My thoughts on Lotus Notes

I love Lotus

Before I start this gripe-fest, I thought I'd share some history with you. I used to love Lotus products. I used Ami Pro and then Word Pro in the early 90's as I was finishing high school. When Lotus Word Pro was released, I remember being quite excited by its features and how powerful and intuitive the product was. It seemed like it was light-years ahead of Microsoft Word. The mode-less formatting palette was wonderful to work with. I could see the changes in the document as I made changes to margins, fonts, styles, etc. I no longer had to deal with opening and closing fiddly dialog boxes. It was a revelation.

I haven't used Word Pro in years, and now that I use Microsoft Word at work, I don't have a compelling reason to use Word Pro. My opinion of Word Pro may change if I looked at it again after so many years, but I suspect I'll still be delighted by it and find it hard to move back to Word. I use a Mac at home now and strangely using Word on a Mac is much closer to using Word Pro. It has a nice formatting palette that means I don't have to fiddle with all those dialog boxes.

I really did have a fond spot for Lotus products, but as you'll soon see, Notes has utterly destroyed any brand loyalty I may have had.