In the early days of computing, people had to buy individual programs for their computers. If you wanted to buy a word processor, you had a number of choices to choose from. Unfortunately, when it came time to buy a spreadsheet, you often bought another program from a different vendor. This made life difficult for the user, who often had to learn two completely different sets of commands in order to use the two programs. Today, fortunately, things are much different. You can now buy an entire suite of programs for about the same price that you used to have to pay for one of them, and the programs are much better integrated as well. A prime example of this is Microsoft^® Office. Once, this suite was a collection of programs that often had as many differences as similarities. Over the years, though, Microsoft has made great strides in binding the suite's members up into a smooth working and integrated whole. The latest release, Office 97, continues this trend, while adding a number of new features that makes Office an even better value.

Office 97 comes in several different versions. The standard edition includes Word (word processor), Excel (spreadsheet), PowerPoint^® (presentation graphics), and Outlook^TM (the newest member of the suite, a personal information manager that replaces the old Schedule + app). The professional version includes Access (a database) and Bookshelf Basics (a collection of reference works). Users of earlier versions of Office 97 will immediately notice the suite's new interface, which was first introduced in Internet Explorer 3.0. The icons now appear as flat panels until you move the cursor over them, at which time the icon's button appears to pop out slightly to the user (selected options appear to be slightly recessed). Toolbars are now completely customizable, and can float freely upon the screen. The toolbars and menus are designed to be consistent between the various applications to make learning and using them easier. The biggest change to the interface, however, is the addition of Office Assistants. These assistants are little cartoon characters that act as interactive guides to the help system in Office. Double click on one, and you can type in a question or select from a list of topics designed to help you perform various tasks. The assistants can even attract your attention and suggest better ways of doing things if you are performing tasks in an inefficient manner. There are a total of nine Assistants that come with Office, ranging from a paper clip to a mad scientist (others are available on Microsoft's Web site). A number of new Wizards have also been added to the new version to make common tasks easier to perform.

In addition to the way Office 97 looks and works, improvements have also been made to the underlying code as well. The different programs in the suite now share more code between the applications to reduce the amount of memory used and to improve performance. Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is now used by all the apps in the suite except for Outlook, which makes it easy to write macros, automate tasks, and write programs that can take advantage of the many features of Office 97. A major addition to Office 97 is the addition of full Internet support to the suite. For example, all the applications can now publish HTML files, something which wasn't in Office 95 at all unless you downloaded a number of clunky add-ons from Microsoft. You can now embed URL's directly into Office 97 documents and then go to that Web site by simply double-clicking on the hyperlink, which automatically loads Internet Explorer 3.0 (which comes with Office 97). You can also create Web pages directly from within Word (there's even a Web Page Wizard available to help you set one up).

A number of improvements have also been made to the individual programs that make up Office 97. Word, for instance, now has a grammar checker that automatically checks your grammar as you type, just like the spell checker that was introduced in the last version. You can now modify tables by simply drawing the changes onscreen with your mouse. The AutoComplete feature will automatically complete a word for you after you type in the first part of the word. Excel has a new AutoCorrect feature that can fix incorrect formulas in spreadsheets (for example, incorrect cell addresses). You can also create formulas based on the headings found in columns, rather than having to create a named range. Charting has been improved in this version of Excel, with new types added and easier manipulation of chart elements. Access has been made faster and easier to use, thanks to the addition of new Wizards to make such tasks as querying easier for users to perform. You can now also publish Access reports directly to the Internet. A number of additional templates have been added to PowerPoint, and the new Clip Gallery Live feature lets you access additional clip art not found in Office 97 itself directly from Microsoft's Web site. Automatic spell checking is now part of PowerPoint, and animation of slides has been improved. Outlook is a combination E-mail client, scheduler, calendar, journal, and contact manager. While full-featured, it is somewhat difficult to learn due to the sheer number of features it contains. One nice feature is the ability to use Word as Outlook's E-mail editor. You can also import data from a number of other PIM's, including Ecco, Sidekick, and Schedule +.

While Office 97 is a substantial improvement over the last version, users should be aware of a few problems. Users of earlier versions of Office 97 will find that they may have problems sharing files with users of the new version due to the fact that Office 97 has introduced new file formats for each of its applications. In addition, Word 97 users will find that they can't save files directly back into Word 95 format. You must save them out as Rich Text Format files instead, which can cause the loss of some formatting (this is to be corrected with a service release due sometime in July). Users should also be aware that Office 97 is a real resource hog. While it will run on a 486 PC with 8 MB of RAM, I would highly recommend using a Pentium^® system with at least 16 MB of RAM for best performance. Be prepared to surrender a large amount of your hard drive also; a complete install of Office 97 Professional uses up 191 MB of space! Overall, though, Office 97 is the best integrated and most powerful suite available, and if you've got the hardware to run it effectively, you'll be amazed at the amount of power you'll have at your fingertips!

Gateway offers this column to its readership as a service, but please note that it is not responsible for the accuracy or opinions of the author and offers no warranty either expressed or implied that the information will produce the desired result.

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