Andover News
March 26, 1999
602Pro PC Suite Competes Effectively with Microsoft Office
By Robin Miller

602Pro PC Suite costs a mere $49, imports and edits Microsoft Office files, and has a built-in image editor. It writes and uploads Web pages as easily as it turns out printed documents. In many ways, it's superior to MS Office for small office use, and since it's low-cost, downloadable, shareware, it has a good chance to grab off a noticeable percentage of Microsoft's Office market share without a big ad budget.

602Pro PC Suite is especially perfect for a small, Internet-hip business. The word processor hardly distinguishes between paper and HTML publication, and the built-in FTP utility is so easy to use that you may not even recognize it as one -- or need to. If you have an online price list or similar document that needs constant revisions, 602Pro PC Suite makes it dirt-simple to download that page, edit it quickly, and upload the revised version. Then you can take that same revision, print it out for in-house reference, and send a fax version to customers who would rather receive information by fax than get it as e-mail or look it up on your Web page.

You can add images to a 602Pro PC Suite document with a click of the button. Spreadsheet users can import data from 602Pro PC Suite's "tab" utility with another click, displayed either numerically, or visually as charts or graphs. Want to mail your finished document through the (snail mail) post office? There's a mail merge feature built in, with enough database power to handle all the clients you or I are likely to accumulate in our lifetimes.

The image processing utility isn't Photoshop, but it's good enough for most small business or home office desktop and Web publishing needs. There are enough filters and special effects included (I liked the "fish eye" best) to keep things from getting boring, and a couple of interesting text effects you can use to create non-ho-hum headlines. Twain support is integral to this module, which speeds up start-to-finish document production. (I tested it with two cheapie flatbed scanners, a mid-range digital camera, and a Snappy video capture device, and it worked fine with all of them.)

The learning curve to accomplish all of this was negligible. If you have used any common spreadsheet, word processing, WYSWYG Webmaking or other modern office software, you will be able to site down with 602Pro PC Suite and go to work almost immediately.

But nothing in this world is perfect, especially a brand-new piece of software. The biggest, most glaring omission in the 602Pro PC Suite is way the word and character count utilities are hidden in a document "propertes" dialog box that can only be accessed through the "file" menu. This information is essential to all professional writers and editors, and to many corporate users as well. An option should be available that would display ths information on the bottom of the screen, where line, page, section, and chapter numbers are displayed in the current version.

Two other text quibbles: lack of a "select all" edit feature, and lack of a easily-found default "monotype" typewriter-style font, which many older people (like me) prefer when we're doing "raw" text preparation.

The biggest 602Pro PC Suite bug, though, is that the graphics utility crashes easily. 602Pro PC Suite is no worse in this respect than Photo Express, Paint Shop Pro, or Adobe Photo Deluxe, but I don't really like having an "illegal operation" box appear when I'm trying to do something critical on deadline. Save your work often, and watch the number of windows you keep open, and you'll generally be okay -- if you have a minimum of 32 MB RAM available. (Below that, 602Pro PC Suite is hardly worth trying.)

HTML produced by 602Pro PC Suite is no worse than other WYSIWYG programs give you, but it's nothing to write home about, either. If you care about HTML purity, you'll want to hand-edit the code 602Pro PC Suite produces before you upload it.

One thing I dislike about StarOffice, WordPerfect, and MS Office is their tendency to totally take over your PC and its entire desktop. 602Pro PC Suite doesn't do this. It loads only the functions you need, and when you're done, you can close down the whole program without background "residues" hiding in your system to mess up other software. For this reason alone, I give 602Pro PC Suite high marks. (I admire software that errs on the side of humility rather than hubris.)

602Pro PC Suite is absolutely worth downloading, and if you like it, the $49 registration fee is one of the best software values around. You can easily spend more on a standalone word processor, image processor, spreadsheet or HTML editor without getting any more functionality than you get in the equivalent 602Pro PC Suite modules