Office 2000: Too Much Renovation

How often do you create a document, spreadsheet, or slide presentation to be shared with colleagues over an intranet? If you work for a technologically advanced corporation, your answer may be ''all the time.'' But if you work for a smaller company or just one that doesn't live on the cutting edge of technology, the likelier answer is ''huh?''

Microsoft (MSFT) clearly had the first group in mind when it designed Office 2000 for Windows, the latest version of its flagship application suite, with the goal of letting ''users move ahead into a new global, Web-centric world.'' While Office 2000, which is shipping now to corporate customers and will be available in stores on June 10, contains a number of refinements that all users of Word, Excel, Outlook, and especially PowerPoint will appreciate, the upgrade is clearly aimed at big corporate buyers.

This is most obvious in the heavy emphasis on the preparation of material to be read in Web browsers. By itself, that is not new. What is new is the ability to save documents and spreadsheets in the Web's hypertext markup language and preserve features, such as notes and formulas, that cannot be displayed in browsers. This allows people to post material to the Web, then bring it back into Word or Excel without losing information. It also makes it easier for work groups that share access to an internal corporate Web site to work together to create documents.

The new Office can be installed with a minimal set of features. Anything not part of the basic set, such as automatic hyphenation, will be quickly and painlessly downloaded from a network file server when used for the first time. This ability to install on demand is handy for corporate technology managers who may want to reduce the impact of a standard installation, which is huge at 250 megabytes. But it only works if you are on a network all the time. If not, you had better keep the Office installation CD-ROM handy. Microsoft has added protections against booby-trapped files, such as the Melissa virus. But the technology employed depends on corporate authentication, which won't do much outside the office.

Not all the new features of Office 2000 are enterprise-oriented. One big change you will notice right away is much simpler menus. Only the most frequently used items appear. The more obscure commands are hidden until you click on an arrow at the bottom of the list or keep a menu open for more than a few seconds without making a choice. This hides some of the sprawling complexity of Office.

ALBANIAN. Another feature that is really intended to make life simpler for multinational corporations can be a big benefit for individuals who work in more than one language. A new feature lets you work in just about any language with the appropriate spell and grammar checkers, hyphenation dictionaries, and other language tools. I found switching languages a bit tricky at first, but once set up, it's easy to go from English to Albanian or 36 other languages. (English, French, and Spanish are standard; other languages require the $70 Proofing Tools CD.)

The changes in the individual Office applications are limited, as befits mature products. Word and Excel get some minor tweaks. Word now lets you enter text anywhere on a page, a feature long available in Corel's rival WordPerfect. And in a feature borrowed from the Macintosh, you can now save multiple selections to the clipboard and paste any or all of them into a document.

My vote for the most improved Office component is PowerPoint. A new screen design shows a slide, speaker's notes, and an outline of your entire presentation at the same time. Clicking on any slide opens it for editing, vastly simplifying the creation of presentations.

Outlook, the complex E-mail and contact-management program, got a major overhaul last year and is little changed in this go-round. An improved version of Publisher, a program that makes it relatively simple to prepare documents such as brochures for printing, is now a standard component of the Office suite.

All in all, Office 2000 represents a useful evolution in what most business computer users regard as their most important set of applications. Still, I couldn't escape the feeling that Office is ridiculous software overkill for a lot of people--too big, too complex, and too expensive. In my next column, I will look at how key Office applications could be made more useful and accessible for home users and small-business people.

BY STEPHEN H. WILDSTROM

TABLE: Three Flavors of Office 2000

                                          PRICE

FEATURES                               UPGRADE/NEW

-------------------SMALL BUSINESS--------------------



Word, Excel, Outlook                    $209/499

   Publisher



--------------------PROFESSIONAL---------------------



Word, Excel, Outlook, Publisher         309/599

Access, PowerPoint



----------------------PREMIUM------------------------



Word, Excel, Outlook, Publisher         399/799

Access, PowerPoint, FrontPage

PhotoDraw

Picture-Perfect Scans

Cheap flatbed printer scanners are great at capturing images for E-mail or a Web page. But they don't offer enough resolution for serious photo work. Professional film scanners such as the Nikon CoolScan series do a terrific job, but these start at around $1,000. The Photo-Smart S20 scanner from Hewlett-Packard (888 474-3867 or www.photosmart.com) does nicely in filling the price gap, at $499.

The Photo-Smart can scan prints of up to 5 x 7 inches, but at this it is no better, and less convenient, than conventional scanners. Its strength is its ability to do 2,400-dot-per-in. scans of either 35mm slides or film strips of up to five 35mm, positives or negatives. That resolution is good enough to produce photographic-quality prints up to 8 x 10 in. with only a bit of compromise in quality. And Windows software helps, with its features offering the ability to create panoramic images and save color-correction settings for easily repeatable results.

The original PhotoSmart scanner was hampered by its use of a SCSI interface, which required opening the computer case to install a card and which was difficult to configure. The updated model uses the new universal serial bus. That will make its setup a plug-and-play snap with Windows 98.

Help Desk

Q: Reader Dave Kuhlman of Carmel, Calif., asks: We would like to be able to access our AOL E-mail using our Hitachi notebook computer while traveling in our motor home. Is it possible to use a cellular phone to sign onto America Online? If so, how? If not, why not? Or better yet, when?

A: The answer today is a firm ''maybe''--it depends on where you are and what kind of phone you have. In general, you can use a modem to send data over a standard analog cell phone, with decent coverage over most of North America. Or you can use a GSM phone, which is ubiquitous in most countries but offers only spotty U.S. coverage. Data service for other digital networks, such as AT&T and Sprint, is coming, but not yet here. It is likely to be available first in Europe and Japan.

You'll need a cellular-ready PC card modem for your laptop and a special cable to connect the modem to the phone. Be sure to get a cable that is specific for both your modem and your phone. To make matters more complicated, not all modems support all phones. Don't expect blazing speed when surfing on a cell phone, either. You're not likely to get a connection faster than 14.4 kilobits per second under ideal conditions, and that can drop off drastically if reception is poor. You also can expect some big air-time charges, so go for a service plan with lots of free minutes.

Web Destinations

THE OFFICIAL STORY

www.usgovsearch.com
Have you ever tried to find federal government information on the Web, only to give up in frustration when confronted by a sea of useless leads from a conventional search engine? Gov.search, a joint venture of the Commerce Dept. and the search service Northern Light Technology, provides a powerful set of search tools that look for information on the official sites of government agencies. You can restrict your search by agency or by branch of government. And the database includes all the publications of the Commerce Dept.'s National Technical Information Service.

Under the Commerce-Northern Light agreement, the service is supposed to cost $15 for one-day use, $30 for monthly access, and $250 for a year. But because of a dispute over whether the government can legally charge for access to public information, gov.search is being provided free for the time being, though there is a charge for full reports from the National Technical Information Service.

oposite.stsci.edu
One of the most interesting things about the Web is the ability it gives anyone with a bit of curiosity to observe scientific discoveries very nearly as they are being made. The Space Telescope Science Institute runs the Hubble Space Telescope and makes images available to the public almost as soon as they are received. Currently, the site features pictures of the massive storm in the north polar region of Mars recently discovered by Hubble. The pictures come in a low-resolution version for quick viewing and a high-resolution version for printing.

www.volunteermatch.org
Lots of organizations are in need of volunteers but don't know where to find them. And lots of people are willing to volunteer their time, but don't know where to start.

VolunteerMatch, operated by nonprofit Impact Online Inc., can close the gap. Organizations looking for help can post their volunteer openings on the site without charge. Would-be volunteers search opportunities by location, by type of organization, and by whether the need is for an ongoing commitment or one-time help.