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Mon, 07 Jun 1999

JP/'Office 2000': The Web will be your office

'Office 2000': The Web will be your office

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): In a few days, computer users in the U.S. will be able to buy Microsoft Office 2000 from their local stores. It may take a bit longer for the boxes to show up at any of the outlets of our favorite software store Precision, but this new edition will replace the ubiquitous Office 97.

Four different packages will be offered. The Standard version will consist of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, all of which have "2000" at the end of their names. SOHO owners can choose the Small Business version, which replaces PowerPoint with Publisher and adds Small Business Tools. The Professional version will add Access, an end-user database management software, and Small Business Tools to the collection in the Standard version.

The Premium version adds FrontPage, which will help you create and manage Web sites professionally, plus the new PhotoDraw! 2000 business graphics software. This one, which is understandably the most expensive version (US$799 new, $399 upgrade) have definitely more tools than what most people need to do their work.

Courtesy of Microsoft Indonesia, I have been able to play around a little with a Release Candidate -- the version that is the closest to what you'll find in the boxes. I was lucky because it was the Premium version, but unfortunately it will expire come November 1, 1999. My demo version comes in four CD-ROMs. One of them contains the standard Office applications, and the others contain Publisher, Office Server Extension and Resource Kit, and a Trial Version of Photo-Draw! 2000.

Web-centric

Microsoft seems to religiously believe that the Web will be where we work in the future, and, therefore, Office 2000 has been designed to take advantage of the Web. Documents created in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, for example, can be saved in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and be posted on the Web. You won't have to learn the codes because everything is done automatically for you. When the pages you create in Word or Excel are posted, they will retain all your dazzling embellishments, including graphics, tables and the watermark (which is part of the "Theme" in Office 2000). Web pages can then be edited by coworkers who have the permission to do so, and they can paste comments all over the place when to collaborate on a document.

Documents can be mailed directly to your recipients, and it can be sent not as an attachment but as the body of your e-mail. Of course, their e-mail client should be able to display HTML files in order for them to really see what you see. One of the best news is that Office 2000 uses the same file format as Office 97.

Now, do you sometimes find that your Word 97 crawls and you suspect that some of your executable files have been corrupted? In Office 2000, there is a nifty command, Detect and Repair. Just place the CD-ROM in the drive and run this command. All the damaged files, if there are any, will be fixed. If the sluggishness persists, perhaps the problem is more serious than just damaged files.

Although hard disk capacity has increased tremendously (the latest record is held by Seagate Barracuda with space for 50 Gigabytes of data on a single hard disk), many of us are still working on a legacy PC with only a 1.7 GB hard disk. An Office suite with a 250 MB hard disk requirement may not seem to be feasible. Luckily, Office 2000 can be installed in increments, which means we can install only the basic components. If we have a network, additional features -- such as the Themes -- can be installed on the fly. In stand-alone PCs, we will need to keep the Installation CD-ROM close by.

There are some other innovations rather than merely renovation, as well. In the past, each time you copied something to the clipboard, that would replace whatever was already in there. A neat improvement in Office 2000 is that you can paste multiple objects -- text, image, tables, what have you -- on the clipboard to be copied again later to your open document. A clipboard toolbar, which you can see in the accompanying picture, will show you what you have placed in it. You can paste the contents to an open document all at once or clear all of them with just a click. The programmers at Microsoft thoughtfully provided us with an easy way to see which object contains what text. Just place the mouse cursor over the text icon, and you'll be able to read the first few words of the text object.

One of the renovated features is the flirtatious Office Assistant. It now comes without the box, making it more ghost- like. Still, the Help is as great as it was in Office 97. The menus have been made less daunting, too. All menu items that you don't often need are hidden. The View menu in the accompanying picture shows you how this is done. When you click on the arrow at the bottom of the menu roll-down list or you press on the main menu item for a couple of seconds, all the menu items will be displayed, as shown in the Excel window.

Future Outlook

As you can see in the accompanying picture, the Open, Save and Save as dialog boxes now has Outlook-like bars that help us organize our files. It's really a welcome addition. There are still other great features as well, such as user profiles and multiple languages support.

Is it too far-fetched to believe that the Web will be where we do our work, collaborate and share information? If we look around us here in Jakarta, that may be a fantasy. But in countries with more advanced levels of technology penetration, that is quite a logical vision. The increasing adoption of intranet (the use of Internet technology internally in an organization) provides a solid ground for believing that our next workplace is the Web. Even SOHO workers with Internet access will find the Web capabilities useful.

If you're not relying on the Web, though, even the $209 upgrade ($499 new) investment for the Standard version may not be worth it. Office 97, as well as the other two rival office suites already provide us with most of the tools that we need to work comfortably and productively. Besides, you need to be careful with the hardware requirements, especially if you work with a lot of graphics. I ran Office 2000 on an up-to-date Compaq Deskpro EP/SB with Pentium III 500 MHz and 64 MB of RAM, and it was really a joy. I still don't know how it will run on a Pentium 133 MHz PC with only 16 MB of RAM. We'll find it out soon.

One noted omission in Office 2000 is a voice-recognition utility. This is interesting, because both Lotus SmartSuite and WordPerfect Office already come with theirs. Office 2000 may not give us hordes of stunning new, automated features, but given the strong popularity of its current generation I think it is safe to believe that this one will be able to maintain its position. In my upcoming articles we shall explore each of the main applications and see what else is in store.