'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.