Unfortunately, it hasn't stood the test of time that well either. In an age when only the rich had a hard disk, presenting the mini Office install instructions as a list of files, which needed copying from four floppies, was acceptable practice. These days it's pretty much unforgivable. It says on the box that mini Office is compatible with Workbench 1.3, useful for all you stick-in-the-muds out there. This facet of the program is made obvious by the fact that the icons have their black and white components switched around -- no MagicWB icons here. Worst of all, the modules all look dated and dedicated to a PAL: Hi-Res screenmode (I'm not even sure that this program will work on NTSC machines).

But these things are all cosmetic. What is less cosmetic is the performance of the programs that make up the mini Office suite. As a tribute to AMOS, (who wrote the program), they are quite impressive, but they certainly do show the limitations of this version of Basic. Picture, if you will, no proper multitasking, no ASL (or ASL replacement) requestors, no CG fonts, no screenmode requestors, an inconsistent menu style, non-standard buttons, gadgets and keyboard shortcuts and much more in the same vein. Also, because these are all Basic programs, compiled obviously, but nonetheless Basic, there are limitations -- spreadsheets can only have 5200 cells, databases only 9999 records and the fifty thousand word dictionary that the word processor uses doesn't have words like 'in', 'January' or 'cope' in it.

However, if you have a really basic machine then you won't have spent time learning that RAmiga-s saves a file, so you won't be disappointed that it now becomes LAmiga-s. As long as your personal requirements aren't too heavy, then mini Office represents a good value- for-money package that should satisfy the needs of quite a few Amiga owners. All the same, it would have been nice if Guildhall had got the source with the package so that it could be updated somewhat, or even had an Installer script written to make installation to a hard disk less of a trial.

The graphics module can create IFF ILBM graphs like the one shown here.