In our age of inflated bloat-ware programs that greedily consume hard drive space and offer lots of features that few actually use, one developer is
thinking in the box, albeit a small box. Portable Apps Suite offers a competent collection of programs that includes an office suite, standalone word processor, Web browser, e-mail client, web editor, personal organizer, and FTP and instant messaging (IM) clients.
The programs themselves, while they aren't necessarily competition for their mainstream brethren, are competent and do a good job of carrying out their respective tasks. The kicker is that the applications are relatively small and the suite, in its entirety, fits quite nicely on a 256 MB USB flash drive.
Leaning towards small, as opposed to large and overblown, has its advantages. The programs in the Portable Apps Suite don't need to be installed onto your hard drive or integrated into Windows. You can simply copy them into a folder and call on them when you wish. And when you copy them onto a flash memory drive, or other external storage device, you can easily move the applications from computer to computer and carry along all of your settings.
Best of all, the price, free, is definitely right. On the downside, if your storage medium happens to be slow, the programs will also bog down during loading, and, at times, during operation.
An Office Run
Most impressive is the Portable OpenOffice.org office suite that includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation program, drawing package, and database. It's much like an integrated "Works" program that offers almost everything under the sun but allows you to take your documents and everything you need to work with them wherever you go.
The individual applications are competent and adequately perform their respective functions. And surprisingly, they're fairly comprehensive. They're still no match for the depth of features found in their mainstream brethren, though. In particular, they lack the step-by-step wizards that help novices accomplish basic tasks, templates for working with commonly used designs and layouts, and the ability to work with graphics and other higher-order features.
The suite's word processor exceeds expectations. It offers the standard features that you'd expect in a high-quality word processor, including spell checking, auto-spell checking that identifies misspelled words as you create them, selective undos that annul specific tasks (even those performed several tasks earlier), and a find and replace function that can match letter case. The program also supports industry-standard file formats and can, in many cases, accept heavily formatted Word documents.
You can easily change fonts, as well as their style and color and highlight text. The program handles hyperlinks and offers built-in graphics capabilities to work with images, draw diagrams, create bullet points, and fill in backgrounds. There's control over indents, headers, footers, spacing, text flow, and more, along with basic table tools. You can also record and execute macros.
There are even basic review functions that allow several people to collaborate on the creation and review of documents. OpenOffice.org's word processor offers most of the features that users require, and the help is well written, comprehensive, and easy to understand.
The spreadsheet maintains the feel and protocol of the standard programs: Excel and Quattro Pro. You can highlight columns and select a summation function to immediately total them. You can select columns and copy functions over to other columns. There's a good selection of predefined formulas that include trigonometric, statistical, and other functions. You can right click to format cells and alter other settings. And there are also decent charting functions.
The presentation program offers the basic, requisite functions — almost everything that you need to build a presentation, whether you want to
display it on-screen or print it out. The program comes with the standard outline, slide, and sorter views, and serves page templates for different style slides that offer predefined placeholders for titles, text, graphics, and images.
The graphic tools let you add text and objects and manipulate them, and you can embed pictures as well as video and audio files. What the presentation program clearly lacks is a rich collection of professionally designed templates, as it only comes with a paltry few. But those who are confident with their design skills will be able to accomplish quite a bit with the program.
The suite even includes a database that offers some relational capabilities. This one is definitely workable, but its lack of templates and wizards makes it harder to learn and use. By the way, a second version of the Portable Apps Suite, Portable Apps Suite Light, leaves out Portable OpenOffice.org to take up half the space of the regular suite and fit on a smaller 128MB USB flash drive.
