Canon Gives Families 400 New Reasons to Use Microsoft Office; OfficeReady Family Essentials Supplies Hundreds of Useful Templates for Word, Excel

Business Wire, June 12, 2000

Business Editors

COSTA MESA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 12, 2000

Canon Software Publishing (CSP), a division of Canon Computer Systems Inc., Monday announced OfficeReady Family Essentials -- an extension of its popular OfficeReady line of software products.

OfficeReady Family Essentials complements Microsoft Office by providing users with professionally-designed, ready-to-use templates and added functionality for Word and Excel. OfficeReady Family Essentials is compatible with Office 97 and Office 2000 as well as Office 98 Macintosh Edition.

Through April, OfficeReady products achieved an 83% unit market share this year for Microsoft Office add-on products according to PC Data. Expanding the OfficeReady family of software into the home is a natural extension of the product line.

Designed for busy families, students or anyone using their computers for home management tasks, OfficeReady Family Essentials software saves time and produces useful documents. For virtually every need, OfficeReady Family Essentials supplies a ready-to-use template. Categories of templates include education, awards and certificates, job search, personal expenses, correspondence, personal planning and real estate.

"We re giving people the opportunity to use Office, a familiar program, to do activities previously reserved for other software applications," said Kevin Reilly, senior manager of product marketing at CSP. "Instead of purchasing and learning several programs to perform basic financial calculations and desktop publishing projects, OfficeReady Family Essentials provides all the basics at an affordable price with almost no learning curve."

OfficeReady Family Essentials boasts more than 400 templates for Word and Excel allowing families to create helpful and fun projects in a program they already use regularly. OfficeReady Family Essentials automatically loads with the selected Office application (Word or Excel) and is accessible through an easy-to-use on-screen toolbar which makes many complex functions in Word and Excel, such as page borders, watermarks and Word Art, easier to access and use. In Excel, formulas are already in place -- eliminating the chore of complex calculations in spreadsheets for planning 401K contributions, vacation planning, college budgets or mortgage amortization.

Finding the appropriate template is fast with OfficeReady's Template Browser(a). A user looking for a book report template, for example, can perform a keyword search in the browser and be immediately presented with the appropriate template options.

Using Digital Images in Word

OfficeReady Family Essentials specifically attacks the roadblocks to using digital photos in Word documents. OfficeReady Family Essentials includes 86 special Word templates containing Photo Sockets, placeholders for digital images, to make artwork easier to use in the word processing program.

With OfficeReady Family Essentials, families can create lost-dog flyers, insert photos into a science report or produce a holiday newsletter with minimal effort. Using photos in Word is a fast, easy way to create unique, personalized thank you letters or fun calendars. By simply clicking on a Photo Socket, users will be able to insert the photo of their choice from a CD-ROM or hard drive. Users may alter the size and shape of the digital photo to fit into the socket by cropping or stretching the image; users can also rotate and flip photos.

OfficeReady Family Essentials enhances Word by giving photo-editing power to the user from within the program rather than requiring a separate program and interface. An AutoCorrect button(a) provides one-click photo optimization by instantly adjusting technical photo elements including the image's white and black points, dynamic range and color balance to improve the overall quality of the photo. Manual controls are available to adjust the brightness, contrast, color intensity and sharpness of a digital image. OfficeReady Family Essentials can also convert digital photos to grayscale images for black and white printing. Additionally, OfficeReady Family Essentials can frame or add a drop shadow to a photo within a Word document.

Canon Web Publisher

Using Canon Web Publisher(a) in OfficeReady Family Essentials, users can quickly send finished OfficeReady documents and templates to a personal home page or as an e-mail attachment(b). Canon provides each user with 5 MB of free, private, personal Web space. Users can effortlessly post resumes, travel itineraries, or moving announcements to the Web for friends or family to view. Canon Web Publisher also gives the user the ability to set up an address book with names and email addresses. The program will automatically inform the selected names on the address book that an item is available for them to see and give them the URL to connect to the document. Sharing a meeting agenda or A book report is simple and fun with Canon Web Publisher.

Pricing & Availability

OfficeReady Family Essentials will be available in July 2000 through major retail chains, e-tail sites and from www.software.canon.com for an estimated street price of $29.95(c).