Office 2000 Premium Part II: Design with Publisher, FrontPage, and PhotoDraw Got Something You Really Want To Publish Fast? Douglas Smith
What's New? Publisher 2000, like some of the others in the Office 2000 suite, has an abundance of new features which show that feedback from users has found its way into the ivory low-rises in Washington state. Publisher 2000 is a business desktop publishing program that allows users to create professional-looking marketing materials. There are over 2,000 professionally designed publication templates and design elements which allow you to mix and match your publications at will. There is also a wizard that allows you to work in an automated way with great results, even for the novice. Integration with other components of Office is also a real plus.
The similarities of Publisher 2000 and other Office 2000 components allow users to start using it right away without a lot of retraining like other software that your organization might use. Newly added features such as automatic bullets and numbering will allow you to create bullet and numbered lists like word, Publisher now uses the same file open and file save dialog box as Office 2000 allowing you to view 50 percent more files with less visual clutter, and provide links to the last 20 to 50 documents that you last worked on. It also allows you to share designs across Office. An example of this would be creating a document in Word and a presentation in PowerPoint that share the same look as a brochure created in Publisher. Backward compatible saving is not a problem anymore, no matter what version of Office others in your office have.
Other improvements: Publisher 2000 incorporates a Quick Publication Wizard, Catalog Wizard, and the ability to flip any graphical element horizontal or vertical. There is also a new Measurement toolbar allowing for advanced text manipulation such as shrinking, growing, and rotation. Rounding out the many new features of Publisher are the Pack and Go Wizard, which allows for easy travel with your whole production over multiple disk anywhere in the world; Commercial printing support, the ability to save your publications as Web pages in HTML just like Office 2000; and several more font and graphical enhancements. Improvements to many other areas of Publisher have been made, making for a great looking package.
The Good and the Bad With all of the new and improved additions, selecting the best is tough and probably will depend most on what you personally need. We felt that the improvement in HTML support, like others in this package, is key. The world seems to be heading in that direction, and Publisher 2000 seems not to risk falling behind in this area. The newly added Wizards have also enhanced this package immensely, when compared to how Publisher worked in the past. If you have ever worked with any publishing software you are familiar with how moving one or two items on a page can throw the whole thing off--but with the help of these new Wizards setting up and publishing is a lot easier for the novice and experienced user as well.
Another improvement that we liked was the way that all of the menus have been made to look just like the rest of Office, including toolbars. This makes getting around in Publisher as easy as with all of the Office tools in the suite. And our hat goes off to Microsoft for including more color schemes and custom colors to choose from: we counted over 60.
Unfortunately along with new features and Wizards comes bulk, and the more bulk that you incorporate in a package usually appears in the form of application speed. If you are not running a really fast Pentium computer with lots of ram and disk space you are in for frustating times when you start working in Publisher. We found that with at least a 400 class Pentium with a minimum of 64 megs Publisher did well but the program performed much better with 128 megs of available RAM.
How Does It All Stack Up? Publisher 2000 is one of the strongest programs of its kind anywhere, hands down. With its seamless integration with all of the other components of Office 2000 you just can't find much better. The closest rival to Publisher 2000 is Harvard Publisher which comes in an 11 CD set. With this package you can do some things that Publisher can't do, such as "shrink text to fit," a feature that will automatically fit any text and font to a particular space or column. But when you consider value for the buck Publisher 2000 still has the upper hand, and it's also king when it comes to design themes and ease of use. And don't let us forget about the fantastic HTML support, allowing you to publish directly to the web in a snap. Pound for pound Microsoft Publisher 2000 is truly the reigning king of the hill!
