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Office 2000: How much Office is enough?
Product: Office 2000
From: Microsoft
Price: About C$250 for an OEM "standard" release; roughly double that for a retail copy. Professional, Premium and developer versions sell for more.
Pros: Improved Web integration. New Clipboard holds multiple items. Solid support for multiple languages.
Cons: It's big -- the Corporate Preview package comes on ten -- count 'em, ten! -- CDs (the retail versions, however, will not include the Windows NT demos and review materials in the Corporate Preview release). XML additions bloat HTML code of imported web pages. And, at least in our tests, it can't read Word 6.01 files created on a Mac. "Red X" problem introduced by some Word 97 documents not automatically fixed. Did we mention big?
It's scary when having more than two hundred megabytes of disk space still nets you a "not enough disk space" error message when you just want to upgrade your word processor and spreadsheet applications. There it was, though: the Office 2000 installer looked at the 257MB of free space on our system's boot drive and, in its own way, laughed at us. But hey, this is a Microsoft product, and no one accuses them of scrimping on word processor or spreadsheet features, now do they?
Improved HTML support
Of course, Office 2000 is more than just a word processor and spreadsheet. In addition to Word and Excel, Office 2000 includes Internet Explorer 5.0 (Netscape fans, don't despair -- you don't have to install it), PowerPoint, Access and about a bazillion filters for importing, exporting and massaging files designed for just about anything else out there. The most notable improvement in Word 2000 is its handling of HTML tags. Unlike all previous Microsoft efforts at interpreting HTML, the company now claims that Word 2000 does not alter (um, well, actually it does -- more on this later....) or destroy HTML tags it does not understand. Finally. And happily, it does a great job at reading and writing pages with advanced HTML features like color, tables, fonts -- even frames.
But Wait...
We installed the collection under Windows 98 and NT 4.0 and found the installation fairly painless, albeit slow. It took over a half-hour to finish. The first beta we tested required us to remove our previous copy of Office 97 Professional -- a task that required digging up our original Office 97 CD. However, the beta 2 release (and, of course, the final version) can automatically uninstall previous Office and, as appropriate, FrontPage releases. Other beta 1 bugs were fixed, too. Running Windows NT 4.0 SP3, the beta 1 installer failed to complete successfully and froze the machine -- but worked fine after a reboot.. This extra step was not necessary in beta 2. We encountered no immediate problems in either beta release when installing Office 2000 under Windows 98, although we've received reports that some users can't get the installer to run at all. We could not successfully install beta 1 of Office 2000 under Windows NT 5.0 beta 1, but this, too, worked as expected in beta 2 form. It's worth mentioning, perhaps, that within three days of installing Office 2000 b2, we had encountered two registry errors -- nasty ones, too. While it's not certain that the incidents were related, we hadn't seen a registry error in Windows 98 prior to the installation of Office 2000. Beware. It is, after all, beta software. We also note that, after uninstalling Office 2000, our installation of OutLook Express was left in a broken condition.
Microsoft touts the "self-healing" feature of Office 2000 and maintains that it will reduce support requirements and TCO. However, we found it fairly easy to break this feature simply by reinstalling Windows. Interestingly, the feature even stayed broken when we restored our previous registry settings, which we had backed up before this test. Moreover, Office 2000 didn't recognize a previous installation and offer to fix it, when we pointed the installer at the previous installation's directory -- it required a full installation. When it does work, though, it's handy: if you accidentally trash a required DLL or deleted an executable, Office 2000 will automatically reload and reconfigure a working copy. It's also possible to configure Office 2000 with a "zero footprint" client install (where it runs from a server), or configure it to load the various components on an as-needed basis.
As we mentioned earlier, Office 2000 does alter HTML tags when web pages are imported. To test this, we imported a large (74K) web page into Office 2000, changed one character and saved the file back out again. The resulting file was 134K. This is, Microsoft says, due to the XML tags the program uses to provide the "round-tripping" capability. And no, the company doesn't plan to provide an option to disable this feature.
FrontPage 2000, provided in the Professional version we tested, has several new features (notably, Word-style on-the-fly spell-checking and the ability to convert a URL to a hyperlink even if it is inside brackets), but still has a few of the long-standing annoyances that characterized previous releases. Clicking on a link to a recently inserted graphic inserts a spurious 32H x 32W size tag -- fortunately, the new release, unlike previous versions will not insert this code if you don't click the newly created icon. One feature that previously worked seemed to be broken in this release, at least until we figured out a workaround. In previous versions of FrontPage, we enjoyed the capability of bypassing the often-sluggish FrontPage Explorer and accessing the FrontPage Editor directly, for easy editing of a web page. This was particularly handy when used with WS-FTP, still our preferred method of uploading web pages to a site. However, FrontPage 2000 needs to have a new file type defined in its Options dialog. We added FrontPg.exe and the filetype "TMP" to the list of files the program supports and then defined FrontPage as our editor in WS-FTP, and it worked! Interestingly, although FrontPage no longer has separate modules for the editor and explorer components, it is as speedy as the old editor was.
Some of the Office apps use HTML in very clever ways. PowerPoint 2000, for example, now saves all its page transition animations as Dynamic HTML, providing a new degree of cross-platform compatibility. Excel spreadsheets and Access database pages can now be embedded "live" into web pages, allowing dynamically updated web pages, or even email messages with "dynamic data." To this end, Microsoft is positioning Access as a front end to its high-end SQL Server 7.0 database system, which further extends this capability.
IE 5...and more
A key part of the Office 2000 bundle is Internet Explorer 5.0 -- provided in the beta 2 release in a fairly robust "Developer Release" form. We've reviewed this product elsewhere; we won't repeat the comments here, except to note that you don't have to use it. However, users who eschew this IE will lose one of the most substantial improvement to Office 2000: its "round-trip" Web capability. And so it is that Microsoft drags Netscape fans kicking and screaming into the world of IE5.
In November, Microsoft greatly expanded its Office 2000 beta program, providing beta 2 to up to 700,000 customers willing to pay US$19.95 to cover the costs of the CDs, shipping, and support. For their money, beta testers will receive Office 2000 Premium Beta 2, including a high-end suite of Web tools, desktop applications, document management software, and graphic design technology, as well as evaluation materials, support, and ongoing information. Such widespread beta testing is probably a good thing, no matter how you feel about paying money to be a guinea pig for Bill Gates. For example, in our tests, we found that Office 2000 could not properly read Word 6.01 files created on a Mac. Presumably, this will be addressed by the time the release version ships. When it is finally released in mid-1999, the program will be available in five variations. The "Premium" release includes FrontPage 2000 and the excellent PhotoDraw 2000. A version dubbed Office 2000 Professional version omits the graphics applications. Small Business and Standard editions are also planned, as well as a release targeted at developers.
Word 2000 users may still be plagued by a problem where a red X appears instead of an embedded graphic. Fortunately, there are a number of workarounds. See Microsoft's KnowledgeBase for more information.
Conclusion
We liked the new features, such as the new Clipboard that holds multiple items, and Office 2000's solid support for multiple languages. There's even a hidden easter egg in Excel 2000 -- a game called Dev Hunter. We also liked the cleaner interface and less intrusive reworking of the "Office Assistants" in this release. But it is Office 2000's stellar support of HTML that proved to be its greatest improvement. For many users, this will be the "must-have" feature.
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