With the increased frequency of digital presentation of research on laptops at meetings, on the web and to journals, the need arises for a unified set of computer programs. The best of all worlds would be to create text, graphs, images and HTML in one program only, but the reality is that several need to be used without much duplication of effort. The ideal situation is one in which the computer applications are open-ended, so that one application saves in a format that is readable by another application across Macintosh® and PC platforms. At the same time, the applications should be straightforward to use.

Taking only the above conditions into account, even the most cursory examination would reveal that Microsoft® products are, in fact, closed systems at best and dead end at worst. PowerPoint® is a good example of a program that can only do one thing—make slides or on--screen presentations--but dead ends because high resolution image files cannot be saved from the program, nor can files export to HTML or to a file usable by a publisher.