On the View/Panels menu you can select which floating panels you would like to have visible at any time. Font, Styles, Ink, Transparency, Zoom and other windows can be floated on your screen, as the whole Productive environment is based on SDI. "Traditional" features found on other word processors, like Header & Footer, Grid, Rulers, styled bulleting and numbering are all to be found on Gobe's Word Processor.
Some interesting features are the following: When you select a piece of text and by right clicking, you can copy the character's or paragraph's format. This way, if for example, you copied a piece of text that it was set to Arial, Size 12, Bold, Underlined, when you paste this format in another paragraph, page or document, you will be able to use this exact style. Similarly, with the use of the Style Panel, you can easily transform pieces of text into a pre-defined format. For example, by selecting some text and then click on the Styles/Link, the text will be underlined and it will behave as an HTML link. These Styles are editable, so you can easily save and restore/use your own prefered text style.
Productive also supports spell checking and it features a Thesaurus and Dictionary as well, always ready for use. I found them to be good and robust and the spell checker has the ability to learn new words too.
The Font panel is a bit different of what Windows users are used to, it does not offer a sample preview, but a live review. For example, instead of play with the font settings and then decide if you want to keep the changes or not, the changes are already made to the document automatically, upon any change on the font panel. This feature is of course impressive, but I found it to be not desirable at times. In fact, in cases where you are not sure which style you want to keep and you keep play with the font settings, you will lose the original style as you will need multiple undo's to reach the original instead of just one or none. I would also say that its Find/Replace panel needs a bit more work on adding some more advance features. You can insert a number of objects in a word document, things like a chart, images (all the images that the Translators support), tables, vectors, hyperlinks and HTML. For example, you can copy/paste a web page directly from an IE window, and it will look like as it does in a browser, but your copy will be editable. It is a shame that this feature never worked for me though, resulting to an instant crash everytime I was copying/pasting something from a web page.
You can save a document as a .pve, the native Gobe file format, which includes in single file format, spreadsheet, word, image document elements etc. So, instead of having different file formats for presentations or spreadsheets, one file format covers all. You always have the freedom to export your documents to Microsoft Word, plain text, Rich Text Format, HTML and even PDF (yes, save as PDF 4 or 5 for free). The generated HTML has pretty good quality for a visual generator, but the problem is that its format is LF and it is not pleasantly visible by Notepad or other simple Windows text editor. The PDF export works fine, it loads under Acrobat Reader 5 fine as well, but on exit, my Acrobat Reader crashes (especially when the generated .pdf was saved with vector graphics in it). You can also save your document by posting/uploading it on the web automatically with the use of Web Folders.
As for the Word .doc compatibility, it works well, as soon as the document is not bigger than ~1.5 MB and it does not have pictures in it. As you can see in the screenshot below, Productive is on the left, and Word on the right. The first Word document has forms, which do not show at all on Productive. The second .doc file includes a picture (the Ensoniq one), which does not render at all on Productive, but the rest of the text is intact. The third document (the Creative one), is 2.4 MB large, which refused to load under Productive. Word compatibility (which is very important, we like it or not) was not great under gobeProductive 2.x either, but it was also functional.
- "General"
- "Word Processing"
- "Spreadsheet"
- "Graphics"
- "Image Processing"
- "Presentation"
- "Conclusion"
