CompuServe Messages

Trevor: As a pro writer, I've been very happy with Excellence! 3.0. The status of its maker, Micro-Systems Software, is in doubt at the moment, but as for a pure writing tool on the Amiga, it even outperforms Wordperfect, and it's a solid program, so even if MSS goes down, the need for tech support is unlikely. It lets me type fast (it has even kept up with my 90 wpm on a FIFTY-page, 160K file, losing almost none of its pep in the scrolling department, either). It also has a great dictionary/speller/thesaurus, grammar checker and lots of little bells and whistles like glossaries and macros (which made the original Microsoft Word so powerful). Bookmarks to let you pop around in your great American novel at will, autohyphenation, table of contents and indexing automatically, etc. etc. Not bad for about a hundred bucks. But the output is only passable, unless you use E's postscript mode. On a DeskJet with one of the third party drivers (Super DJC, for instance) it ought to suffice. Me, I import over to ProPage for really fine output when the writing's done. ProPage keeps all the bold facing, etc. as it understands E's format. You could even set up a special save macro in AREXX that would do all this automatically. The A1200 would make a pretty decent writing machine. Fast (probably about 5-6 times faster than your A1000), good graphics built in (VGA 800x600x256 colors is one of the more modest of its modes) and small footprint. And with a hard drive (plus Final Copy 1.3 and Deluxe Paint AGA), it's going for about 700 bucks on special into June.