Many people consider recent application suites to be little more than bloatware intended to force you to upgrade your hardware. Office 97, for example, takes up as much as 185MB of hard-disk space. The competition has similarly rapacious appetites. Sure, you get lots of features and functions for all that disk space you've sacrificed. But, as most studies have shown, regular users rarely take advantage of many of those features. An equation editor is nice, but if you never do equations, why bother?

Java applications, such as Corel's new Office, have been suggested as a trimmed- down alternative. But so far, those Java apps have been even more sluggish than the behemoths they purport to replace. But there are alternatives.

Recently, for a segment on ZDTV, I put together a suite of slimware-- applications with most of the functionality of the major office suites, but at a fraction of the disk-space requirements and at a fraction of the price. My totals: 22MB of disk space and $135--far less than Microsoft Office. Here are the applications I found:

YeahWrite: I was shocked when former WordPerfect President Pete Peterson handed me his new word processor on a single floppy disk. I've seen spell checkers alone that gross more. But YeahWrite is a full-featured word processor, with spelling checker and everything. Sure, it doesn't have some of the more esoteric functions, but who needs them anyway? I'm using YeahWrite right now!

Sidekick: At 11MB, this is the heavyweight of the group. But if you need an easy-to-use and flexible contact manager, datebook and PIM, you'll not find much better than Starfish Software's Sidekick. It even has a small word processor, suitable for short notes and memos. It lacks an E-mail client, which is built into Microsoft's Outlook, but you can always download a free one from the Internet if you need it.

ASAP Active Presenter: If you're like me, you do a lot of standard text-style presentations, and you pull most of them together at the last minute. Now, it would be great to have a staff full of PowerPoint pros on call, but who's got resources like that? This great product (formerly known as ASAP Word Power), from the creators of Harvard Graphics, is easily the best presentation package I've ever used. It's so simple and foolproof, you'll be creating in minutes professional-looking presentations that look like you spent days building them. It won't make your content any better, but at 7MB, it beats any other presentation package by a mile.

VistaCalc: When it comes to spreadsheets, some people really need those multilayer, multi-tiered versions with databases, programming languages and all. But for most of us, these tools are overkill. Enter a neat little spreadsheet called VistaCalc. It looks just like Excel and has some of the same neat features, but it takes up only about 2MB. I found VistaCalc over at our shareware library. If you need to exchange data with Excel or other spreadsheets, take a look at SDSS Spreadsheet while you're up there.

So there you have it. A full-featured and very fast alternative to those bloatware office suites. Even better, you can run it on a standard Windows PC, without having to worry about your Java virtual machine, your servers or running out of hard-disk space.

Jim Louderback is the editorial director of PC Week. He can be reached at jim_louderback@zd.com.

Source: PC Week