An office suite for the next century: Microsoft Office 2000

Home Office Computing, Oct, 1998 by Joel T. Patz

What can you expect from the latest upgrade to the world's most popular office productivity suite? In a word, plenty.

For starters, the Microsoft Office 2000 applications we tested in beta form work with HTML as easily as with their native formats (such as .DOC files for Word and .XLS for Excel). New File Open and File Save dialog boxes add a button for saving to and retrieving from Web servers, a great tool if you want to collaborate with your clients over the Web. And with a series of themes (backgrounds, colors, and fonts) borrowed from Microsoft FrontPage, you can quickly turn a Word document into a great looking Web page.

If the Web's not important to you right now, not to worry. There are dozens of changes in Office 2000 for improving your own productivity. Tables are a great way to summarize data for a pleasing impression; with Word's vastly improved table handling, columns are resized more intelligently and it's far easier to wrap text around a table than before. You can also draw diagonal lines in any cell, and even nest tables, putting one inside another.

In Excel, you can now see underlying formatting characteristics when selecting a cell range. If you do analysis using data stored in lists, you'll appreciate the ability to drag and drop column names to a PivotTable layout that instantly displays, for example, sales by region by month. Best of all, it's possible to create a simple chart that changes as you manipulate your PivotTable. The spreadsheet also lets you AutoFormat your PivotTable, so good-looking, colorful tables are a snap to create.

PowerPoint's new three-pane view puts your presentation, an outline, and speaker notes all on the same screen. IntelliSense has also been added to several operations: For example, if you add too many bullets to a slide, PowerPoint shrinks the font size so your text fits. As for Outlook 2000, there's new emphasis on synchronization, support for Internet read receipts, and an improved Rules Wizard for automatic e-mail handling.

The design for all Office applications has also changed slightly--and smartly. Menus are abbreviated by default, but if you hover over a selection, the full list of menu options appears. Choose one, and it's added to the shortened version of the menu. If you don't use a menu option, it disappears over time--a great feature that responds to your personal work habits. Toolbar buttons work the same way.

On the downside, Microsoft continues to pile on features, tools, bells, and whistles as if there was no tomorrow, making Office 2000 a huge, even ungainly product. Our beta version devoured nearly 200MB of hard-disk space.

To add insult to injury, the company has announced that a high-end version of Office 2000 will ship with FrontPage 2000, its potent but by no means compact Web site building program.

But if you have the storage capacity to spare, there's a lot to look forward to in Microsoft Office 2000. Whether you need the formatting interchangeability of HTML documents or seek productivity-enhancing features in each of the familiar applications, we recommend Office 2000 as a worthwhile upgrade or first-time purchase.