CompuServe Messages

Version 2.0d of excellence! (the latest) is quite a bit faster than 1.x, and has lots of neat little features, like contents indexing, literal characters (put a copyright symbol in your text) and Postscript output. The ONLY thing it really doesn't do is let you snake text around an IFF graphic. You can have only one line of text next to an imported graphic, so essentially the image (if it's less than a page wide) has white space to one side or the other. Something that should be improved in the next edition. Graphics can be sized, however. The grammar checker/thesaurus/speller functions are quite good. It'll also handle math functions within text, do very nice headers, footers and footnotes, hyphenate automatically, and let you keep "glossaries" (style sheets) of often reused forms, a la Microsoft Word. It will work with HP printers. Postscript fonts can be created for on-screen reference. Utilities such as the speller, thesaurus can be moved into RAM for fast look-up in real time. Print merge is powerful and the print preview window is straight out of Wordperfect for MS-DOS. What's really nice is that you can print in draft to a dot matrix, or use the printer's internal font, or use a near letter quality mode with graphics, or use a complete graphics mode with all the font creation coming from excellence! (not what's aboard the printer). Gadgets let you lead out lines, do hanging indents, etc. It is Clipboard-aware, handles multiple columns, can print sideways, etc. And if you look carefully you can find it for $99. >> Ron Legro / Milwaukee via WHAP!