It appears that Lotus/IBM has reserved most of the changes and improvements in the SmartSuite for OS/2 1.5 package for Lotus' oldest product, namely 1-2-3. In contrast with the components we have looked at so far, WordPro and Organizer, which contained only minimal enhancements, 1-2-3 v1.5 has a substantial number of new or enhanced features. In addition to these features, v1.5 has some updated material dealing with a variety of issues.

This review will be largely limited to these new features, enhancements, and updated material.

What's New?

1. Some of the New Features are:

   1. New file format that supports 64 K rows

   2. SmartLabels

      1. Perform routine calculations without having to enter functions or calculations.

   3. 58+ new @functions
      Examples of these functions are:
      1. @YEARFRAC - function for computing fraction of year from number of days;
      2. @BIN2HEX, etc. - set of functions to convert between binary, hex, octal, and decimal numbers.

   4. Web tables
      1. Supports importing a table from an HTML document, retaining the table structure.

   5. Sheet copy/move
      1. Move/copy entire worksheets using either the mouse or menu commands.

   6. Hyperlinks

   7. HTML file open/convert

   8. Support for Comma Separated Values (CSV) file format
      1. This very common format (aka Ascii-delimited) is now fully supported.

   Additional information on the new features may be obtained from the online Help under the "What's New" section.

2. Some of the Internet Enhancements are new menu items:

   1. Choose File-Internet-Convert to Web pages to save a file to the Internet;

   2. Choose File-Internet-Get data from Web to open a file from the Internet;

   3. Choose File-Internet-Convert to Web pages to publish a range to the Internet

3. Some of the Updated Material is:

   1. Additional changes to deal with Y2K issues;

   2. LotusScript has been upgraded to 4.0;

   3. Using the Euro; and

   4. Addition of the Microsoft Excel 97 Filter

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—Walter Metcalf