By Rose Vines

This month's cover disc features a fully functioning, time-limited version of Gobe Productive 2. This integrated suite runs on the BeOS operating system. (We included a copy of BeOS 5 Personal Edition on our June cover disc.) It features a word processor, spreadsheet, graphics editor, image processing and presentations package.

You'll find Gobe Productive is easy to install and easy to learn. It may not have the fire power of the big-gun Windows suites, such as Microsoft Office and WordPerfect Office, but it has superlative integration and zippy performance.

BeOS is renown for its excellent graphics and multimedia support and that comes through in Gobe Productive. Not only does it contain three graphics related components, but its use of frames for positioning text, tables, spreadsheets and other objects within a document gives you complete control over positioning and formatting. That makes Gobe Productive an excellent tool for creating brochures, invitations and other mixed-mode documents.

Gobe Productive handles Microsoft Word and Excel documents with aplomb, although it has trouble with complex documents. It can also read and write HTML, RTF (Rich Text Format), plain text, BMP, JPEG, PPM, TGA, TIFF, GIF, PNG and PICT formats.

To get up and running with Gobe Productive you'll need BeOS 4.5 or later and around 20 megabytes of hard disk space. To install the program:

1. Run BeOS. If you installed the copy of BeOS 5 Personal Edition from last month's issue, run BeOS 5 from Windows in the usual fashion.

2. Pop the CD containing Gobe Productive in your drive and, when the CD icon automatically appears on the BeOS desktop, double-click it.

3. Locate the Install Gobe Productive icon and double-click it to start the installation. Read the licence agreement, click the Agree button and then click Begin to install Gobe Productive to the default folder.

4. Click Yes when asked whether you want a link to Gobe Productive in the Deskbar's Be Applications menu and then click Close to complete the installation. You can close any open windows by clicking in the close box in the top left corner.

To start Gobe Productive, click the Deskbar, select Applications and then Gobe Productive. Gobe displays a list of document types. Double-click any item in the list to open a new document, or click the Open… button to open an existing document.

Try this
To get you started, create a new document, of any type, and then choose Help from the File Menu. Gobe's help comes in HTML format. Check out the section on The Basics plus the Tutorial. There's also an Index for those times when you're after specific information.

If you prefer to dive right in without consulting the documentation, here are some things to experiment with:

* Integrated documents with context-sensitive menus. Gobe doesn't care what sort of information you want to insert into a document. You can mix up graphics, text, tables, spreadsheets and other types of data in any Gobe document. Use the Frame, Insert frame command to insert different data into a document within a static frame. Or, if you'd like to create a floating frame that you can position anywhere, do this:

1. Open a document and make sure the toolbar is showing by selecting Show Toolbar from the Window menu.

2. Click on the Frame Tool (it's a capital A in the left of the window -- if you let your cursor hover over the icons you'll see a tooltip describing each) and keep your mouse button depressed to display a menu of choices. Select one and then draw an outline within your document to define the limits of the frame.

Note that while you're working within a frame, Gobe's menus adjust to match the type of data you're working with. You can right-click within a frame to adjust its transparency, font attributes and other properties.

* Tear-off menus. Many of Gobe's tools can be 'torn off' their toolbars and turned into free-standing options boxes. To give this a try, open a word processing document and click-and-drag the Text Font box into the document.

* Linked text boxes for flowing text. You can flow text from one floating text frame to another. To do so, use the technique described above to insert a floating word processing frame within a document. Once you've inserted the frame, click outside it to deselect it then click inside it once more to select the entire frame. Now, open the Frame Menu and choose Make Linked Frame. Click twice within the first frame and start typing. When your text fills the frame it will overflow into the linked frame.