Applixware Office Suite for Linux

Applixware for Linux brings productivity software to the Linux platform, making it possible for you to write reports, perform calculations, develop slide shows, and do other everyday office work. The suite comprises five applications:

• Words, a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) program for writing and editing text
• Graphics, a paint program for producing and editing image files in a variety of formats, including GIF and JPEG
• Spreadsheets, a general-purpose calculator for business and scientific use
• Presents, a presentation graphics program that's handy for creating slides
• Inbox, an e-mail manager
• Data, a database management tool
• HTML Author, a tool for creating Web documents

We installed Applixware under Caldera OpenLinux 2.3 with no trouble. Applix has tested this product under several other Linux distributions (including Debian/GNU 2.x, Red Hat 5.x and up, and SuSE 6.x), and it probably can be made to work with other distributions as well.

If you've used a modern productivity suite under Mac OS or Microsoft Windows, you'll understand Applixware's user interface. It's graphical, with toolbar buttons that invoke the handiest functions. There's a little control panel window that you use to launch applications, and you'll find that many interface elements are consistent across applications.

Applixware's feature set is quite elaborate and should prove satisfactory for most users. For example, Spreadsheets allows you to call up a wizard that walks you through the creation of a chart, step by step. The library of available chart styles is impressive (it includes a variety of 3-D looks). Graphs update automatically as the data they're based on changes. It's possible to copy a chart from Spreadsheets and paste it into a Words document, though the automatic update feature doesn't work across applications. Other impressive features include Directory Displayer, which allows you to organize and locate your files quickly, and a macro language. Words can do mail merges. Words also supports a ton of keyboard shortcuts for everything from "move forward on paragraph" to "insert a blank line."

Applixware is a worthy productivity suite for Linux users. With it, you can use Linux full time and accomplish everything you'd like to. --David Wall