Hands-on Office 2000

Office 2000 Premium (final) – a Hands-on Test

June 10th, 1999 was the long-awaited release date of Microsoft Office 2000. Although the full version of Office 2000 Premium edition carries a hefty C$1229 list (C$1149 street) price, you may qualify for the upgrade version. Upgrades are C$699 retail ($599 street) -- a web-based Office 2000 Upgrade Tool lets you find out if you meet the requirements.

Microsoft Canada says users of Office 97 or previous Office releases will pay the same amount to upgrade. (Less expensive versions, missing some features, are also available, as we've noted in our previous reports.)

The company claims system requirements haven't changed since Office 97  -- but then again, 16MB of RAM wasn't a realistic minimum memory configuration for Office 97, either. I tested it on a variety of systems equipped with 40MB to 160MB of RAM, and CPUs ranging from a P166 to a range of Celeron and PII models -- and even a dual-CPU 450 MHz monster running Windows 2000 beta 3, all with reasonable results. Performance, however, was poor on a system with only 32MB of memory. At today's RAM prices, do yourself a favour....

The Premium Edition tested includes FrontPage and PhotoDraw 2000 -- which are both excellent programs, in my view. I've discussed these programs in some detail previously. If you do not need these programs, the Professional Edition (about $490 street, with a C$60 in-the-box rebate) may be a better choice.

Among the many changes to the program are some clearly intended to benefit Microsoft and its resellers: in response to the ongoing problem of piracy and counterfeiting that plagues Microsoft and many other software manufacturers, the company has incorporated sophisticated holograms into the packing and the CDs themselves. Microsoft says in no case should the software come preloaded onto computers sold to customers without a license.

The program’s Autocomplete feature may seem intrusive at first, and you’ll probably spend some time using the Undo command (or Control-Z keyboard equivalent) to undo its “Help.” For example, when typing my last name at the top of this article, Autocomplete automatically added “Arts Ltd.,” thinking that I want to type my company name. Fortunately, it seems to have learned; now, when I type “Graeme ” it pops up a tool tip containing my first and last name, indicating that, by pressing Enter, it will autocomplete that text string. By simply continuing to type, you can also override this feature.

A more vexing problem is the program’s utter insistence on opening web documents in the application that created them. Sure, this is a great feature – an the cornerstone of Microsoft’s “to the web and back” marketing campaign for this release, but, hey – what if I don’t want to edit that web page’s graphics layout in Microsoft Word, or do a little after-the-fact HTML editing in FrontPage? I talked to several Microsoft managers about this feature – it’s too bad they didn’t take a little friendly advice to make the program’s XML-centric output optional.

Of course, with all this power to publish on the web, there are some security concerns. For example, when we installed the program onto an NT system running Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS), a dialog popped up warning us that the extensions we were about to install would allow anyone with web access to author pages on our server. Gulp! Unfortunately, the solution sounded like a bit more effort than some might want to undertake just to have this feature: the dialog recommended (but did not explain) converting the drive to NTFS, reconfiguring IIS to use this drive, then reinstalling the extensions.

For FrontPage users, the improvements in that program -- NTFS hassles notwithstanding -- are a significant step forward. In particular, we find the new toolbar font, size and color options and the interactive spelling checker key "must have" features. For those who want to use Word or Excel to create documents and then share them on the web, ditto. However, those who want to edit those documents in a program other than the creating app may find the new features get in the way. At any rate, we've used the new release for a wide range of tasks and find it extremely stable and its behaviour predictable in all tests so far. For those of us who've struggled with less-than-excellent "upgrades" in the past, this is a good start....

Update: Note that, since the release of the "Office 2000 Service Release 1" update, Microsoft has implemented a system in which retail versions of the Office suite run a maximum of 50 times before Office must be registered. This makes the program ill-suited to "group purchase" efforts, which are, of course, in contravention of legal requirements and license stipulations anyway.

For Further Reading:

Office 2000: to the Web and Back