled graphics. This article is excellent and covered areas that I was not going to, as I use these programs for their word processing features and ProPage or PageStream for my graphic requirements. Comparison of Features Both are `What You See What You Get' wordprocessors. They accept a variety of fonts and will insert IFF pictures. They allow you to set up page sizes, in inches or centimetres. Both give you timed saves and backup saves, dictionary, user dictionary, and thesaurus. In their latest versions both programs are very robust. However I have had a problem with excellence! in that if you double click in a header, the program falls over and the Guru appears. It does appear to be a major bug in the program. ProWrite has been very good and the only time it fell over was when I set up an A3 page on the screen and then asked it to printout through postscript at 150%. The screen went all red and funny colours and I had to reboot. I would hasten to add that it is not something that you would normally do, so I couldn't call it a real bug. Manuals In my opinion ProWrite is a little light on in the index section. The manual is well written and easy to follow. After a few days I had most of it's features sorted out. As I have had excellence! since 1988 it's difficult to comment on the manual as I have two addendums in the front. However I will say that the index is more comprehensive.  Real differences between the programs  ProWrite Proud  Page Sizes ProWrite allows you to set an A4 page as one of the default settings. With excellence! you have to know the size (297mm (h) x 210mm (w)) and physically set it. Carriage returns, tabs etc I have to say I really like ProWrite's `invisibles' as they call them. They show a dot for a space and a very clear tab arrow. I use an interlaced screen and so the type can be quite small. The dot clearly shows me if I have a space between the words. excellence! shows carriage returns and page breaks but not tabs. I have found with excellence! that sometimes when using tabs, the text appears moved on the screen, but has not worked when printing out. With no visible tab indicator there is nothing to show you if your tab has been accepted by the program. Change Case ProWrite allows you to convert lower case to uppercase or in reverse. excellence! doesn't. Sort ProWrite's is much easier to use as it explains whether you are sorting up or down with the use of A-Z or Z-A. In excellence! it's called Descending or Ascending. I could never remember which was which.I invariable selected the wrong one. It's not a r eal problem as the text is still highlighted so you selected the other option. It's just with ProWrite it is clearer. Convert- File Program A utility provided by ProWrite allows you to convert a file saved in another word processor format and convert it to ProWrite format. This has proved very useful as I have years of excellence! files saved and I have had to convert what I need as I have been running ProWrite. Formats that can be converted include excellence!, Beckertext, Scribble!, Textcraft plus others. With excellence! files it converts all the fonts, the page settings and any page-breaks you have used. It seems to work well, although one large document caused it to fall over. I don't know why. Fonts The bugbear of my life. Why does every program use fonts that are incompatible with each other. It's a nightmare. I use excellence!, ProWrite, PageStream and ProPage, and not one of these fonts are compatible with the other. To use ProWrite and excellen ce! together while doing this review, I decided to load ProWrite fonts into my system fonts, and create a new drawer called ExFonts. I put excellence! fonts in this and wrote a short file that automatically assigned fonts to ExFonts and then loaded exce llence!. I then wrote a short file to reassign fonts to fonts when I had finished using excellence!. For those using dot matrix printers both programs will accept CG fonts and ProWrite Provides fonts that will give you the right spacing if using NLQ or Draft when printing out on a dot matrix and using the printers fonts. I have tried these out and they work well. excellence! recommends that you use Topaz, the default font. On the short time I've spent with a dot matrix printer, I believe ProWrite better equipped to handle dot matrix print outs. Note if using CG fonts, I recommend creating a bitmap font of the font sizes that you use the most with the Fountain Utility found in AmigaDos 2. I tried using them, and even with a hard drive they take forever to load. Create a bitmap of it and it's as quick as the other non CG fonts I use. Personally I have found the Postscript fonts provided by ProWrite not very good. The characters have too much space between themselves. Now I don't know whether this is just my printer. I have found that the Times font provided by AmigaDos or the CG fon t to give me a better printout. In terms of font handling I prefer ProWrite because it is more transparent. You just use either the fonts provided by Commodore or ProWrite, that's all there is to it. Plus I really like the way that you are able to select only the fonts that you regularly use to appear in the font menu, whereas with excellence! when you call up the font requester all the fonts in your font directory are shown. The final font handling benefit that ProWrite has over excellence! is that it allows you to scale fonts even with version 1.3 of the operating system. With excellence! you cannot. Output - Landscape or Portrait  You can print out in landscape format with both. excellence! requires you to reset the page size, ie swapping length with width. With ProWrite you just click on the icon in the Page Setup to give a portrait or landscape printout. HotLinks The latest version of ProWrite has HotLinks capability which is a program data swop system. Produced by Soft-Logik Corporation it allows you to write text in ProWrite and import that file into HotLinked programs. I happen to use PageStream for all my DTP work so I find this feature very useful. ProWrite also will accept Professional Page files and will convert them. excellence! does not have either of these facilities, but the latest versions of PageStream and ProPage will allow you to import native P roWrite and excellence! files. Insert Literal Both have the same feature that allows you to insert special characters into your text. However this feature is more useable with ProWrite as the display reflects the font in the document You click on the one you want and it is inserted in the document. excellence! shows you only the system default characters. So if you use Dingbats for example it will still show the normal alphabet, whereas ProWrite shows the complete display of dingbat symbols to choose from. excellence! excels Macros and AREXX What a nightmare AREXX is, for idiots like myself who couldn't program myself out of a paper bag. ProWrite has decided that for the 10 programmable macro keys you have to use AREXX. I am proud to say that with much reading of their manual, (I tried read ing the Commodore manual on AREXX and went into programming shock, and quickly put that away!) and faxing their support, which is truly excellent, I have managed to make the macros I wanted work. ProWrite include some examples on their disks and in the manual, so your not entirely on your own. I wish that ProWrite would allow you to program the 10 Function keys that they have already programmed. For some reason these ten are set, and what they say goes. When it comes to macros I much prefer excellence!. They don't use a language, it is simple and easy to program. I have set up a macro to insert everything I need to put a memo on the screen. With excellence! you copy the text into the macro. With AREXX you have to stuff around with line after line of special characters to tell it you what text to put on the screen. excellence! v3.0 offers AREXX if you want to use it, but keeps their own macro language. Dictionary Dictionary access is much faster with excellence! than ProWrite. Running both off my hard disk, excellence! will check a document faster. This is an area that ProWrite needs to improve. Even when you copy the dictionary into RAM: using Guess can take over 30 seconds to give you options of the word. I don't believe that's acceptable. Not everyone has souped up Amigas. In addition ProWrite's Look Up... feature drives me mad. If I type a word that I feel is not spelt correctly, I would like to be able to copy this to the Look Up... text box. I can't do this. I have to retype the incorrect word again. It all gets too hard and I just don't use it. You have to be very disciplined to think in advance of a word you are going to type and expect to spell wrong, to use the feature. After all isn't sped and ese of use why yu use a partikular program?  Summary Allows you to check number of words in a document, sentences etc. Both have it but excellence! allows you to highlight part of a document and give you a summary of just that section. ProWrite will only give you a summary of the whole document regardless. Hyphenation excellence! allows you to hyphenate the whole document. This is useful if for example you are reformatting your document or adding bullet points or highlighted paragraphs. With the whole text hyphenated, it will always be OK. ProWrite lets you hyphenate words, but you must do each word individually. It's not a big point but excellence! 's feature is more useful. Delete excellence! has a Delete command in the project Menu. I find this useful if I want to get rid of a file for some reason. ProWrite has no facility to do this. You have use the Shell or a utility to do it.  Maths One feature I really miss on ProWrite is excellence! excellent Maths feature. Pressing alt and dragging the mouse with the right button down allowed you to highlight a list of numbers. you then pressed right Amiga and M and it would add up those numbers You could then paste that total into your document. Index & Contents Generator If you are writing a long document, paper or book these are really useful features that excellence! provide. I have only used them once, but found it relatively easy to use and worked as it was supposed to. WISHLIST My wish list for both programs is that they would allow you to import structured drawing clip art. This would make the graphic import really useful in my mind. Why do I want to import IFF files that print out all jaggie, when I could have a illustration looking a million dollars. I could do things like have my signature as a clip file and append it to the bottom of documents. The other feature I would like to see is basic drawing tools. Even vertical lines and horizontal lines would do. Vertical lines for between columns in multi-column layouts and horizontal lines for splitting one story or feature from another in a newslet ter. CONCLUSION It is interesting how you live with a program for a while, become used to its features and quirks and are happy with your lot. Along comes another program and suddenly you have to re-evaluate what your norm is. I have found that since I started using ProWrite it has become the program of choice for me. I believe it to be an easier program to use as a wordprocessor and have much more competent graphic handling capabilities. With the added bonus of HotLinks I highly recommended it. No doubt both programs will continue to slug it out as they go head to head to try and become the leading Amiga wordprocessor. EQUIPMENT USED excellence! and ProWrite were reviewed on an un-accelerated Amiga 2000 with GVP Hardcard and Quantum 40Meg drive. 1 Meg Chip ram and 4 Meg Fast ram. Both programs were used in interlace mode on 8 colours using a FlickerFixer and viewed through a NEC Mul tiSync II. DISCLAIMER Products and brand names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. NAME AND ADDRESS John Varcoe Perth Western Australia Ph: (09)227 5000 Fax: (09)227 1432  || 33 ||| 33 ||| 33 ||| 33 ||| 33 ||| 33 ||| 33 ||| 33 ||| 33 ||| 33 ||