Book an office suite - Microsoft's Office for Macintosh 4.2.1 and Office 97 Small Business Edition, Lotus's SmartSuite 97 and Corel's WordPerfect Suite 8 Professional - includes related articles summarizing results and on how to shop for an office suite - Software Review - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, July, 1997 by Rick Broida

Taking a cue from Corel, Microsoft has equipped Office with a bundle of extras. The Office 97 bonanza includes the Avery Wizard for label printing; Draw 97, a flowchart and illustration program; 150 TrueType fonts; and a utility for distributing Publisher documents to the Web.

Office 95 users will immediately notice some differences in Office 97 SBE, starting with installation. Curiously, each application must be installed individually rather than all at once, suggesting that Microsoft rushed a bit to get this product out the door. Office 97 also doesn't include Binder, the clever tool used to keep related documents together. Fortunately, Outlook has a document-grouping feature that compensates in a pinch.

The core applications--Word, Excel, and Outlook--look so polished they. practically gleam, with common toolbars and menus throughout. Word and Excel are, hands down, the most powerful and easy-to-use word processor/spreadsheet combo available. New to each is OfficeArt, a set of drawing and graphics tools meant for creating everything from basic shapes to 3D objects.

Word has added real-time grammar-checking to its roster of proofing tools, and Excel now offers multilevel undo, automatic formula correction, and color-coded change tracking. Both applications deliver unparalleled Internet integration; just type a URL and Office 97 automatically creates a hyperlink. Click on the Web address and the program launches your browser to take you to the Web page.

Outlook's debut in Office is noteworthy. This robust contact manager handles faxes, e-mail messages, and client information with the skill of a figure skater. Outlook's amazing Journal records the amount of time you spend doing various activities and can link those activities to specific contacts. If you bill clients by the hour or just want to keep better track of your time, Journal is invaluable. Only Outlook's to-do list needs work; it handles recurring tasks awkwardly.

Publisher 97, now nearly a year old, looks nothing like the core programs, but it's a terrific DTP program. It's loaded with while-you-work help screens, cool clip art, and automated Web features. Among its 18 document creation wizards is one for creating Web pages, and the results are pretty slick. Publisher can automatically upload pages to your ISP, and it even supports America Online and CompuServe.

Although our praise for Office 97 SBE is endless, it has a significant flaw: new file formats in Word and Excel. Simply put: Documents created in Word 97 or Excel 97 can't be opened by anyone using older versions of Word or Excel. This can be extremely frustrating when you're forced to relaunch documents and save them in an older file format, such as Word 6.0/Word 95 or as Rich Text Format. (Go to www.microsoft.com/word/freestuff/ converters/wrd97cnv.htm to download a conversion macro that will enable you to open Word 97 files in a previous version of Word). It's because of this seemingly unnecessary inconvenience, which will certainly cause file format confusion, that we did not give Office 97 Small Business Edition our Best Buy seal.