THEY always scoffed at the mention of the Amiga.  THEY always laughed
 and asked you why you hadn't bought a PC.  THEY said that all it had was
 some games. Who?  PC owners ofcourse.  Whenever you show a PC owner an
 Amiga there instinct reaction has always been, "So what?  Who cares that 
 it has great games?  I have Word Perfect!"  So you went and showed him 
 some demos.  Once again, he replied "So what?  I have Word Perfect!"  
 when he grilled you on whether you had Word Perfect, you had to admit that
 all you had was an old version.  But now, the time has come to throw off 
 the shackles.  We finally have the software we need to make the Amiga a 
 business machine (plus have a little fun playing games on the side).  Not
 only are most of the software titles mentioned in this article good, but
 ALL of the them are NEW!  
     The first field we will look at is that of word processing, a type of
 software that almost no computer doesn't have on it's hard drive.  Just 
 a year ago we had the American Amiga users using Softwood's Final  
 Copy 2 and New Horizons' ProWrite 3.3, the European users using Digita's 
 Wordworth 2, and a few using a smattering of different word processors, 
 such as Excellence!, Turbo Text, or Pro Text.  Then both Softwood and 
 Digita came out with new version of their products, and both made claims 
 of being the best word processor on the market.  With such bold claims, 
 and Softwood's new attention on the European market, a rivalry was bound 
 to start, and that has made both companies continuously upgrade their 
 products in the hope of coming out with a new feature before their 
 counterpart, and thus winning more of the market.  Because of this 
 constant upgrading, we now have Final Writer release 3, Wordworth 3.1, and
 Wordworth 3.1SE, a cut down version of Wordworth 3.1 for machines not as 
 blessed in the CPU and RAM  departments.  These word processors are light 
 years ahead of their earlier incarnations, sporting such features as 
 spell checking as you type and table generation, and with this rivalry 
 they can only keep improving with time.  Ofcourse, you can still get other
 word processors, some notable ones are Pro Text 6.5, a great program for 
 documents without pictures, Rashumon v3.0, which has multi-lingual 
 support, Turbo Text II, and Maxon Word. 
     Another product that no Amiga should be without is a directory
 utility.  These programs allow you to point and click to delete, rename, 
 copy, move, decompress, view, edit, and do a multitude of other tasks on 
 files and directories.  In 1993 and 1994 we could use Directory Opus 4.12,
 which was one of the most popular, and most highly rated, programs of all 
 time.  You could also use Disk Master 2, but the company that made it had 
 gone out of business, so the outlook for upgrades was not good.  In early 
 '95, however, we got both an upgrade to Directory Opus, v5.00, and a new 
 challenger to the crown, MaxonTools.  Hopefully these products will start 
 a rivalry as Final Writer and Wordworth have, although Directory Opus is 
 supposed to be so good that it will destroy MaxonTools under its foot like
 Godzilla crushed Tokyo.  
     The most depressed portion of the Amiga software market had long been
 the money management field.  Sure we had Phasar, Home Accounts, and PFM,
 but when we saw Quicken and MYM our jaws hit the floor.  Well, you can 
 stop drooling now, because two new programs came out in 1994, and eight 
 more are coming out in early 1995!  These programs are Money Matters 3 
 by Digita, which is essentially Home Accounts 3, Invoice-it by Legendary 
 Design Technologies, Pretium by Intelligent Design Inc., Best Business 
 Management by Software Technology, General Ledgers by GP Software (makers 
 of GP Fax) and Jonathan Potter (Directory Opus), CheckitOut by Bug Free
 Developments, Easy Ledgers by Small Biz Software, a new version of Phasar,
 MicroTrader by MicroActive, and Checks and Balances by Amisoft.  With all
 these programs to choose from you should have no problem finding a good
 program.  And there should be no problems with new updates, because with
 so much competition, these companies have to keep on upgrading their
 products of have their software get looked past in the stores. 
     Moving onto telecommunications, we can't really say that the Amiga has
 been left out of the field.  All you really need for it is a modem, which
 are compatible with all computers, and some telecommunications software.
 However, this year we are getting some upgrades and new products that
 should make the Amiga comm market better.  GP Fax and TrapFax, two fax
 programs, are both being upgraded, as were Phone Pak and Advanced Voice
 Mail, two programs which allow your Amiga to receive phone calls and
 handle them like a voice mail system.  A new commercial comm program came 
 out, named Termite, although the PD/Shareware programs Term, Terminus, 
 NComm, RIPComm, and many others are very good Comm programs, and well 
 worth checking out if you need some Comm software.  Buying a modem itself 
 has never been a problem, because modems are normally connected to the 
 Serial of Parallel ports, and all Amigas have these two ports, but if you 
 own an A600 or A1200, then you can now buy a PCMCIA modem thanks to 
 Scala, who released software that allows you to connect a modem that 
 supports speeds of up to 28,800 baud.    
     In no other software field on the Amiga had there been such domination
 by one piece of software as in database programs.  For a long time
 SuperBase had been the acknowledged winner.  It was upgraded all the way
 to SuperBase 4, with both Personal and Pro editions for home and office 
 use.  But in 1995 we will receive 5 new database programs, ranging from 
 low end to high end.  Softwood was the first to announce its database 
 program, Final Data, and, Digita, not wanting to fall behind, announced 
 their own database program, Data Store.  Data Management and Research are 
 also programming a database program, MultiFinder, Maxon continues their 
 entry into new fields of the market by introducing Twist, and Merian 
 Software & Design are upgrading Database Professional to v2.00 to compete 
 directly with SuperBase Pro.  These programs will face a tough challenge 
 to form a niche out of the Amiga database market, as SuperBase not only 
 is one of the best database programs on any computer, but there is also a 
 PC version and many software packages that work directly with it.  
     Now I can hear you thinking that this is all great, but there can't
 possibly new spreadsheet, because the Amiga never gets spreadsheets.
 Personally, I could care less if the Amiga didn't get a new spreadsheet,
 they seem to be the most useless programs in the universe to me, but for
 any Amiga users who have been holding their breath waiting for nine years
 waiting for a spreadsheet, 1995 just may be your year.  First, TurboCalc
 is being upgraded to v3.0, and the goal is to make the program good 
 enough not only to challenge Microsoft Excel, but to beat it!  And back 
 once again, Softwood is releasing yet another great product, Final Calc,
 and are also claiming that it will be on the level of Excel.  If their
 past word processors are any indicator, this program should be great.
     Ofcourse, there is more software being released, but if I kept on
 writing I'd never finish.  I haven't even touched graphics programs, still
 the biggest field of software titles for the Amiga, and I haven't looked
 at the hardware or games being released!  As you can see, a few companies
 have really ratcheted up their Amiga productions, like Softwood, Digita, 
 and Maxon, and hopefully, if any other companies go under, as has been
 rumored with Innovatronics, those bigger companies, who have a lot riding
 on the Amiga market, should pick up their products and programmers.  
 Doesn't that make you feel better about your Amiga?  And hey, if that PC 
 owning friend scoffs at your Amiga again, give him a punch in the nose  
 for me, OK?
 
                            ********************************
                            *Joshua Galun is the sysop of  *
                            *The Wolf's Lair BBS (201) 666-*
                            *9472 and co Editor in Chief of*
                            *this excellent mag!  Mail him *
                            *JGalun@maple.nis.net.         *
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