The Lotus SmartSuite millennium edition is an office application suite like Microsoft Office. It contains the Word Pro word-processing program, the Lotus 123 spreadsheet,  Freelance Presentation, the Lotus Approach database, Organizer and a few other related programs. We didn't find a lot of outstanding performance support features in this package, but it did contain a few interesting and unique features.

Bubble, Bubble, Boil and Bubble
Figure 1 shows an interesting use of bubble help in Word Pro. This examples shows part of a letter template that contains fields for entering address information. When you click on the field to enter information the italicized  field description disappears and the bubble help displays .  For example, if you clicked on the field "Click here to type Recipient's Address" Word Pro would display a bubble with the message "Type the Recipient's Address"

Figure 1

Show Me the Header
Word Pro uses an always on top tabbed dialog to add or change formatting options. Making a change in a dialog setting will immediately change the underlying document. While this can be great for immediately seeing the affect of your changes, it means you must change a setting to undo an inadvertent action.

One of the nicer features of the formatting dialog (called a property manager) is tab for setting header margins and spacing. The dialog (Figure 2) contains a diagram showing the relationship of the page, header and body areas. The lines and arrows from the setting field show what will be affected by a setting change.

Figure 2

No more gray
I'm not sure why it is but I've always found it difficult to read text on a gray background. So I really like how Lotus puts instructions and explanations in an area with a yellow background. I find this text easier to read.

Figure 3

Eliminating the Great Cover up
One of the things I really dislike about using search and replace or spellchecking, is that the dialog sometimes covers up a highlighted word. I then must move the dialog to view the word. Lotus has nicely solved this annoying problem, by eliminating the dialog and using an expanded tool bar as show in Figure 4. When I select the Find and Replace option, Word Pro display the tool bar. When I'm done it goes away. This feature first appear in Lotus Notes several years ago.

Microsoft has added a similar feature to Word 2000. When you choose to email a word document, the program places the address fields just below the toolbar. This makes it look like the e-mail program.

Figure 4

Option Based Messages
The dialog in Figure 5 features an option based message (bottom of dialog) that shows additional information about the selected radio button option.

Figure 5