Atlantis Ocean Mind 1.5 Review Fun and Frills Eric Grevstad
Atlantis doesn't have anything as daft as Word's infamous Clippy cartoon-paper-clip mascot, but it does have its whimsical side: A checkbox in the setup routine lets you install a customizable sound-effects scheme ranging from file-opening fanfares and exit-without-saving warnings to typewriter keyclick and carriage-return noises.
In addition to the soundtrack, you can customize or tinker with everything from Atlantis' toolbars to its default file-saving directory. (Version 1.5, in addition to periodic saves in case of power failure or system crash, offers the ability to automatically back up successive versions of each document, letting you retrieve, say, the Tuesday 1:30, 2:00, and 2:30 versions of your budget proposal.)
Word or WordPad users will soon feel at home with the program's drag-and-drop editing, unlimited levels of undo, and shortcuts such as double-clicking in the margin to select a paragraph or pressing Ctrl-Bksp or Ctrl-Del to delete the word before or after the cursor.
And Word users, though they may miss their tables and thesaurus, will find no fault with Atlantis' as-you-type spell checking and correction, complete with squiggles under possible typos and on-the-fly fixing of common errors like freind or alot, plus smart quotes --conversion of straight to curly apostrophes and quotation marks, double hyphens to dashes, or other automatic corrections or abbreviation expansions from a customizable list.
While earlier versions offered only page numbering, Atlantis 1.5 finally delivers full-fledged headers and footers, including support for different first-page or odd and even (right and left) layouts. Both headers/footers and body text can contain various fields with document data ranging from the current page number and date to author and word count, and Atlantis can generate a table of contents if you use numbered heading styles to delineate chapters, sections, or topics. As limited compensation for the lack of tables or spreadsheet functionality, a built-in calculator can add highlighted numbers or perform trig and metric-conversion functions.
Extra-credit print options include N-up (up to 16 pages per sheet) and booklet printing, akin to those provided by many printers' software drivers; friendly dialog boxes walk you through the paper-shuffling steps for double-sided printing on a non-duplex printer.
As for saving documents, Atlantis defaults to Rich Text Format (RTF) but does a pretty good job of reading and writing Word DOC files -- our Word 2002 test document arrived with formatting, fonts, columns, headers, and centered graphics intact, though footnotes disappeared, as did an image embedded within a paragraph. Tables arrived as old-fashioned lines with multiple tabs; Atlantis supports bulleted lines but not automatically renumbered ones, and sticks to plain bullets instead of fancy ones such as checkmarks. The program can also save (relatively simple) documents as HTML pages.
Clearly, Atlantis Ocean Mind isn't a feature-for-feature match for Word or WordPerfect. Even the newest version leaves us longing for tables, footnotes, and text wrap around graphics. (And we're still concerned that Atlantis' up to four toolbars plus rulers plus navigation bars for switching among documents or "bookmarks" within a document can leave you with too little screen space for actual content.)
But we're impressed with the steady improvement or addition of truly useful features such as smart quotes, auto-correction, columns, and headers since our review 20 months ago. And we're naturally biased toward any company that (a.) lives by the commonsensical 80/20 rule, keeping software slim instead of yielding to "feature-itis" or growing bloat, and (b.) sells a first-class productivity package for $35. If you enjoy word processing, keep an open mind to Ocean Mind.
