What were/is the most powerful Amiga office suites?

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

...but this crashed a hell of a lot on Win 95 and 98 anyway so a bit rubbish to be quite frank.

Ah yes, it's coming back to me now. Memory protection wasn't much help when your program crashed and lost what you were working on. There were other problems too.

I liked having a lot of icons on the desktop. Windows 98 had this bug where when the icon cache size crossed a certain boundary it corrupted its database and all your icons turned into the same random image. AFAIK that bug was never fixed. Another problem some programs had was fonts not being picked up and getting replaced with a really ugly 8x8 bitmapped font that looked like it came from Windows 1.0. Installing new programs was dicey because they sometimes replaced dll files with incompatible versions.

Sometimes a program would crash so hard it took the OS down with it. You might be able to move the mouse pointer around but not click on anything, ctrl-alt-del didn't work etc., or worse you got the blue screen of death. Then you had to wait for ages on reboot as it scanned the hard drive for errors.

I don't get those problems anymore, but this Linux box has a habit of running out of physical memory and taking ages to do anything (like 5-10 minutes) while the hard drive thrashes like crazy. Sometimes It's so bad the mouse pointer freezes, which is a bit scary. When I go to shut the computer down it often takes 10 seconds or longer to respond to mouse clicks. On the Amiga I just turn off the power!

[ImmortalA1000]

To be fair we did pretty much stress test any application due to the size of the company I worked at, the reports were massive and all had linked graphs and data tables in the Word documents. Sure it was Office 97 Pro and Win 95 v2 then Win 98 before I left in late 1999.

System critical departments were all on OS/2 (Warp I think) but there wasn't really anything on OS/2 that was going to do any better.

Extremely frustrating but you just keep saving stuff to a few alternative filenames every few minutes when the document became large and complex.

I probably should have asked them for a Colour Next computer setup lol

[C64A1200CD32]

[QUOTE=ImmortalA1000;1607957]I know there is Wordsworth vs Final Writer but what about the most powerful Spreadsheet and relational/SQL type Database products for Amiga. I remember there was Superbase Professional but no idea how good Spreadsheets were compared to Excel for Office 95.

I'm currently looking at using Mini Office from Europress. It has intergraded elements and can produce graphs and charts. It has a ASCII wordprocessor, database, spreadsheet, graphics and disk utilities. I'm not too sure how powerful it is but I'll look into using ARNOR's Prodata as an alternative database if it proves to be naff!

[E-Penguin]

I know it's not the same but I quite fancy writing some scientific papers in LaTeX on the Amiga as the editor (and compile it remotely). Is there a PDF view for the Amiga?

[TCD]

Originally Posted by E-Penguin

Is there a PDF view for the Amiga?

Have a look at this thread: https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=73276

[jPV]

Originally Posted by slaapliedje

Pagestream... I installed 5.x on my 060@50. Wow is it slow...

Try 4.x before judging. 5.x is still in transition to use different GUI toolkit etc, and it gives some issues.

[Seiya]

various software are simple, but as Office Suit, it is the best and exclusive for Amiga!

[alanwall]

Originally Posted by E-Penguin

I know it's not the same but I quite fancy writing some scientific papers in LaTeX on the Amiga as the editor (and compile it remotely). Is there a PDF view for the Amiga?

Yes there is ! It's called RNOPdf and is on Aminet

[Daedalus]

I remember Mini Office being pretty poor even at the time. Non-standard screens, no vertical ruler in the word processor, non-standard GUI elements and file requesters, very limited features in general and almost no compatibility with any other packages were the key issues for me from memory. Digita Office is absolutely leagues ahead of it.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

I remember Mini Office being pretty poor even at the time. Non-standard screens, no vertical ruler in the word processor, non-standard GUI elements and file requesters...

I suspect there was a reason for that. Mini Office originated on the BBC micro / Acorn Electron back in 1984 - published by Database Software, who later became Europress Software.

Mini Office for the Amiga was published by Europress in 1992, the same year that they released AMOS Professional. The GUI style in Mini Office looks suspiciously similar to AMOS. In an advert for AMOS in the November 1990 issue of Amiga Computing, one of the testimonials said:-

"Fantastic. I knocked up something in a day which would have taken a month in assembler" - Gary Symons, Bournemouth

Gary Symons is credited as one of the developers of Mini Office for the Amiga.