lap0530's Full Review: Microsoft Office 2000 Professional Upgrade Version...
Introduction
I figured that with only six weeks left in the Year 2000, I should finally upgrade to Office 2000. The upgrade was supposed to occur this past spring, but I never got around to it. One reason was that I liked Office 97 just fine, and was still learning some of its finer points. Alas, Office 97 is no more on either my desktop or my laptop, and I am writing this review in Word 2000.
At first blush, Office 2000 is not a radical departure from Office 97, and that is a good thing. Most of the changes appear to be cosmetic only, and these are a mixed bag. Some of the changes are for the better, while others are not. Most are simply like Mount Everest. They are there, just because they could be, or to differentiate Office 2000 from 97.
In this review, I provide a high-level flyover of Microsoft Office 2000 Professional, including the installation, the software suite, major changes and features, and a cursory evaluation. Stay tuned for detailed product reviews of Word 2000, Access 2000, PowerPoint 2000, and Outlook 2000. I have already used and reviewed Excel 2000 and refer you to that review for more detail than I provide below. My Excel 2000 review can be found at:
I am fortunate that my company provides the license for me install and use Office 2000, so that I personally did not have to pay the $499 purchase price. I installed Office 2000 two different ways. In both cases--based on previous experience--I completely uninstalled Office 97 before making the upgrade to 2000.
On my laptop, I installed the Office 2000 suite from the company server since I was connected to the company network. The installation took about five minutes and was uneventful, except that the Internet Explorer version on my laptop was detuned from 5.5 to 5.0! I suspect that I have the IS people to thank for that “upgrade,” rather than Microsoft. I then had to reinstall IE 5.5, though no settings were affected.
At home, I used the Office 2000 CD. This installation was momentarily disrupted when the installer could not find my win.ini file. Figuring that I had to have one, or I wouldn’t be in Windows, I quickly found the file and changed the attributes from Read Only. The installer worked beautifully after that, and in eleven minutes and twenty-two seconds by my watch, Office 2000 was fully installed, including a reboot to finish the installation. As I watched and listened to the CD drive humming along, I thought of the days when a major office suite such as Microsoft Office was installed from a series of thirty or more floppy disks and would require more than an hour with constant disk replacements. Times have changed for the better!
Features
Microsoft Office Professional 2000 comes with Microsoft Access 2000 (a database management program), Microsoft Excel 2000 (a spreadsheet program), Microsoft Outlook 2000 (a personal information management and group collaboration tool), Microsoft PowerPoint 2000 (a presentation program), Microsoft Word 2000 (a word processing program), and additionally with Microsoft Publisher 2000 (a low-end desktop publishing tool) and a series of four tools for small businesses including a Customer Manager, a Business Planner, a Direct Mail Manager, and a Small Business Financial Manager.
Below, I provide a quick rundown of some of the enhancements or characteristics of each of these programs. Since I do not currently use Microsoft Publisher or the Small Business Tools, I omit them from this review.
Overall. A consistent approach to program icons in the Office suite renders them looking much like the faces of kid’s ABC blocks. This is nitpicky, I know, but I liked the older ones better. In addition, someone had the “brilliant” idea to withhold less frequently accessed menu items from immediate view--sort of a “short list” notion. I prefer to know all the menu options available to me with one mouse click rather than having to use two clicks to find some of the more obscure features. I was thankful that changing the menu to display all options was a simple matter of visiting Tools, Customize, Options and then unchecking the box in front of Menus Show Most Recently Used Items First. I did this in Outlook, and Office was smart enough to apply my choice to all the other programs in the suite.
A welcome enhancement is the improved File, Open dialog box, which includes immediate access to the Desktop, Favorites, My Documents, Web Folders, and History folders. Rather than browse through the directory tree, one simply clicks on the icon of the desired folder. In general, the “save as a web page” and group collaboration features of Office 2000 are advancements over the Office 97 suite. Additionally, the integration among the Office programs is even tighter than before.
One “feature” that I find totally annoying and distracting is the ubiquitous and solicitous Office Assistant. This animated paper clip character (which can be replaced by a dog, a cat, Albert Einstein, and other characters) now floats above the open application ready to assist. I quickly deactivated this “helper.”
Access. Unlike Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, Access 2000 is not directly file-compatible with Access 97. When opening an Access 97 database, the user is presented the opportunity to continue to keep the file in 97 format or to update it to 2000 format. If the 2000 format is chosen, the file can no longer be opened via Office 97. Otherwise, the changes in Access 2000 are largely cosmetic, with the main exception being a tighter integration with HTML and web access.
Excel. As I pointed out in my earlier review, Excel is fundamentally unchanged, and minor differences are mostly cosmetic. For example, the color of a highlighted region in the spreadsheet is now blue. The pivot table feature is appreciably harder to use and less intuitive than before, though no less powerful or useful.
Outlook. Outlook is basically unchanged from the 98 version I was using. One notable exception is that instead of supporting a separate Personal Address Book and Outlook Contacts, Outlook 2000 insists on merging these two. That made a great deal of sense to me, since I wondered why they were separated in the first place.
Outlook offers to be one’s default e-mail, contacts, and newsgroup client. Since I access the Internet via a dial-up connection from home and use Outlook Express for e-mail and newsgroups, I opted to keep OE as my Internet e-mail and newsgroup program and to use Outlook for my Exchange-based company e-mail. Outlook quickly configured itself to my specifications, and worked like a charm. I did have to reboot Windows to have access to my newly merged contacts and personal address book. All my e-mail folders from Outlook 98 were imported perfectly. Outlook remains a very useful calendar, scheduling, group collaboration, and e-mail program, though not as fully featured as Lotus Notes and other similar groupware applications.
PowerPoint. PowerPoint has become as ubiquitous as the paper clip assistant, and in the wrong hands, every bit as annoying. PowerPoint allows the user to include animations and transitions in slide shows, and the novice user seems determined to use such incredibly irritating effects as the “typewriter sound effect” coupled with the introduction of one letter at a time. If you are new to PowerPoint, I beg you as Susan Pouter would say, to “Stop the Insanity,” and use these transitions and animations sparingly and judiciously. In addition to all the views offered in PowerPoint 97, PowerPoint 2000 has the feature of a split-screen view when one uses the “normal” view of a presentation. This welcome extra allows the user to make changes in the outline view and see those changes immediately reflected in the slide view (and vice-versa). As with Excel and Word, PowerPoint 97 and PowerPoint 2000 share exactly the same file formats.
Word. As I mentioned at the outset, I am using Word 2000 to type this review. The features of Word 97 that I have come to rely on, such as real-time spell and grammar checking, revision tracking, and word counts (important to make sure that my Epinions reviews are at least 100 words--;-)) are all there and work exactly as they did before. Additionally, Word now offers toolbar and menu items for web page previews and saves, sending a Word document by e-mail, and frames pages (including tables of contents in frames). Word files transfer seamlessly from 97 to 2000, which is a blessing seeing as how the hard drives of both of my computers contain many megabytes of Word files.
Evaluation
Overall, the Office 2000 suite is a welcome upgrade. No great surprises await the user who has become accustomed to Office 97. Many of the changes are apparently for appearance’s sake only, while a few, notably the tighter integration, better web presence, and enhanced feature sets, are definite improvements.
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