Microsoft updated its Office suite slightly when Windows 95 came out, in order to have a 32-bit version available early. Office 97 Professional includes Word (word processor), Excel (spreadsheet), PowerPoint (presentation graphics), Access (database), and a new program, Outlook, which combines the functions of a personal information manager with an e-mail client. The numbering scheme has been from the previous single-digit system (e.g., Word 6 or Word 7) to show the 97 theme. So now we have Word 97, Excel 97, etc.
This latest version of Office incorporates major changes supporting the way Microsoft thinks businesses will operate in the future. Their view, mirroring the group-centric approach favored by modern management theory, assumes that employees in a modern business will be linked by electronic communications, either a local area network (LAN), or the Internet. Although these advances are most beneficial in a business environment, they also benefit individual users. Office 97 runs under Windows 95 and Windows NT.
I need to be clear what this article addresses. The version of Office 97 Professional discussed in this article is a Preview Program provided by Microsoft. Only Word is a final version; the rest are late beta, or test, versions. Microsoft passed these out at COMDEX , so I expect they are pretty close to the final version that should be available by the time this issue reaches you. We are using the Preview Program to prepare to teach the latest version of the suite to our Word/Office SIG.
One of the strengths in Office has been the integration among its programs. That means they share a common look in their menus and toolbars The Office 97 programs are exceptionally well integrated; in fact, the code used to display a toolbar serves all the programs, so if you run more than one program at a time, the toolbar code only gets loaded once. Of course, there must be some differences to reflect different program functions. One of Microsoft's goals for Office 97 was to share as much code as possible, so (for example) you don't need a separate spelling checker in each program. On a more subtle level, functions like Undo now operate more consistently in each program.
Microsoft makes a big deal about the Internet connectivity of Office 97 programs. How does that matter? Perhaps it doesn't, to an individual user on his or her home computer. But to a business whose employees are connected to a corporate Intranet (an Internet-like setup on the corporate LAN), it's very important. Individual users can use Office 97 programs to read hypertext markup language (.html or .htm files) directly. You no longer need the Internet Assistant programs. You do need to be sure to install the Internet publishing option when you install Office 97; otherwise your applications won't be fully "Internet-enabled." You can even use the Office 97 programs to create a Web page.
All the programs except Outlook have Web toolbars that look just like browsers, so you could actually use Word 97 or Excel 97 as a browser. You can also put HTML files into a spreadsheet, for example, and Excel will enter data from the URL site on your Intranet or the Internet. If you do that, the spreadsheet will look to a source on the Internet or Intranet for the data that is needed in that cell of your spreadsheet. In Word 97, you can link a graphic on the Internet into your publication, thereby saving storage space on your hard disk.
OfficeArt is a piece of code shared by all the Office 97 programs. It lets you use a set of drawing tools in all the Office 97 applications, not just in Word. It's equivalent to making WordArt available in all the other applications, except Outlook. Oddly, when I tried to look up OfficeArt in the Help files, they didn't recognize the term; possibly a beta version phenomenon.
To help you traverse the learning curve, Office 97 has added an Office Assistant. Represented by an animated graphic, Office Assistant pops up spontaneously when you invoke the Help function. He's really a Wizard who offers various sorts of help, including a response to a "How do I. . . ?" question. Another way to turn on Office Assistant is to invoke a Wizard.
The help that Office Assistant provides is good, with particularly useful organization. But when you have gotten the help you want, Office Assistant stays on the screen, making occasional noises and going through periodic animated sequences that distract me. Sometimes Office Assistant will flash a light bulb which indicates it has produced a tip for you. In my view, the tips are completely irrelevant to what I'm doing at the time, so are quite annoying.
One feature that Microsoft doesn't emphasize is that the file formats in Office 97 programs have all changed, and previous versions of the programs can't read them. That can be a real pain if you need to share documents with someone else who has an earlier version of the program, or with someone whose program could import earlier files. For example, I thoughtlessly sent Clarke Bird a Word 97 document for my input to PC Alamode, and of course, had to redo it in other formats that he could read in WordPerfect and PageMaker.
It's easier than ever to make changes to your toolbar icons to set it up just the way you like it. You can put any menu command on the toolbar, and of course, your own macros. And you can still remove icons you don't use from the toolbar by holding down the Alt button, clicking on the icon, and dragging downward off the toolbar.
Word 7 introduced a background spelling checker that runs constantly in the background and flags misspelled words with a jagged red underline. Word 97 adds a background grammar checker, which underlines grammatical errors with a gray-green jagged line. I approached this feature with a great deal of skepticism, since other grammar checkers have always infuriated me with how poorly they work. They make more grammatical mistakes than I do! I'm sad to say that Word's background grammar checker isn't perfect, either. But it seems to make fewer mistakes than most, so for the time being, I will leave it running. I will tell you how far I get in this article before turning it off.
Gone from Word 97 are Frames, which were used to create a document-within-a-document. For example, if you placed a clipart graphic in a Frame, you could drag the Frame containing the graphic anywhere on the document. Now, anytime you insert a picture or a piece of clipart, Word 97 automatically puts it in a Frame. That's great for pictures, but what about text? To make up for the loss of Frames, Word 97 adds a feature called a Text Box, that is really nothing more than a Frame renamed. You can even put a picture in a text box, just like a Frame in previous versions of Word. I'm not sure that this change added anything of value.
On a more positive note, you now have much more flexibility in wrapping text around a Frame (or text box). In an effort to keep up with WordPerfect, Word 97 now provides for a tight wrap around an image, so text flows around the shape of a graphic. You can also write text over a picture or a text box, creating an effect like a watermark. Speaking of watermarks, Word 97 still doesn't equal WordPerfect's ability to easily create a watermark; maybe not a big deal, but nice if you really use the feature. You can create a watermark, it's just harder than it should be.
Another new feature that strikes me as really useful is the Document Map. Displayed as a separate pane on the left side of the screen, the document map is an outline of the document structure. It lets you browse the document by clicking on the desired section. It could be very useful when reading long documents, or Web pages. A toolbar icon lets you toggle the document map on and off.
Microsoft is proud of its new letter wizard, and it is kinda cute, but, hey — this is a professional word processor. Users probably know how to format a business letter already. AutoComplete is a new feature that attempts to complete text that you start to enter. I had high hopes for this feature, but it's really hard to anticipate what you want. AutoComplete currently inserts the following text
Another new feature is AutoSummarize, which builds a summary of your document automatically. This strikes me as hard to do, and when I tried it on this review, it didn't do a very good job. Maybe this isn't the type of document that lends itself to AutoSummary. The idea is good, but needs further development.
One of Word's most useful features, Tables, is much stronger in Word 97. Although the Insert Table command remains intact from the last version, a new Tables and Borders icon opens up a new toolbar that lets you actually draw a table just the way you want it to look. Even the Insert Table command has been enhanced; you can now merge cells both vertically and horizontally.
To use the Tables and Borders command, click on the icon and then draw the outline of the table you want to construct. Don't worry, you can resize it if you need to. Then draw the internal lines, which will snap into place. If you want to change your mind, an eraser tool removes lines you have drawn. When you have the table laid out like you want it, just start entering data.
I maintain a Web page for a professional society. Being HTML-challenged, I originally developed the page using the Claris HomePage program, which lets me draw a page the way I want it to look, and then writes the HTML code to produce a page that looks that way. HomePage gets the page 99% right, letting me make a few tweaks to the actual code to perfect the way the page looks.
To test Word 97's prowess as a Web page editor, I used it to duplicate my Web page. To my delight, Word 97 proved to be a very respectable Web page editor, which has virtually all the features of HomePage, and is easier to use. And it's more "Windows-like" than the Claris program, which is really a converted Macintosh program. When I saved my document as an HTML file, Word 97 displayed a changed the formatting toolbar to one designed especially for HTML editing.
Word 97 doesn't let you create frames (which I would prefer to avoid, anyhow) or a few other advanced effects, but for straightforward, interesting, and informative Web pages, it may well be all you need. A Word 97 table translated splendidly to an HTML table, which makes it easier to read. Adding a background texture was just a matter of clicking on the background icon and choosing from a display of stock textures, or selecting an external graphic to serve as my texture. Adding a URL reference was also just a matter clicking on an appropriate button on the toolbar.
OK, this is as far as I got before I turned off the grammar checker. It made too many errors to justify leaving it on. Grammar checkers in general need a lot of work to become useful tools. Word's is a good as most, which means terrible. And on that note, let's leave Word and move to. . .
A small but welcome touch is that when you double-click on a cell which contains a formula, Excel highlights the cells which are referenced in the formula. That makes it much easier to trouble-shoot a formula. And formatting a cell is easier than ever, with a custom formatting option that lets you start with a set format and then customize it to meet your specific needs.
Excel has always offered an easy way to graph your data, although getting its charts to look just right has sometimes been a convoluted process. But now, Excel 97 makes it much easier with a new chart wizard if you need lots of help; and with easier, improved object-oriented formatting even if you don't use the Wizard. Just right-click on any part of the chart, and a context-sensitive menu pops up and tells you how you can alter the appearance of that section. And what would a new version of Excel be without a couple of new chart types? There is a new cone chart, plus cylinder charts and pyramid charts; stock charts showing highs, lows, and closing values; and bubble charts.
Printing spreadsheets has become easier, too. Previous versions
of Excel required you to switch to Print Preview mode to see just what
would print out and where the page breaks would fall. Now Print Preview
shows a Page Break preview that is clearer where the page breaks fall,
and even lets you adjust the page breaks by dragging it to another cell.
Microsoft beefed up PowerPoint's AutoContent Wizard, a feature that actually composes a presentation for you. You just tell it what type of presentation you want to make and it offers 23 different templates to base the presentation on. AutoContent not only helps you decide how to design the appearance of your presentation, but also what the presentation should say! For someone new to presentations, that could be a great help.
Two of the templates are for Web pages, suggesting you could use them to build either a corporate or personal Web page. However, the Web page that PowerPoint 97 builds is really just a Web version of a PowerPoint 97 presentation. Using a PowerPoint 97 viewer, which (surprise) just happens to be built into Internet Explorer 3.01, you can view a PowerPoint 97 presentation on the Web, complete with buttons to change slides in either direction. That's neat, but the downside is that the slides are kinda small, and thus hard to see. Still, for the right content, that could be useful.
PowerPoint 97 improves your ability to merge slides developed by different people into a new presentation. This is a great feature when a presentation is developed by a workgroup, rather than an individual. Using the same template, Roger in accounting can develop a slide that shows budget status, Angela in personnel can show projected training requirements, Bruce in graphics can show the new sales brochure, and Gina in engineering can describe your new, innovative manufacturing process. Ted, the VP of Sales, can assemble all these slides into one coherent presentation that will wow the clients.
Speaking of clients, do you use the same presentation for all your clients? I thought not. If you're like me, you take a basic presentation and build slightly customized versions for different clients, focusing on their particular needs and how you can satisfy them. PowerPoint 97 lets you build a presentation file containing all the slides you will need for all your customers, then create Custom Shows, which are like presentations within a presentation, to use only the slides you want for a particular client. That way, you can save all the slides in a single file, and not have to try to figure out two months later which version of the presentation says what.
Have you ever started a bullet slide and gotten so carried away with your text that you ran beyond the bottom margin of the slide? I do that frequently. The answer is to break the material up into several slides. PowerPoint 97 has a new feature called Expand Slide that is supposed to automatically distribute material from an overly long slide over several slides. When I tried that feature, PowerPoint 97 took each bullet on the slide and built new slides with the bullets as the title. There was no text on the new slides, except for the titles. This is another case of a good idea that needs more work — lots more. Maybe the shipping version will have perfected this approach.
Going in the reverse direction, have you ever decided to start a presentation with an overview of points you will make and then end the presentation with a recap of what you said? That's a standard practice for presentations. The overview and summary slides are pretty similar, if not identical. Rather than make you go back and review what your main points were to create the overview/summary slide, PowerPoint 97 has a feature called summary slide that automatically builds such a slide for you from the titles of the presentation slides. You must switch into either the slide sorter or outline view, select the slides whose titles you want to show in the overview/summary slide, and then click on the summary slide icon.
PowerPoint 97 creates a new slide, titled Summary Slide, before the first of the slides you selected. That's not where I would place a summary slide, but you can drag it to the end of the presentation, a more logical place. Or you could just retitle the slide as "Overview" and leave it at the beginning of the presentation.
Speaking of PowerPoint's outline view, when you enter that mode, you will see a small but neat enhancement where a thumbnail sketch of the selected slide appears on the right side of the screen, giving you a preview of what to expect. For those who are not familiar with PowerPoint, the outline view is a view that makes entering and editing text easy, especially if you want to move text from one slide to another. But before PowerPoint 97, you had to switch to slide view to see what the slides would actually look like.
Animation is a series of visual or sound effects that you can add to a presentation to make it more attractive. Animation is particularly effective, even essential, for presentations where there is no live speaker. Microsoft calls these kiosk presentations. A kiosk presentation could be left running unattended and would feature text, graphics, sound, and even video to present your message to passers by. A kiosk presentation might be used at a trade show where there were not enough representatives to talk to all the customers.
PowerPoint 97 has beefed up its animation capability. You now have more control over animation effects, although they could be simpler to find. But compared to a multimedia champion like Astound, PowerPoint 97 still doesn't begin to compare. For example, you can't control the path and the timing of a moving object like Astound can. And although Microsoft says there are templates with animation effects already included, it neglects to tell us which ones they are. But remember, this is beta software, and there's no manual. For simple and easy presentations, with a few entertaining effects, PowerPoint 97 will do the job.
PowerPoint 97's file format, like the other Office 97 programs, is not
compatible with previous versions. Microsoft says that means the files
load faster and take less space on your disk drive. If you need backward
compatibility, PowerPoint 97says it lets you save files in earlier versions'
formats, but when I tried saving a PowerPoint 97 file in a PowerPoint 95
format, six of the ten slides in the presentation vanished, along with
some clip art. A 40% conversion rate is not very impressive.
Like Exchange, Outlook 97 lets you set Word as your e-mail editor. Unlike Exchange or any of the other Office 97 programs, you can't customize the Outlook 97 toolbar with the buttons that activate the functions you like to use, although Microsoft's press release says you can. Maybe that feature will also be fixed in the final release.
The Outlook 97 Inbox lets you preview the first four lines of each incoming e-mail message. It's an unfortunate fact that a lot of e-mail is not interesting, and this preview helps screen out the junk mail. Obviously, the mail from Alamo PC stalwarts Don Rist and Dvora Mathews did not warrant classification as junk mail, although several other now-deleted messages did. You can edit incoming e-mail and save it to a folder, essential for paring off advertising and keeping the essential part of mailing list messages. Unlike Microsoft's earlier e-mail programs, Outlook 97 lets you click on the From address of an incoming message and add it to your personal phone book, a real time-saving feature.
The Outlook 97 e-mail client is also TAPI-compliant. That means it meets the standards for sending faxes and receiving telephone voice mail. The mail client with Internet Explorer does not.
Outlook 97 also has a better contact manager than Office 95's Schedule+. Still no threat to heavy-duty contact managers like ACT!, Outlook 97 lets you record time you spent serving a client — like a telephone call, perhaps providing consulting services. You can send e-mail directly to a listed contact, or go online to schedule a meeting with him or her.
The hub of a personal information manager (PIM) is its calendar, which displays your daily schedule and helps you manage your time. Like many other PIMs, Outlook 97 displays appointments, tasks, and small calendars which let you click on a date to view the appointments for the day. You can set the calendar to display weekly or monthly view of your appointments, also. An icon on the toolbar jumps you back to the current day from wherever you may be adding appointments.
You can schedule meetings with the calendar and have it invite, online, other attendees who are listed in your contact list. Calendar lets you schedule recurring appointments, meetings, and events; where an appointment involves only you, a meeting involves you and others and a meeting location, and an event is a full-day or longer activity like a birthday or anniversary. Events are shown as banners across the calendar. The calendar provides sonic alarms to alert you to impending appointments, and you can set the warning time to provide you enough time to prepare.
Outlook 97 can also print your appointment lists in various formats, including some that fit in your planner notebook. That's great when you travel and don't take your laptop computer along. Outlook's printed calendars may not be as attractive as some dedicated calendar programs, but they look good and are easy to read. They don't wrap text within a cell on the monthly view, however.
The Tasks list is a computerized "to-do" list. You can check off a task once it is done. If you don't accomplish a task, Outlook will remind you at intervals until you tell it to stop. Past tasks are kept in an archive for review at a later time. Having used several other PIM's versions of task lists, I would rate Outlook 97's as one of the best.
One of the new features in Outlook 97 is a Journal. Unique in my experience, the Journal lets you keep track of information that flows through your computer. That means incoming and outgoing e-mail, documents sent or received, and phone calls made through Outlook. A Journal tab appears on the Contact list, so you can immediately see all communications you have had with a contact. That feature could be very useful when you are on the phone with a client. And once an item is listed in the journal, double-clicking on it will display that item.
Any good PIM will have a contact list, which is basically an address
book. Outlook 97's is a big improvement from the rudimentary contact list
of Schedule+. The standard fields are very well-chosen, but you can add
other custom fields that suit your business. The Contact list can be used
as a mail-merge source for mailings, and if you do that, the mail will
be recorded in the Journal. And finally, there are e-mail address fields
on the form. You can use a telephone dialer to place calls to a contact,
which records the call in the Journal, but of course doesn't record the
call. That's for Office 99. Outlook 97 provides an electronic analog of
the yellow sticky notes that have become so popular. Called Notes, these
look like little yellow pages with short messages. You can drag a note
from Outlook 97 onto another document, where it will stick. Or you can
even send the note as a message via e-mail. I wasn't sure I would like
Outlook 97, but have become a convert. Just looking at a list of features,
even one as abbreviated as this one has been, doesn't tell the story. You
must use the program and experience how well all its components are integrated
with each other and with the other Office 97 programs to really appreciate
it. The only thing I miss is the ability to customize the Outlook 97 toolbars.
The most annoying aspect of Outlook 97 is the long time it takes to load,
and especially unload. Maybe that's Microsoft's way of telling you to leave
it running at all times, which certainly makes sense for a business environment.
Memory is cheap, anyhow.
The Bottom Line Office 97 is a significant upgrade to Microsoft's Office suite. Most of its changes are improvements, although some seem to be changes to improve the logical location of a feature rather than improving the feature functionally.
The really disturbing discovery about Office 97 is the incompatibility of its files with previous versions of Office. If you need to share files with others who have not upgraded yet, you may be out of luck. That's unacceptable in the business world, and lamentable in any environment. Microsoft writes about a file version converter, and maybe if that materializes, it will fix the problems. Until it does, I would caution you to think carefully about upgrading.
Office 97 was evaluated on a computer with a 133 MHz Pentium processor
and 16 Mb of RAM. This review was prepared in Word 97. Except for Word
97, all programs were beta versions. That means they may not be exactly
like the final versions, especially in the area of speed. Office 97 Professional
requires up to 191 MB of disk space, with 121 MB cited as typical. Of course,
a fast computer with lots of memory makes any Windows program run faster.
A Microsoft IntelliMouse was used in the evaluation.