In the battle between the two main BBC word processing systems, View and Wordwise Plus, users of the former (Acornsoft) product have so far been better served with extra utilities and linked suites. Now, in the last couple of months, the Wordwise Plus userbase is striking back; and where better than with this utility disc from Beebugsoft which adds the 20 or so most useful additional commands? .

Assuming you have Wordwise Plus fitted as a ROM, booting Wordease gives you a fully interactive set of utilities placed in segment 9 of the word processor, with segment 8 reserved for additional options loaded from disc. Once loaded, you can move easily between Word wise Plus, Wordease and BASIC and text in memory is kept safe. It uses a number of internal variables (listed so you can avoid these if you have other programs to run concurrently) but there is no full error trapping, due to the lack of error handling facilities in Wordwise Plus.

So what are you adding for your money? A fair number of the utilities merely make the use of Wordwise Plus rather easier; such as an autosave facility for text files, a status report with a contents summary of each segment, an automatic unrestricted transfer of text from area to area (previously, as with much here, possible only manually), a function key editor and a selection of general utilities to use on the current text area (such as automatically aligning column of numbers in text).

Rather more complex are the disc menu options which provides detailed information on text files held on disc (filename, dircrory letter, file length and the first 25 characters of the file) and a simple text editor to replace the rather inflexible Wordwise Plus search and replace options. These, like the rest of the package, are simple to use.

Finally, there is a set of utilities designed to make printing your processed text a little easier. You can, for example, simply and automatically insert any required printer codes - this defaults to the Epson range but can be readily changed to suit your own configuration. Further, you can now choose predefined characters from a menu and automatically add these to your text; replacing the lengthy process within Wordwise Plus which allows you to calculate and include sequences of embedded codes. However, this is only simple to use on unjustified text as Word wise Plus remains unaware of details of these symbols and so your formatting and justification will be upset. A standard page handler and a label printer utility will be upset. A standard page handler and a label printer utility are also included.

As mentioned, this disc is easy to use and adds some genuinely useful extra commands to Wordwise Plus. It is excellent value and should be considered as highly desirable by any reasonably serious user of Wordwise Plus. As a bonus, there are even six utilities included to help in the development of your own Wordwise Plus programs - variables lister, various crunchers and so on.

D.R.