Office 2000 Premium Part I: Word, Excel, and Outlook A Word About Word Douglas Smith
What's New?
Word 2000 has an abundance of new features which show that feedback from users has found its way into the ivory low-rises in Washington state. Creating common Web, e-mail and print documents has been made much easier. Organizations have been developing intranets allowing users to publish and share projects in a Web work space, and Word 2000 has pushed these possibilities to a new level, allowing publishing of these projects without having to learn all new controls and methods. Some of the enhancements include the ability to preserve all HTML code, even if Word does not understand it, instead of losing or destroying uncomprehended code and associated tags. Also new is the ability to import and export HTML encodings. Now, turn off features that are not supported in older browsers to make displaying a page much easier for them. Themes are now available, making consistent Web pages a more realistic task than ever before, by allowing co-ordination between Word 2000 and creation of Web pages.
Developers can now create and view Frames more accurately, with new and more powerful tools. Also new to Word 2000 is the ability to customize e-mail by choosing personalized font settings, backgrounds and themes. The emphasis has been placed on ease of use; you can now move the cursor anywhere on a page or document and with a double click, start typing immediately. Also new is Print Zoom. Here a user can scale pages at print time regardless of paper sizes. Personalize menus based on what is used most, without having to wade through less-used features as in earlier versions. Word 2000 can now use pixels and percentages of a page as alternate units of measurements, and supports 24-bit colors to set text, borders and shadings in any color. To make bullets pictures instead of the old numbers or characters is no problem.
In most offices are many users who accumulate documents over the years in various older versions of Word. This has been thought out and you will find that Word 2000 addresses this issue with the ability to turn off features that won't be displayed or viewable in older versions. For the International user, it combines all language versions with the exception of Thai, Vietnamese and Indic, making for much better worldwide distribution while requiring less training after installation. Setting language of the user interface does not affect use of the program, and automatic detection of language being typed will launch the proper spelling and grammar checker. There have been many other improvements that just would take more print than we can provide at this time, but are evident the moment the application is launched.
The Good and the Bad
With all of the new and improved additions, selecting the best is tough, and probably will depend mainly on what you personally needed to see changed. We felt that HTML support along with e-mail improvements was key; working together with other users is always a good thing, especially in an office with many users depending on uniformity throughout the organization. By going to the new Web-productivity work style and the new tools associated with the new Word, the program has vastly improved productivity and the sharing of information throughout an organization. With its HTML support, users now have the ability to make changes or edit formatting of documents directly. All formatting is saved in a document with the exception of versioning and passwords.
There's no worry about losing unknown Tags, either, since Word 2000 saves them even if it doesn't recognize them. If you have ever tried to save HTML pages with earlier versions of Word you will understand the concern, because earlier versions just didn't do a really good job of this. Microsoft even threw in a Web Page Wizard for those who don't want to learn coding, and a Web Page Preview which works directly from a document in any browser.
What we still don't like about Word 2000 is the formatting remaining in Web documents after saving and pulling up in a different editor. All of those tags that are still hanging around and unnecessary outside of Word. Also, it seems that that little Office Assistant just won't go away, and just keeps coming back, usually when not wanted. But all in all, from the newly designed interface--much easier to navigate now--to the new icons which now come in multiple colors, this version of Word is great!
How Does It All Stack Up?
Word 2000 has always been a strong product, especially matched up against the competition. In the earlier years the main competition was products such as Word Perfect, Ami Pro, etc., but today the competition has dwindled and there doesn't really seem to be any serious threat out there. Word 2000 just does so many things so much better than any of the competition, that it's in a world of it's own. If you are or have been a user of Word in the past, you will find that upgrading to this new version is definitely the thing to do. With all of the enhancements, and better handling of speed issues and HTML support, anyone making the switch won't be disappointed. If it's ease of creating common Web, e-mail and printed documents that you're aching for, Word 2000 is the prescription.
