gobeProductive 3.0 Preview Take It for a Spin Eric Grevstad
We're indebted to reader Gordon K. Miles, who tipped us off to Gobe's beta program -- we knew of Productive from its BeOS days (heck, we go back to the ClarisWorks ancestor its creators wrote for the Apple IIgs in 1987), but didn't realize a Windows port was in the pipeline. Miles wrote that he was looking for a compact office suite, and the Productive beta is a 6.3MB download -- an .MSI rather than .EXE file; some Windows 98 systems might not have the Windows Installer utility required to double-click and unpack it, but Gobe's site explains how to get it.
Once installed, the program takes a modest 23MB of hard disk space and modestly refuses to flaunt itself at the top of your Start menu or seize control of file-type associations. It uses a proprietary .PVE document type by default for all kinds of documents, including ones containing multiple "sheets" (such as a word processing file, spreadsheet, drawing, and finished report using elements from each), but can also read and save Word and Excel files.
Word compatibility is pretty good, though Excel worksheets arrive without macros or charts, and we're disappointed that the presentation module can't open PowerPoint slide shows. Productive can save files in a variety of formats, including familiar graphics formats, HTML Web pages, and Adobe Acrobat PDF files -- although fonts didn't always look smooth and one text frame shrunk, lopping off some of its content, when we tried the latter.
The interface takes a little getting used to, partly because of Productive's all-in-one instead of multiple-application approach and partly because the beta release loads skimpy help screens from Gobe's Web site instead of offering complete help. Pull-down menus are less important than toolbars, which mix unchanging icons with context-sensitive tools for the different modules (we've never relied so much on pop-up hover help). In a nice touch from the BeOS days, a handful of menus or tools such as color, transparency, and layer palettes can be "torn off" or converted to "panels" which you can put anywhere on screen.
The word processor doesn't have all the shortcuts of Microsoft Word (you can't delete text a word at a time with Ctrl-Del and Ctrl-Bksp, for instance), but mixes ample layout power with smooth drag-and-drop editing. In addition to the usual choice of fonts, type sizes, and paragraph styles, you can adjust kerning (letter spacing); flow text through as many as 10 columns; and employ headers, footers, and footnotes, the last appearing either at the end of the document or bottom of the page or column in question.
Inserting special symbols is easy -- Productive automatically changes straight into curly or "smart" quotes, though it doesn't have any other auto-correct functions. A spelling checker flags typos on the fly, while a thesaurus helps you find the right word -- and we happily noticed that both work whenever you right-click a word, offering possible spellings for unknown and synonyms for known words.
The spreadsheet is your basic number-crunching grid, with convenient toolbar icons for summing, sizing, and formatting rows, columns, and cells and inserting a good variety of math, financial, logical, and time/date functions. Charting options aren't especially fancy -- not quite 20 varieties of column, bar, line, pie, area, and scatter charts, including some 3D versions -- but you can make them fancy by using the drawing, rotating, and transparency tools.
Productive offers an impressive array of both drawing (vector) and painting (raster or bitmap) graphics tools, ranging from handy prefab shapes for the former (arrows, cartoon speech balloons, flowchart symbols) to a "magic wand" area selector and special effects akin to Photoshop plug-ins (blur, warp, engraving) for the latter. The zoom capability makes pixel-level editing easy, though beginners will occasionally find themselves losing objects with invisible transparencies or overlapping layers.
The presentation module is basically the drawing module with the addition of transition effects and timed slide shows; you can specify that new slides share the same background layer as their predecessors, but it's not as intuitive or convenient as the master-slide and prefab slide types offered by PowerPoint and its peers. Nor are there any speaker's-notes or handout options, though you can publish a slide show to the Web.
It's not quite fair to judge a product based on its public beta release (not that that stopped anyone with Windows XP -- Ed.), and gobeProductive 3.0 -- although the company's site says it'll ship yet this month -- seems noticeably less solid or finished than the similarly previewable StarOffice 6. Even so, Productive looks like it'll be worth looking out for: reasonably fast (beta code is never blazingly quick, but the program's real-time text and object changes are addictive) and elegantly integrated or seamless, with less of the unintuitive, un-Windows feeling that ClarisWorks/AppleWorks had. We don't expect the phoenix to topple the gorilla, but we're glad to see it rise.
