 This
is not a review of Office 2000. A full review would take forever
to write. Instead, this article is an impression of the new features of
Office 2000, specifically the Professional version.
Microsoft updated
its Office 97 suite in June. Is it worth the expense and effort to upgrade?
The answer is a resounding maybe.
Here’s the bottom line: the big gain in Office 2000 is its ability to
publish documents on the Web. It does that extremely well; otherwise, improvements
are small. Unless they tickle your fancy, you may want to stick with Office
97. However, some of the new features are pretty nifty.
Versions
There are actually five versions of Office 2000, with the contents
of the most popular four shown in the table below. A fifth Developer Version
adds programming tools to create applications to run within Office. Costs
for the various versions vary with the seller. Theoretically the multiple
versions let you pick one with the programs you want. Many computers come
bundled with the Small Business Edition. Word, Excel, and Outlook (in all
2000 versions) are common to all versions. The programs require a lot of
hard drive space. The Standard Edition takes about 357 MB; the Professional,
566 MB. And Office 2000 places about 132 MB of files in the Windows folder.
On a whim, I installed the entire Office 2000 Professional version on my
hard drive, including the clip art (normally left on the CD; it took an
entire gigabyte of space. Good thing big drives are so cheap!
| MS Office 2000 versions |
-
Standard
-
Sm Business
-
Professional
-
Premium
|
| Version |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
| Word |
X |
X |
X |
X |
| Access |
|
|
X |
X |
| Excel |
X |
X |
X |
X |
| Outlook |
X |
X |
X |
X |
| PowerPoint |
X |
|
X |
X |
| Publisher |
|
|
X |
X |
| FrontPage |
|
|
|
X |
| Small Business Tools |
|
X |
X |
X |
| PhotoDraw |
|
|
|
X |
As usual, there are two types of packages: upgrade and full. Upgrade
packages are for those who are using a previous version of Office and cost
less. The Upgrade Office 2000 installation program searches for a previous
version, or asks you to insert a CD for a previous version. A Full version
is for those who do not have a previous version of Office, and costs more.
Common to all programs
The Office 2000 programs are very similar in appearance and share files
like dictionaries, clip art, and thesauruses. Menu structures are similar,
as are icons.
Personalized menus
A complaint about previous versions of Office was the complexity of
the programs, with commensurately long menus. Office 2000 tries to fix
that by showing you abbreviated menus with only a few commands available.
You can click on a double arrow at the bottom of each menu to see the complete
menu. Also, Office 2000 has an algorithm watching how you use the menus
and changing them to place the commands you use most at the top of the
menus. That means that you will eventually have personalized versions of
each Office 2000 program. Fortunately, for those who can handle the long
menus, both of these features can be turned off. Even better, create toolbar
icons for the operations you perform most and skip the menus altogether.
Multi-item clipboard
Windows only lets you place one item at a time on the Clipboard. Office
2000 offers a replacement Clipboard that holds up to twelve items so you
can select from several choices to place an item into your document. A
Clipboard Toolbar shows how many items are available, and shows you the
first line of text of an item on the Clipboard. Unfortunately, the multiple
Clipboard feature is only available for Office 2000 programs.
Partial installation
In an effort to save disk space, you can tell the Office 2000 installation
program to only partially install less-used features of Office 2000 programs.
If you click on an uninstalled feature to try to use it, Office 2000 asks
you to insert the Office 2000 CD and installs that feature for you. For
those who, like me, find this feature maddening, you can also install all
features from the start.
Detect and repair
A truly valuable feature of Windows 98 is its ability to detect corrupted
files and reinstall them from the Windows 98 CD. Now Office 2000 adds this
feature, appropriately placing it on the Help menu.
Help/Goodbye to Office Assistant
Although Microsoft felt proud of its help system, including the Office
Assistant, many users found it hard to use, and the Assistant downright
annoying. Office 2000 makes some big improvement in the help menus, including
tiling the Help screen to let you see the help text while trying out the
suggestions on your document. And if the Office Assistant drives you nuts,
you can turn it off entirely, or modify its operation to delete things
like making sounds, my pet peeve. You can also make the Assistant automatically
move out of the way of the area you are working on.
New icons
The least significant change in Office 2000 is the new icons it provides
for each program. They are easier to read on a small toolbar.
Thesaurus
Although Office 97 had a fine thesaurus, Microsoft seemed determined
to hide it. Now you can use this valuable author’s assistant by simply
clicking on a word and then selecting Synonyms on the pop-up context sensitive
menu.
Taskbar button for each document
Although previous versions of Office let you load several documents
and switch between them, lots of folks never figured out how. Office 2000
makes that easier by placing a button for each open document on the taskbar,
as though each were a separate program. This approach works, but fills
up the taskbar rapidly.
Clip Gallery
Office 2000 includes a lot of clip art, and makes it easier to use
by managing the clip art better, and giving you direct access to a Clip
Art Gallery on Microsoft’s Web site where you can find zillions of additional
clips if you need more. There are also links to other sites with gigantic
collection of art and fonts, Like Art Today’s collection of 750,000 items
and 4,400 fonts (a 30-day free trial).
Word 2000
Type anywhere on the page
Previously, Word forced you to type only at the fixed text insertion
point, which was limited to a point within a line of text, or at the left
margin of a blank space. Now you can double-click anywhere on a page and
start typing there. A small icon attached to the I-beam shows you how the
text alignment is set.
Multi-language support
Word 2000 automatically supports 35 languages. If you type a French
word, for example, Word 2000 will use a French dictionary to check its
spelling. When I first installed Office 2000, it decided that I wanted
to use the French dictionary as my primary spell-checker, which was fortunately
easily changed.
Improvements in tables
Word 97 wouldn’t let you place graphics in tables. Word 2000 will.
It also lets you place tables within tables, allowing you to create some
pretty complex tables.
E-mail integration
Word 2000 offers an e-mail button on the Standard Toolbar, which lets
you send a document as e-mail. This basically duplicates the File/Send
To… menu, but anything you can do to avoid using menus speeds up your work.
Web Layout View
Replacing Word 97’s HTML Layout View, this view is much better suited
for creating Web pages. It even includes a Web Wizard that works.
WYSIWYG fonts
If Microsoft Works could show you a preview of actual fonts when you
clicked on its Font window on the Formatting Toolbar, why couldn’t Word?
Now it can, although Works is still much faster.
Excel 2000
PivotCharts accompany the previously available PivotTables, whatever they
are. Microsoft touts these as the main new feature. It’s a pretty advanced
feature.
Outlook 2000
You can keep previous versions of Office installed when you install Office
2000, so if several people are using a computer, User 1 can use Word 97
while User 2 uses Word 2000. The exception is Outlook, Office’s e-mail
and personal information manager. Only one version of Outlook can exist
on a computer. There is very little apparent difference between Outlook
98 and Outlook 2000, and Outlook 97 was horrible, so using Outlook 2000
shouldn’t be an imposition on most people.
PowerPoint 2000
Opening screen
In PowerPoint 97, the opening screen asked if you wanted to open an
existing presentation, or perform other actions. But to access the list
of recently used files, you had to close the opening screen and then click
on the File menu to see the list of recently used files. PowerPoint 2000
places the list of recently used files on the opening screen, a small but
welcome improvement.
Normal View
A new Normal View lets you see a large image of the slide, the outline
view, and a Notes page all at once, making it easy to create a complete
presentation.
Web presentations
PowerPoint now builds much better Web presentations. PowerPoint 97’s
presentations consisted of shrunken slides with a button to move between
them. PowerPoint 2000 builds much nicer presentations, with access to the
outline view to speed up navigation, and a full slide show view on the
Web. The last feature is pretty slow, though.
Access 2000
Unicode/new file format
The only application that changes its file format, Access 2000 now
uses a Unicode format. It also fully supports Visual Basic for Applications
(VBA) and a new Microsoft Data Engine, a client version of SQL.
Publisher 2000
This is the first version of Office that includes Publisher is a part of
the program. Although Publisher is very useful to home and small business
users, it is not as well integrated into Office as are other programs;
Publisher 2000 still behaves like a stand-alone program. There’s no denying
the usefulness of this novice-oriented desktop publisher to a small business
or home user. They can turn out professional documents with very little
work. The 2000 version of Publisher adds a lot of new templates for even
more power.
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