No PC is complete without basic productivity applications. These include a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, e-mail, etc. Gobe productive is an office suite that runs on the BeOS.

The suite is divided into five primary components—word processing, graphics, spreadsheet, image processing, and presentation. It has a neatly integrated interface. As with other suites, frequently used functions are available on toolbars. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support customization of toolbars, and many functions available on the toolbars are not available in the menus.

One useful feature for people switching to Gobe is its capability to import as well as export documents created in Office 2000. We opened DOC and XLS formats, and it was able to read them without any problems.

Compared to other Office counterparts, Gobe runs pretty fast. However, stability seems to be an issue, as we managed to crash Gobe quite a few times. Fortunately, none of the crashes were fatal, as we were able to save our work after BeOS gave us the crash warning.

It comes with a 35-page manual, which is not very detailed and gives
you a concise introduction to the different tools.

Gobe is pretty easy to install, and someone completely new to BeOS managed to install it without any problems within a few minutes. No reboots were required, and the software was up and running after the installation.

Word processor

Gobe Productive’s word processing features are easy to adjust. The interface is fairly intuitive, and has a clean look. The toolbar is not cluttered with unnecessary buttons.

Spell checking is a simple process. Click the spell check button on the toolbar, and the SpellBar is added to the window. Our installation shipped with an English dictionary, but other languages are also available for download from the Gobe site.

Graphics

The graphics program is similar to Paintbrush for Windows. It has some very elementary functions like pen, eraser, arc, rectangle, etc. It has the capability to save the image in several formats, including JPEG, GIF and BMP, but can’t export files to other image-editing utilities like Adobe Photoshop, etc, in their native formats.

As with other components in Productive 2, the graphics module supports layer and transparency effects. However, you shouldn’t expect to accomplish major illustration work with this package. Most of the functions in this application are too basic for this. The Image Processing tool (we’ll talk about this later) would do a far better job of it.

Transparency controls apply to spreadsheets as well as to word processing, letting you define the transparency factor of any image you want to put in the document.

Spreadsheet

Editing cells and adding formulae is fairly straightforward, and is similar to Excel for Windows. Unfortunately, some features are conspicuous by their absence in the spreadsheet component. These include trend lines for charts, and statistical functions like Z and T tests. In fact, there’s little you can do to a graph after you’ve made it, except for change type of graph, and resize, rotate, etc. You can make all types of charts, however, including Bar, Pie, Line, Area, and XY charts.

Productive ships with a number of impressive demo documents, most of which are various forms of spreadsheets. Amongst the "applications" included with Gobe are a calendar, monthly day planner and a business card generator. Users could find ways to use the functions in the spreadsheets to build similar applications of their own.

Image processing

This software comes in use when you want to touch up, or even edit image files and digital photographs. Gobe supports many standard graphics formats such as TIF, JPG, etc.

It’s easy to alter images with the several tools available. They include the magic wand and lasso (for selection), an eyedropper color selection, and magnifying glass among others. Lots of plug-ins are included to add effects to your images. If you mess anything up, the undo function can always come to your rescue.

Presentation

Using this software really made us wish we had to make presentations more often. You can make stunning presentations from scratch in almost no time.

It consists of slides, which are made up of a number of layers. Slides themselves can’t be drawn on, and you have to insert a layer before placing graphics on a slide. Gobe Productive also has the ability to create common background elements for slides, so that they have a unified look.

When run, the presentation takes up the entire screen. Controls are simple. A click, spacebar, or right arrow key displays the next slide, and a left arrow key or backspace returns to the previous slide, like with any other presentation package.

Conclusion

Gobe productive is a fairly complete Office application for BeOS—easy to use, and packed with lots of features. Although this version still has some rough edges, it’s good enough to be used full-time. It has to mature a little, and lacks the decades of development other Office suites in its league have been through.

Anuj Jain at PCQ Labs