by Douglas Mechaber, MCSE, MCNE, CCDA, LACS

Microsoft has a penchant for releasing a new edition of Office every two years or so. A cynic might suggest that this was Microsoft’s way of forcing upgrades every few years, particularly by the business community. I detect a pattern: Microsoft releases a new version frequently, thereby markedly increasing its revenue stream. It helps to convince its partners of the need to upgrade and elect Microsoft maintenance agreements. With Windows XP, the agreements have changed markedly. I have read that most business users upgrade only every two to three years. The expense is the work to install and troubleshoot new applications, as much as the price of the new software. Most businesses have maintenance agreements that permit free upgrading. Now, only premium agreements allow for new versions. The most intrusive change is the need to register XP with Microsoft, unless you are a "Select" customer. Once you obtain the key, you are only allowed two installations before you have to place a call to Microsoft to reactivate.

During a custom installation some default options make little sense unless you conclude that Microsoft should replace existing programs. Some of these choices give you a hint of the power, breadth (and size) of Office 2000.

The options available for deselecting include help for each major program (Word, Excel, Access, Power Point), and in Word for Windows 2000, Wizards and templates. Excel 2000 listed for selection Add-ins, many of which were preselected as "install upon first use." The options available for all selections included install on the computer, install to operate from the CD-ROM, and sometimes, install upon first use, as well as deselect. Not all components listed with a check box had all options available. Power Point 2000 had the help and tutorial listed, but included some new features, such as "Presentation Broadcasting." Choices include Outlook, Access and Front Page. Continuing along the lengthy selection of optional programs: under Office Tools, there are selections for Clip Gallery, HTML Source editing, and International Support, and such less well known choices as Lotus Mail Support (Microsoft everywhere?), and photo editor.

One editing error in Part I (U.F. June 2001) that I will correct now is that NT upgrades are designated as SP; no SR exists for NT, Win 2000, or Win XP. The minimum NT requirement for Office 2000 is SP-3. You will want to update your installation of Office 2000 with its latest service release, SP-2 or better, which is a very large download. This requires prior installation of SR-1 or SR-1a. Microsoft seems to have changed SP and SR designations.

As a test of save functionality and efficiency, I created a 454 Kb ASCII text document that I could open in WordPad. When saved in various formats, its size varied as follows: Lotus WordPro document
(.lwp, WordPro ’96), 211 Kb.
Word ’97 file (.doc), 575 Kb
Word 2000 file, 1141 Kb.
This is more than twice the size of the original text document, with no additional formatting . This result may indicate the additional complex codes Microsoft used to embed additional features. However, competitors (notably Corel) seem to enable new features without embedding huge amounts of code and also manage to include backward compatibility.

As with most other Office 2000 programs, most of the PowerPoint changes from Office ’97 have to do with much improved general Office features and not so much with individual program changes. PowerPoint has become the de facto standard for almost any business slide presentation, to the extent that it is derided at conventions and conferences.

Several features make the time-consuming task of developing your PowerPoint presentation quicker. One neat new ability combines three views into one – a new Normal view, consisting of Slide, Outline, and Notes, which makes editing easier. In ’97, I had a lot of trouble reordering my presentation. Other useful features include formatting and typing enhancements, similar to Word: AutoFormat changes special feature text (em, en dashes, fractions, smart quotes, etc.) as you type. Bullets auto number, as you edit. I could create a simple table within PowerPoint, without having to go into Excel.

Those who use laptops and forget to disable their screen saver will appreciate the ability to disable it during a slide show from PowerPoint. A new projector wizard makes connecting a laptop to a projector easier. As with other Office 2000 programs, you can save files in HTML, so you can present your show over the Web. There are several new schemes available, so I was able to update an insipid and way too common format on an old show. If you use audience handouts, you will appreciate the additional options to print various numbers of slides per page.

Access is a relational database useful for organizing data and making it accessible for several or more users. The new, more user friendly pull down menu generates forms, reports, etc. based on Visual Basic 6 for Applications (VBA). Access 2000 visually appears differently from the ’97 version, as the Object Bar - to create and display databases – is on the left side of the database window. A new option called Group lets you gather similar queries and forms in one place. Another significant change: Data Access Pages (DAP), which are database objects that can be saved as HTML. I could edit and view data in my web browser, although these objects are stored outside the database as .mdb files, so you can publish them on a Web site.

It is easier to view relationships between tables, because the new Print Relationships Wizard automatically creates a report based on what is displayed in the Relationships window. Other new features available in 2000 include conditional formatting, and name AutoCorrect. When you close an Access database, the database will automatically compact if that will save space. Also you can view linked data from one table to another subdatasheet).

Several books list the Access 2000 file format as the only one that changed between Office 2000 and ’97. Not only did it change, but some Office 2000 Word documents cannot be opened up in ’97 without a converter as well. The reason for the lack of direct compatibility between Access ’97 and 2000 formats is the change to support Unicode characters in the Jet engine database, the original database engine included with prior versions of Access. New is the ability to use Microsoft Data Engine, a version of MS SQL for the desktop. Access can also serve as a front end for access to SQL business databases, since it supports OLE DB, so users without programming experience can use Access to grab data from SQL databases. Competitors offered this functionality previously.

This Web site creation program is only included in the Premium version of Office. Specific extensions, or ancillary server programs, are necessary to use FrontPage created-Web sites on any server. The Explorer and Editor are now integrated; in FrontPage 98, they were separate. Because larger web sites are frequently the purview of different groups, FrontPage 2000 now includes check-in and check-out features at the page level and limited approval process control. Cascading Style Sheets, a means of enforcing a common set of look and feel throughout your web site, are now available for the entire site. FrontPage 2000 includes standard VBA and Office editing tools, menus and toolbars to improve interoperability with other Office applications.

New themes – comprising fonts, colors and images – are available when FrontPage 2000 is installed. HTML documents can be edited in FrontPage 2000 without changing from the underlying HTML basis. Like reveal codes in WordPerfect, FrontPage 2000 has a new feature called reveal tags, which is useful when importing snippets and other pages, and as a good HTML learning tool. You can open multiple Web sites at once. Once you select the system to which you will publish your web pages, built-in intelligence prevents you from adding features that don’t work. Modest site management help is available: you can generate reports showing slow pages and broken links, but the limited tools are unlikely to be useful on large sites. Language support is available for 15 languages.

PhotoDraw 2000 is only included in the Premium version of Office 2000. The advantage of PhotoDraw 2000 is the integration with the rest of the Office applications, which also lets you manipulate the increasing amounts of clip-art on the other Office CDs. It can also manipulate the photos, graphics, and scanned images resulting from the trend of integrated presentations and documents.

Publisher 2000 includes many additional wizards, so it is much easier to design a stock newsletter or brochure. As with all other Office 2000 applications, with Publisher 2000, you can publish directly to HTML. However, FrontPage 2000 is to be preferred for direct web publication. Newly supported are 4-color process with color separation and spot color, previously only available in higher end desktop publishing programs. Publication sizes may vary from banners to unusual folding paper sizes.

If you are running Office 2000, congratulations, and I suggest that it is not necessary to upgrade to Office XP. If you are running a version of Office, prior to ’97, you will want to upgrade to Office 2000, especially if you can find a legitimate copy at a substantial discount. Otherwise, Office XP makes substantial improvements on various Web functions, never mind some format changes. From Office ’97, the differences to Office 2000 are not substantial; if you wish to upgrade, do so to Office XP.

Aside from the problems with registration and the inability to seamlessly perform multiple reinstalls (something us hobbyists seem to do on a regular basis, at 3 AM), XP’s major changes are to Word and Outlook, with few incompatibilities. One problem with XP is that a default installation will leave Word 2002 as the editor for mail. Fix this by doing a custom install and choosing Outlook 2002.

Microsoft Office 2000 Premium Suite

List price, $799; upgrade, $449., with $50. Rebate

Microsoft Office 2000 Professional Suite.

List price, $599; upgrade $349, with $40. Rebate.

Street prices are considerably less.