A little history. I am going to stretch this review of Office 2000 over several articles in upcoming newsletters. To do the suite justice would take an entire newsletter. There is so much you can do with these programs. I know I haven't begun to push them to their limits, and I have been using them for many years. I started with Microsoft Word 2.0, I believe it was, late in 1991, shortly followed by Excel. I didn't add Access until probably a couple of years later, since at the time I didn't see much need for a database, assuming that I could manage any tabular data that might arise in Excel. Boy, have I learned a lot since then. Now I probably spend as much time using Access as Word and Excel combined.

In the beginning these three programs sold separately, and they were quite expensive--probably at least $200 each. I just don't remember the prices. I do recall that my brother-in-law gave Excel to me as a Christmas gift in 1991 and that when I bought Access a couple years later, I used the fact that I owned a copy of the Windows database program, SuperBase, to get a special upgrade price for Access of less than $150. At some point these three programs were combined into the "Office Suite". Later PowerPoint was added to the suite, and now the suite has expanded to include the additional programs in the table above.

Also, when I got started with Word and Excel, they did not dominate the market as they do now. Back then WordPerfect and Lotus 123 were still kings of the word processing and spreadsheet worlds, respectively. Now, of course, both Lotus 123 and WordPerfect are only shadows of their former selves. Additionally, PowerPoint has done in Harvard Graphics and the other presentation software programs. And certainly Access dominates the desktop database market. Thus, Microsoft, in the past nine years since I started using their "office" software, has gone from a small part of this market to dominate it. Why did I purchase it originally instead of the then current industry leaders? Basically I did it because I wanted products made by the same company that worked well together and worked well in Windows. I believe WordPerfect still did not have a Windows version of its program in 1991. I recall, too, that Microsoft also offered some pretty nice pricing to gain market share then.

Now, of course, as mentioned, Microsoft dominates the "office" market. Unfortunately their pricing is not all that aggressive anymore. A quick price check shows Office Standard is $395; Office Professional is $427 (this is a good price); Office Premium is $628. The upgrade versions would be cheaper, of course. You do get a lot for your money, but, for those who are cost conscious, the approximately 50% cheaper price of the competing Corel WordPerfect product vs. Office Standard or Professional may be a draw. In fact, when Corel first took over the WordPerfect suite, they were essentially giving it away to try and gain market share, as I recall.

But they will not get my business at any price—not because I have a dislike for WordPerfect, but simply because I know the Microsoft Office products like the back of my hand and because they blend so well with the other Microsoft programs I use daily like Publisher and FrontPage (which, of course, are now included in the ever expanding Office Suite) and Visual Basic. And almost anything I can think of doing, I can do in these programs.

Two places where Microsoft has not beaten the competition is in high-end desktop publishing and computer graphics. Although I use Publisher and find it quite adequate for our newsletter, I don’t think it has made any inroads in the high-end desktop publishing market. Additionally, I have no plans for replacing Corel Draw and Corel Photo-Paint on my computers with PhotoDraw from Microsoft.

The Suite Office 2000 comes in four flavors as indicated in the table above. I have the Professional version. This difference in the versions is simply what programs are included.

I currently use all these programs except Outlook and PhotoDraw, and I have used Outlook in the past. Now that I have Office 2000, I will begin migrating to the newer versions which are installed on our newest Gateway computer. However, I will still be keeping Office 97 along with Publisher 98 and FrontPage 98 on our older Gateway. (Our ancient Gateway has Office 95 on it.)

Office 2000 Professional comes on two CDs, with the second CD containing Publisher. The one thing I noted about the installation was that there was no indication which component of Office was being installed at any given time. In previous versions, it would say something like "Installing Microsoft Word...", then "Installing Microsoft Excel...", etc. Now it is something like "Completing Office 2000 Installation." Additionally, I was given no opportunity to register online at the end of the installation. That seemed odd.

An additional new feature of the installation is that, if you do a custom installation, for many of the features of the different Office programs you may choose to install that feature on your computer, to install it the first time it is called for, to run it from the CD, or simply not to install it. Another new feature is that the Microsoft Windows installer can detect and repair problems associated with installed Microsoft Office 2000 programs, such as missing files and registry settings. On the Help menu, simply click Detect and Repair.

New File Formats While I am writing this I am using Word 2000 as a text editor for Publisher 2000 (there is no real need for this, since Publisher functions quite well as a text editor; however, Word does give you a bit more control over certain formatting features—at least from my point of view). The two programs work together seamlessly. Word 2000 has the same file format as Word 97, but Publisher 2000’s file format is different from Publisher 98. However, something new in Publisher is the ability to save a Publisher 2000 document in Publisher 98 format with the possible loss of some of the new features. In the past, when you converted a Publisher document to the newer version, there was no going back.

Access 2000 also has a different file format from Access 97, and, as with Publisher, you can also save an Access 2000 database in an Access 97 format. This latter fact is important for people like myself who have written Visual Basic programs that use Access databases. These programs (until they are modified) will not work with the newer Access file format.

Word Now to the best known program in the Office Suite, Microsoft Word. The look and feel of Word 2000 is the same to me as Word 97. What can I say, it is a word processor—probably the best in the world. You can do all the usual things you would expect from such a modern program. But there are some additions, changes, and improvements. The first thing I noticed was the HTML type of help. Once you have learned how to use this type of on-screen help, you really have no desire to go back to the days of the paper help manuals.

The next thing I noticed was that opening new documents produced an additional entry on the Windows Task bar, just like for a separate program. I like the feature. Now, instead of having to click on the Windows menu item to be able to move between the several documents you may be using, you can click on the Task bar to select, or do the usual Alt-Tab routine to select. Surprisingly, many people apparently don’t like this feature.

The second new item I found was the Clipboard feature. It maintains the last 12 items saved to the Windows clipboard from any Windows program. Now that is a real convenience. The next thing I noted is how much better this version of Word handles inserted graphics than previous versions. Now you can easily place a picture anywhere on the page you want and have the text flow around, in front of or behind it. This, with the ability to have text flow from one inserted text box to another (not a new feature), makes Word a candidate for simple desktop publishing, something that I couldn’t recommend for earlier versions.

Then, of course, there is the Internet. As with Word 97, you can save your document as a web document in HTML format. You can also import HTML documents into Word and any unknown tags in the document will be preserved, even though Word won’t be able to display them. You can now also preview the document as a web document in your browser. But the big addition is web collaboration.

With web collaboration, you can place your documents on a web server for others to review and edit. For this process to work you need the use of a web server running Microsoft Office Server Extensions. Since I don’t have access to such a server at the moment, I can not test this feature. But it should work similarly to the more easily attainable form of collaboration through routed email—a feature which existed in Word 97. Here you select the individuals you want to send the document to and the order in which they will receive it. Then when an individual receives the document attached to an email message, the individual may make changes or additions and these alterations will be highlighted in color and the author of the changes identified. The individual then sends the document on to the next individual on the list.

Collaboration seems to be the main thrust ofn changes in Office, and I hear the next version of Office (yes, there is new version that will soon go into Beta testing) will tilt even more in this direction. This is something of interest to large corporate workgroups as opposed to the individual. You might say that Office is moving away from individual use towards group use.

I still think the suite of programs is of use for individuals and advise people I deal with to purchase the Professional version so as to have Access in the package. There are certainly much cheaper alternatives available—but nothing better. I have lived with these programs for the past nine years, learning more as I used them. At present I am discussing their common programming language, Visual Basic for Applications, in our Visual Basic SIG. Come join us if you have an interest.

In the next newsletter I plan on discussing Excel and Access. u