Office 2000 Premium Part I: Word, Excel, and Outlook The Bottom Line Douglas Smith
In this first segment we have taken a good look at Word 2000, Excel 2000, and Outlook 2000. These three products, the major players in the Office 2000 suite, are the basis of the others to be reviewed in Parts 2 and 3. We have tried to set the stage, and give the meat of what makes each product tops in its individual class.
The competition is out there, but just doesn't stand up to Microsoft’s first offerings in this marvelous suite of productivity tools. One thing to remember when using these beauties, though, is that memory is a must-have, along with plenty of hard disk space, if you intend on loading all or most of the programs. We found that they perform best on a Pentium class machine, preferably a 200 Mhz or higher with at least 64 MB of RAM. Having at least 500 MB to 1 Gig of hard disk space would be needed to get the full benefits of the package.
The new features in Office 2000's core applications--Word, Excel, and Outlook—didn’t exactly rock our world, but because of the fact that industry standards are heading in this direction, if you aren't using Word or Excel, you'd better be using an application that's compatible, or you'll be left behind the eight ball, all alone.
Office 2000 is the strongest contender out there, period. There are others that will put up a great battle, but when it comes to a suite that works great, application wide, and uses HTML as a native file format, nothing else is close enough.
Stay tuned for our next part of this three-part review of Office 2000. We will take a look at Design with Publisher, FrontPage, and PhotoDraw, and finish off with Access, PowerPoint and the Small Business Tools.
