Product Reviews

It's hard to buy a new PC these days without receiving a set of bread-and-butter business applications bundled: a word processor, spreadsheet, database, and so on. They are, after all, the programs we use the most. So the fact that Microsoft has launched a completely revamped version of its market-leading suite is big news - whether you want to upgrade your existing office software or you're in the market for a new PC. By the end of the summer, Office 2000 will be bundled with PCs from big names like Dell, Gateway and Compaq. Read on, and see if Office is a more welcome bonus on a new PC than Lotus' SmartSuite Millennium or Corel's WordPerfect Suite 8.

Different combinations of the core programs are bundled together in five flavours of Office 2000: Standard, Small Business, Professional, Premium and Developer. Word, Excel and Outlook can be found in all the versions, others also include the desktop publishing tool Publisher and/or graphics packages PowerPoint and PhotoDraw, both of which are aimed at the non-professional.

Compared to its popular predecessor, Office 97, there are obvious general improvements. Some make the suite easier to install and run. More impressive is the fact that Office 2000 can detect and fix any errors within its own applications. If Office notices something is wrong, it'll ask you to insert the original CD and re-install any files that may have become corrupted.

The new Microsoft Office clipboard that's shared between all core Office applications sports some new features too. You can copy up to 12 chunks of text, tables or pictures from Office documents, e-mail messages or Web pages and paste them, either individually or en masse, into any Office file.

More controversial, though, are menus that adjust automatically to display the items the user employs most often. They start out with what Microsoft believes are the commands used 95% of the time. An arrow button at the bottom of a menu expands to reveal all available commands. Once a hidden command is used, it moves higher up the menu, while unused ones are relegated.

Of course, Microsoft Office is not alone. Lotus SmartSuite Millennium Edition and Corel's WordPerfect Suite 8 are both highly respectable competitors, some of whose component applications give Microsoft a real run for its money. Updated versions of these, SmartSuite Millennium Edition 9.5 and Word Perfect Office 2000, are due this summer. It'll be interesting to see whether either poses a real threat to Microsoft's overwhelming dominance of the market.

Word 2000

Word is one of the classic Windows applications. Originally designed to produce richly-formatted printed documents, it can easily turn its hand to e-mail and web page creation too. It's bursting at the seams with functions that cater for every need. Yet it's easy to master, due to first-rate design that has improved from one version to the next.

Thanks must go to updated animated Office Assistants, onscreen cartoon characters that can answer vexing questions posed in plain English. As you work, their animated eyes follow your cursor, amusing themselves until you ask them a question. Updated for Word 2000, their advice is practical, informative and easy to follow; and, depending upon which character you pick, the content and style will change too. Whatever sort of user you are, there's an Office Assistant for you.

Our favourite new feature is 'Click-n-type', which allows you to insert text in a document simply by double-clicking where you want to type. Click in the middle of a line, and the text you enter will be centred. Click on the right and it will be right-aligned. You can also use this feature to create indented paragraphs. Another big plus is that you can now position tables side-by-side with text and create tables within tables, which should be useful when creating newsletters.

As you type, Word underlines any spelling mistakes in red. Right-clicking on such a word produces a list of suggested corrections, which can be inserted in place of the error. In Word 2000, right-clicking on correct words produces a list of synonyms. You can even work with multiple languages within a single document, provided the dictionaries and thesauri have been installed.

For webheads out there, there's also the new 'Save as Web Page' feature that produces HTML from a Word document, no matter how flash and complex it may be. When saving to the web an HTML file is produced, together with a folder containing any pictures and other ancillary material. Beware that these files are often far larger than the size of the corresponding .Doc file.

Although Word 2000 may lag slightly behind Lotus' Word Pro and Corel's WordPerfect when it comes to producing collaborative book-length documents, the Microsoft product still has the edge in terms of overall design and flexibility.

Excel 2000

Excel is the PC's Swiss Army knife. There's very little of an analytical nature that you can't accomplish with it. As well as being adept at producing tables of calculations, using its many built-in functions, Excel has a wide range of graphing tools too. It can also build databases, and search or query them, too. Indeed, those who used Excel 97's database features will be glad to know that Excel 2000 has been bolstered in this department.

If you're paranoid that the Millennium Bug may affect your precious data, the new version of Excel has a wealth of features that should help you survive. These include tools to configure exactly how the spreadsheet will work with dates.

Another noteworthy feature is the PivotTable, an extremely powerful tool that can be used to summarise complex statistics. You can rotate rows and columns to see different summaries of the source data, display summaries of subsets of the data, or zoom in on areas of interest to display the individual details. Impressively, the tool is also intuitive to use.

Tools for importing data from the web have been improved and simplified, and you can even drag and drop tables directly from Internet Explorer into Excel. If you frequently bring text data into Excel, format it, add formulas for analysis and then present the information, there's a big boon for you. Excel now includes a text query feature, that lets you refresh the data from the original text source without having to redo formatting or formulas.

You can use the new office multiple clipboard within Excel, just as in the other core components of the suite. But take care! If you copy a range of cells, the first time you paste to another position within Excel all the underlying formulas are preserved, as you'd expect. However, subsequent pasting from the multiple clipboard simply inserts the values. Very confusing!

There are other minor gripes. For instance, if you need more than the 65,000 rows and 256 columns of Excel, you might prefer the version of Quattro Pro that's part of the forthcoming WordPerfect Office 2000 suite. Overall, though, Excel keeps its top spot - especially since it has become the standard spreadsheet. Virtually every serious commercial, statistical or engineering program will be able to export its results in Excel format.

Outlook 2000

Outlook is an ambitious program. It combines the twin roles of e-mail client - being able to send, receive and manage your e-mail messages - with that of personal information manager.

If you're busy but disorganised, Outlook can manage your appointments, tasks and contacts too.

You can send plain text e-mails from within Outlook thanks to some pretty comprehensive word processing tools and menus. If you're more ambitious, you can hook up to Word and produce messages in highly formatted text or even as HTML pages. If this isn't enough, you can include nearly any type of file attachment with your message as well as a virtual business card.

There are powerful tools for searching through received e-mails, and a rule wizard that automates the handling of incoming messages. For example, you can divert junk mail directly to the 'Deleted' folder. However, Outlook doesn't include an integrated newsgroup facility. Perhaps Microsoft believes that its more important customers consider newsgroups an irrelevance.

You can build up a list of business and personal contacts and set up e-mail distribution lists from them. Outlook now lets you keep track of e-mails, tasks, appointments and documents related to an individual contact. It also provides an appointments diary,

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which can be displayed in a variety of different formats (day-at-a-time, week-at-a-time, and so on).

Rather than burying you in an avalanche of information, this version now includes the simple 'Outlook Today' screen, which shows commitments at a glance, including to-do lists and new messages in your e-mail Inbox.

Despite considerable improvements to the interface, though, Outlook can still be a daunting program to use. There are so many preferences and options that have to be set, most hidden beneath layers of menu commands and dialog boxes. But persevere with it, and you'll begin to appreciate the breadth of functionality that puts it ahead of both Lotus Organizer and CorelCentral.

FrontPage 2000

FrontPage is a program for creating and managing web sites. This is the first time it has been a full member of the Office suite, complete with the programming language Visual Basic for Applications. You'd think that with the rest of Office 2000 becoming so web-savvy, FrontPage would be redundant, but this isn't the case. Firstly, to produce a coherent site, you need to tie together the pages produced in other Office applications. And secondly, you may want your pages to include zingy special effects, animations and so on, none of which can be created directly in Word or Excel.

FrontPage's revamped interface combines a page Editor and site Explorer (with a hierarchical tree of the links between your pages), so you can create and then manage a site without having to jump back and forth between views.

The page editor lets you lay out HTML pages using graphical tools, and you get an active preview for accurate formatting, insertion of tables and placement of graphics. You can opt to display HTML tags in this view, as well as tools for fine-tuning results, with a good colour-coded HTML editor. There's also a preview mode, and you can use a variety of browsers to view your efforts.

FrontPage produces genuinely creative web sites. FastSite, which comes with Lotus SmartSuite, and Trellix, that'll be bundled with WordPerfect Office 2000, are also excellent tools, but narrowly focused on creating sites out of the web pages saved from apps in their respective suites.

Access 2000

Compared to Word, Excel and PowerPoint, Access is a relative newcomer to the Office suite, but has established itself as the leading Windows database system. Access is powerful and flexible, providing comprehensive facilities for demanding users, but also catering for individual home or small business users. Indeed, it can build all kinds of databases, from pretty forms that let you search your record collection, to massively complex networked systems. It's even possible to create databases that can be accessed via the Net. No matter how grand your plans, Access should cope.

To build a new database, you can start from scratch, defining the fields of the tables you need, and queries that refer to one or more of them. However, most database novices would be daunted by all this, so they can use a Wizard to create a database from one of the many templates included on the CD-ROM. When you're building your database, Access has some excellently intuitive graphical tools for constructing links between data tables, and for viewing their contents.

Access has far broader scope that Lotus Approach or Corel's Paradox. Some people find Approach simpler to use than Access, but you may find that your demands soon outgrow its capabilities. On the other hand, Paradox is a moderately powerful system, but really aimed at experts.

PowerPoint 2000

PowerPoint is Microsoft's tool for creating presentations. When you're done, they can be printed out on overhead projecter transparencies, if your printer's up to the job. More impressive (and in keeping with our technological age) presentations can be delivered direct from the PC - complete with fancy animations. Another option to help spread your message with PowerPoint 2000 is the facility to publish your presentation on the web.

You can create a new presentation from scratch, entering text, tables and graphical content on each slide, as required. Then you can apply a common look to the slides. However, the easiest way of getting started is adapting one of the collection of ready-made styles. Themes include 'Communicating bad news' and 'Introducing and thanking a speaker'.

PowerPoint has a fantastic range of tools for producing diagrams, charts and tables. It also offers classy visual and audio special effects, along with pre-recorded narration. You can now use animated GIFs to jazz up your presentation. With patience, imagination and persistence, your message can look wonderful - even if it's bad news!

Although it isn't as sophisticated as PowerPoint, Lotus Freelance Graphics makes putting together presentations quicker and simper. Corel Presentations is also a very strong contender, with excellent visual tools and effects. But it's a little harder to use than either PowerPoint or Freelance, and in its current release, web-based presentations aren't totally foolproof.

Other bits

Office 2000 comes with a collection of highly sophisticated Small Business Tools, designed in the UK for local users. Used well, they could save time and expense. Highlights include Small Business Financial Manager which runs within Excel. This takes data from a firm's accounts package and creates projections and what-if analyses, together with a variety of standard reports: balance sheet, profit and loss, sales analysis and so on.

There's also the Business Planner for UK and Australia, which is a library of small business text-books on disc, covering planning, finance, marketing and analysis, as well as a tool for creating your own business plan in Word.

All but the Standard version of Office 2000 include Publisher, a splendid DTP program aimed at the home user who wants to design great-looking catalogues, brochures, cards, posters. It's very easy to use, being Wizard-driven, with a vast number of templates for every type of short publication. It has a generous library of clip art, too.

The Premium version includes PhotoDraw. This new and very ambitious program combines drawing and painting tools - Illustrator and PhotoShop for the rest of us. Paradoxically, its amazing 2D and 3D special effects - including turning photographs into oil paintings, water colours, or stained glass - are blazingly fast, while simple sketching with the paint tool is so slow that PhotoDraw for jazzing up pre-created pictures.

Conclusions

Though the most dramatic enhancements to Microsoft Office relate to the web, home users will appreciate the many other small improvements to individual Office applications. Few of these offer a compelling reason to upgrade from Office 97, though, and since (with the exception of Access) all Office 2000 file formats are identical to those of Office 97, you won't be forced to either. However, if you're in the market for a new PC or your first office suite, Office 2000 has a lot to offer. It's just a question of which version's best for you.

Office 2000 comes in several different flavours, with prices rising as the versions include more of the applications looked at above. With the fully-loaded Premium edition we tested, you get the lot: Word 2000, Excel 2000, Outlook 2000, PowerPoint 2000, Access 2000, Publisher 2000, Small Business Tools, PhotoDraw and IE 5.0. Then again, at £594 it's the most expensive version, and is really meant for heavy business users. It's probably overkill for the small business or home. Next in the pecking order is Office 2000 Professional, packing everything except PhotoDraw, which knocks the price down to £484. This is certainly a better buy if you never intend venturing into the world of computerised art, but do want all the key apps of the business professional.

Small Business edition omits Access too, but when you consider that Excel 2000 offers many excellent database features, this will be no loss to the average home user. It does include Word, Excel, Outlook, Publisher, Small Business Tools and IE5, though, and costs £373 - over £200 less than the Premium version. If you prefer PowerPoint to Publisher, there's the Standard Version which packs Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and IE 5, and costs £373.

Whatever version of Office you plump for, you'll be assured of the highest quality business software available - which, for many, is reason enough to go with Microsoft. However, if you're strapped for cash, you may be forced to choose between the cut-down versions (Small Business or Standard Edition) or a cheaper full-width suite such as Lotus SmartSuite Millennium or WordPerfect Suite 8. If the Small Business or Standard Edition collections cover all your needs they're the obvious choice, but if you need a proper database, the Lotus and Corel products are both decent alternatives, have few noteworthy defects and make up for their slight shortfall in quality with the sheer quantity of tools on offer (including voice recognition).