Review Last month I looked at Microsoft’s Office Suite in general and how it has evolved over the many years I have used it into the number one such product. I then concentrated on Word, its word processor. As noted then, the product seems to be evolving toward the corporate user and the web. There is not really much new in the suite for the casual, individual user in a home or small office environment. How many people do you know involved in web coloration of Office documents?

Of course, there have been refinements and minor additions (like the ability to have tables inside of tables in Word, which I have already discovered can be a useful item). But, for the casual user, I don’t think these additions will be noticed or prompt one to upgrade from an older version.

However, I can think of one reason to move up, and that is to get away from having to deal with the less than perfect service packs for Office 97. People fault Microsoft regarding service packs, but as a small-time software developer, I can assure you it is impossible to produce a program that is bug free. And at least Microsoft does produce corrections for their mistakes. Some vendors seem to never get around to doing this. The Office 97 service packs, SR1 and SR2, however, were not always that easy to install, and seemed to keep changing, at least in the case of SR1. An upgrade to 2000 should do away with all of that. Not quite, SR1 is now out for Office 2000. But, as best I can tell, the things corrected by it are far less extensive than those for SR1 for Office 97, and I have no plans to download and install it at this time.

Excel and Access Like Word, Excel doesn’t seem to have changed much. Excel looks almost exactly the same when you open up a workbook. Access does have a different look as regards displaying the window with your list of tables, queries, forms, etc. It is more like a two pane Windows Explorer view. And there is a new object in the Access window’s left pane, the data access page, which is a form-like object to be published to a web site along with its supporting files for viewing by—and interacting with—other Office 2000 users. More on this later.

Another addition to Access is the Visual Basic Editor for any Visual Basic for Applications code you may wish to use. In Access 97, you could use such code, but the method for editing it was less robust than that provided by the VB Editor which Word and Excel already had in Office 97.

However, again, the VB Editor is a feature, like the data access pages, that, I suppose, at least 90% of Access users will never use. Of course, it could be argued that Access is not meant for the casual user anyway. In fact, it is not part of the standard version of Office, and, indeed, most people can get along fine using Excel to keep their "data." But for more demanding uses of data, a database is indispensable.

Much of my work now with Visual Basic involves interacting with Access databases. When Office 2000 first hit the shelves, it caused me to worry a bit about my VB programming. VB 6 was written to work with Microsoft Access 97 databases, and I worried about what would happen if someone were to update an Access 97 database that provided data to one of my VB applications to Access 2000 format—they are different.

I follow several VB Usenet newsgroups, and I had read about the problem. I had also read that to get a VB 6 application to work with a Microsoft Access 2000 database, you needed to set up your program to use Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0 as your data connection provider and have a reference to the Microsoft DAO 3.6 object library in the project. So I started using that setup in my programs even though I was still working with Access 97 databases. And it appears to have worked. If I now take an Access 97 database that is used in one of these VB applications and update it to Access 2000 format, all the database components in the VB program still seem to work properly.

But I have drifted away from the average user who will never use VB with a database. As to this person, I think you are getting the drift that there is not really much in Office 2000 that should make him or her want to move up from Office 97. In fact, Office 97 is overkill for most people, and the Microsoft Works Suite (not just Works but the Suite), consisting of Microsoft Word, the Works spreadsheet and the Works database (really just using one table at a time), is sufficient. To me, it seems Office 2000 is aimed at the corporate computing environment where people will collaborate on documents placed on a company intranet or on the web—and to individuals like me who want to work with the latest software technology.

The Latest Software Technology With Office 2000, there are three ways of putting your documents on the Web: As static pages, as pages with limited interactivity, and as documents with an interactivity just like you would have if the document were on your own computer. Office 97 provided for the creation of static web pages from Word documents, Excel worksheets and Access tables or queries. With Office 2000, we get a good bit more.

To publish documents to the web for collaboration by different individuals, everyone using it needs to be running Office 2000 and the server where the document is installed needs to be running Microsoft Office Extensions. I haven’t been able to test this out, since I don’t have access to a server with Office Extensions. However, I have tested publishing both Excel worksheets and Access tables where anyone using Office 2000 can interact with them and make certain changes. To see the results of this, go to http://tpcug.org/office_2000. Of course, nothing will display properly or work if you don’t have Office 2000 on your computer with the Web Component option installed.

There are four examples at present. The Excel example is an interactive work sheet that does a loan calculation and displays the first two years of payments. There are two Access examples, which are essentially the same. One is an interactive display of a database of around 2,500 auto body shops in Florida, the name, address, phone number, etc. for each body shop being displayed one at a time on a form that you can scroll through and either filter or order on any of the display fields. The second example is the same, but consists of only Tampa auto body shops. The final example is a chart from Access that graphs the number of body shops in each zip code in Tampa.

For the above to work, nothing special seems to be required of the web site, but, as stated before, the viewer must have the Office 2000 Web Components on his or her computer.

It is all interesting—at least to me—and I can see the use for organizations. And I look forward to being able to place my documents on a Microsoft Office Extensions enabled server. But for most individuals this is not a must-have upgrade. u