ny times evaluation of office 2000
regards
June 10, 1999
Office 2000 Is Well Connected
By ROB FIXMER
ffice 2000, which hit the shelves this week, is a complete overhaul of Microsoft's suite of so-called productivity applications and offers many new features -- and, predictably, a few new irritations. But its most remarkable innovation is the way the entire family of applications seamlessly interacts with the Internet, in essence recasting cyberspace as the World Wide Hard Drive.
Looking at the software strictly from a user's standpoint, the change is definitely for the better. After four months of playing with Office 2000, it's clear that not only is it an improvement, but it makes excellent use of Microsoft's integration of its Web browser into the Windows 98 operating system.
That integration, which is an issue in the long-running antitrust suit against Microsoft, turns out to be a powerful and very desirable asset for Office 2000 because it enables programs running on Windows to interact effortlessly with the Internet.
Say you receive an e-mail message with a Web link in it. While most e-mail programs will allow you to click on that link and fire up your default browser, Office 2000's Outlook immediately displays the Web page within the e-mail window and adds a Web navigation bar. You can remain in the Web environment as long as you like, then immediately return to reading mail in your In box without ever switching programs.
More important, all Office 2000 applications -- and that includes Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook, and in some versions other programs as well -- now read and write documents in HTML format, the lingua franca of the Web. Say you want to save a document you just wrote in Word as a Web page. Just click on File/Save As and choose HTML as your file format. The operating system saves your work as a Web document, and if you have set up a Web site, it publishes the page on that site as easily and quickly as it would save a traditional document to a disk or send it to a printer.
So whether the task at hand is publishing a corporation's annual report or posting pictures of the kids for grandma, you can create instant Web pages.
In addition, the Web pages created by Office 2000 can be interactive -- but only if the host of your Web page installs special "Office extensions," add-ons to the software on its server. To take advantage of a few of the most advanced interactive features, the visitor to your Web page must be running Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5.0 or Office 2000 applications. Though most of Office's Web pages will work just fine with Netscape Navigator, any Web documents that must be shared widely with users of other browsers should be created with an HTML editor.
The combination of Office 2000, Explorer 5.0 and the Office extensions enables groups of workers to collaborate on Office documents saved as Web pages. And you can enable outside visitors to query an Access or Microsoft SQL database that has been linked to a Web page.
These features are not for typical individual or small-business users. Though they work fine over the Internet, they will be of most use on company intranets, where the computer systems managers will install the Office 2000 extensions to enable easy collaboration by many employees on a variety of documents. Clearly, Microsoft is betting that the Web will become a ubiquitous reality in both the office and the home.
And if you don't need to create or maintain Web pages? That's a tougher call, but it certainly makes upgrading to Office 2000 less attractive.
Some parts of Office that needed improvement don't seem to have been touched.
That's especially true given suggested retail prices that range from $209 (after a rebate) for upgrading to the standard edition -- Word, Excel, Powerpoint and the Outlook e-mail and personal assistant program -- to a wallet-draining $800 for a from-scratch installation of the deluxe edition, which adds Microsoft Publisher, Small Biz Tools, the Access database manager, the Frontpage Web page editor and the Photodraw graphics program to the standard applications.
In between are the small-business version ($209 upgrade, $409 full), which adds Publisher and Small Biz Tools to the basic four applications, and the professional edition ($309 upgrade, $599 full), which adds those two applications plus Access.
Still, even without the Web features, Office 2000 offers sundry new refinements that make life a little easier. For example, the spell checker now automatically corrects common errors as you type. That affects only typing for which there is a single possible alternative in the spelling dictionary, and it ignores proper names. The upshot is that this feature has evolved into a very useful tool.
On the other hand, some parts of Office that needed improvement don't seem to have been touched.
For instance, the grammar check that is found in Word still typically introduces more errors in its recommendations than it finds in the document.
And in a few cases, I could do without an "improvement" altogether. Among these are menus and toolbars that adjust to include only features you actually use. That can be annoying because it makes it much harder to find some feature that you use twice a year but just now happen to need urgently.
On the other hand, the annoyance is minor because if you hesitate with the mouse pointer over any menu for more than a second, it automatically expands to offer all the features.
But of all the genuine improvements in Office 2000, nothing compares with the applications' ability to repair themselves.
If Excel, for example, starts acting flaky or spitting out error messages, you can ask it to diagnose its problem and fix itself. Almost unbelievably, it works.
That turns out to be a godsend for Outlook, which still seems shakier than the rest of the suite. In fact, this combination of e-mail software with a contact manager, scheduler, electronic stick-'em notes and to-do list remains Office's weak link; it's confusing and very nonintuitive. Though all its elements work together, they often do so in a clunky, inelegant way.
For example, the contact manager is also the e-mail address book, but adding an address from within the e-mail program is so nonintuitive that I often end up opening the contact manager to add an address that is sitting in an open piece of e-mail right in front of me.
Still, the bottom line is that Office 2000 sets a standard for productivity software that will be hard for competitors to match.
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company |
