The Best Microsoft Office 97

Review

While Office 2000 initially impressed me greatly when I saw the first beta over a year ago, on closer inspection (and more testing) I’m less enamored of the suite. For example, Web collaboration sounds great – share documents over the Web and view comments from your browser – but to use it you’ll have to use an NT server with Office extensions. As a single user or a worker in a small office, that puts it beyond my reach. That may be just as well. I think other solutions are actually more effective. For example, if you do much collaboration, you should be using SmartSuite. Hands down it’s the collaboration champ, with a user interface that makes it a no-brainer to accept or reject changes and incorporate comments. If you need a Web-based solution, consider storing your files on Punch Networks’ WebGroups which offers check-in/out control and using your existing word processor.

Microsoft also boasts about how HTML is just another file format, and it’s true that Word .DOC files saved as HTML have greater fidelity to the original. However, for the vast majority of us, I doubt you’re going to use Word as your Web-page editor. It’s fine for text-based pages (with a picture or two), but it doesn’t have any of the tools (fly-over mouse-triggered activity, for example) that dedicated tools (such as FrontPage) offer. Worse, while it’s true that you can create HTML documents, it doesn’t offer anything like FastSite (in Lotus SmartSuite) for actually posting the content.

FastSite is one of those SmartSuite jewels that helps novices create intranet sites with an absolute minimum of Webmaster intervention. What does Word offer? Zip. Sure, you can save to a Web site, assuming you know the URL and have permission, but no links are automatically created as they are when you incorporate a document into a FastSite project. Thus, what Microsoft has given us is really half a solution: a tool for creating content but no good way to turn several Word documents into a site. It’s this kind of half-baked approach that ultimately makes Office 2000 a disappointment. It also makes you wonder what Microsoft was thinking about how people work in the real world.

That’s not to say Microsoft hasn’t done some fabulous things with the Web. You can take in an existing Web page, edit it in Word (rather than an unfamiliar Web tool), and save it back out, for quick-and-easy editing. But how many of us do that? Not as many, I suspect, as Microsoft would have us believe. Being able to export a pivot table to a Web site is great – if you can count on the person viewing your spreadsheet using IE. Great for Microsoft-centric installations, not so great for the real world: Web tool developers tell us tales of how many corporations are still stuck on Netscape version 2 or 3. Sure, Microsoft is taking the forward-looking position. It’s just that you’ll have to wait for everyone else to catch up. That could take some time, and by then there may be yet another Office upgrade to consider instead.

Some of the day-to-day productivity enhancements – the ability to save 12 items to an Office clipboard, a History folder (more of your most-recently-used files are listed), easier toolbar customizations everywhere, multilingual AutoCorrect, the three-panel view in PowerPoint, and synonyms finally available in Word by right-clicking on a word – are great. But others, such as integration with Microsoft NetMeeting and a resource-hog called PhotoDraw 2000, just don’t excite me.

Where are the improvements I can use every day? Why do I have to use tables to place left- and right-aligned text on the same line? Microsoft knows this is a problem, and has for some time. They even joke about it in presentations. Yet it remains unfixed. WordPerfect has been able to handle this simple text feature for a long time. Corel, it seems, understands how people work better. — From Winmag&#174