Microsoft Office 97 in use

The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group
Microsoft Office 97 in use
Ash Nallawalla
ash@melbpc.org.au

Last December, Australia was treated to a rare "privilege" by Microsoft: the shipment of Office 97 one month before the rest of the world. I received my copy a few days before Christmas, and have been using it nearly every day at work. Microsoft Office 97 (O97) is a suite of programs one would use in large and small offices. Many, like myself, would use it at home. I have not used a competing product for some years, but I have not felt the need to leave the Microsoft camp.

O97 is made up of several complementary programs that are well linked to one another

Figure 1. Word's marquee editor

Figure 2. You can check spellings in three flavours of English

An overhelpful assistant

Help comes your way when you need it (and sometimes when I don't) in the form of an animated character called the Office Assistant. If you begin typing, say, "Dear Stan," the character pops up and says (quite unnecessarily) "It looks like you are writing a letter" and asks if you need help. If you accept, a letter Wizard pops up and extracts an impressive amount of information about the topic, including matters you may not have considered, such as mailing instructions or a choice of complimentary closures. Once the assistant has "realised" that you have learnt a task, it will not pester you again.

Figure 3. Oh no, here comes that helpful Assistant!

Figure 4. Outlook's mail inbox

Word 97

The user interface for all the components has changed for the better, although I did not have any problems with the previous version. Menu options are mostly where they used to be, or moved to more logical locations.

An interesting new feature (available in all modules) is the Hyperlink. You may know the link from Help text or a Web page; this one can be used to make a web link or a document on a private network. Links are great for offering the reader an option to digress and look at some information in detail.

I believe I invented the concept of the Intranet four years ago (no, don't spoil my dream and tell me someone beat me to it). If I were smarter then, I'd be a rich man. At my previous job I compiled some corporate policy manuals with a Help compiler and placed link icons on my Sydney director's desktop. He didn't think much of the idea, so there died the Intranet, waiting to make someone else rich. Anyway, you don't need a web server to create an Intranet: linked documents can be HTML or O97 files, down to a specific cell in a spreadsheet.

Tables can be a tricky concept to a newcomer. Now there are two more ways to create them. A "pencil" tool now enables you to draw the approximate shape of the table and it is drawn for you; you can adjust the details later, if you wish. Another nice touch is the icon that inserts a new row or column for you.

Sorting torture test

I needed to sort a 288-page-long list of newsgroups. This was derived from a much larger source file. As I scrolled down the source file (to remove other lines, leaving only the newsgroups), Word ran out of some memory and said it would no longer display grammatical errors. Each pass would sort only a part of the file. The third pass (after minor editing) hung the program and I had to kill the task. Restarting the program enabled me to complete the sorting. In a separate exercise, Word failed to sort a 481-page document at all.

Replacements

In the same large file I needed to reduce the number of blanks that were present on each line - say about forty per line. I asked the search/replace tool to replace two blanks with one blank. I was disappointed to see that it had made a single pass per line, that is, only half the blanks had disappeared. Other text editors would have removed all but two or three blank spaces per line. A second pass hung the program.

Figure 5. Excel makes a fine Web table editor

Figure 6. Some Melb PC personalities being examined
in Photo Editor

Word as a Web tool

Word 97 is full of pleasant surprises, such as the little dialog box that popped up when I went to edit a marquee (see Figure 1). I would not regard Word 97 as a true HTML editing tool for anything beyond a simple page; however, it does a great job of those small edits to existing documents.

There are minor irritations, such as editing on a "page break" can cause the edited text to be hidden until the page is refreshed. Changing between source and preview modes requires the page to be saved first. Source view always starts not in the "Normal" view, which would be more suitable here, but in a "Page layout" view, which is better suited to a word processing task.

Excel 97

I use Excel mainly to fill out weekly expense claims and design the occasional new form. To my surprise, I tend to use this version to design Web tables (since my Web editor has always been Notepad and I can never remember the syntax).

Outlook

It took me a few months to understand the purpose of Outlook.

Yes, many reviewers said how wonderful it is but didn't convince me how it was so. I don't claim to be completely convinced but I like what I have seen so far. The turning point came when we installed Exchange Server within the company. I found Outlook's e-mail interface to be a little better than that of Windows Messaging (the new name for the Exchange client in Windows 95). Outlook and the Exchange client share many components; for example, when you start the latter, its Help file points to that for Outlook. A friend sent me a patch that adds a preview pane and allows quote symbols to be added to text that is quoted in replies.

I am not impressed by the general approach of Microsoft mail packages (that I have seen) that make you reply above the quoted text. The convention on BBSs and the Internet is the opposite. I imagine the explanation is that the recipient does not need to scroll past dozens of lines to read the reply. Now we have all these people using such mailers on the Internet and quoting entire messages below their comment. (Never mind me, this is a lost cause.)

I liked the ability to set up meetings with my colleagues, which is not a new concept but something you don't fully appreciate until you use it.

I imported my old address book from Symantec ACT 2.0. It was mostly a clean, quick process, particularly the way the country code (a separate field in ACT) was appended to the phone number in Outlook. ACT did not have a defined code for "Country", and Outlook ignored user-defined fields in ACT, so I had to add the country manually. Another minor quirk was that "Mr & Mrs G Smith" was imported (and sorted) as "Mr Mrs & G Smith". Yet, I was happier with the on-screen and printed appearance of the address book than ACT 2.0.

PowerPoint 97

PowerPoint (PP) 97 is a noticeable improvement over the previous version, particularly when it comes to special effects. In a corporate environment one is usually limited to a corporate style, so the generous selection of templates is wasted on me. The sound effects are all well and (quite) good, but few of us travel with amplified loudspeakers, so they remain unused in most of my presentations.

We tend to like trivial features that are important to us and my favourite new feature is the transparency tool. I can now hide the surrounding background in product shots if it is not relevant. You click on the colour that is to be hidden and it becomes transparent - as simple as that!

I tend to re-use some old slides and I like the new Slide Finder, which displays tiny images (thumbnails) so I can choose the ones I need. Previously, I would open the old presentation in Slide Sorter View and pick them from those images.

The main disappointment was that the PP 97 viewer is not available as this is written, five months after release. A viewer is a program you can freely distribute and which is used to display a presentation. The supplied viewer is for PP 95. This is mentioned in the "Readme" file, which I had not read until I heard complaints from my correspondents.

Access 97

I have only used Access for trivial tasks, such as importing from another data source or using a membership database designed by someone else. It is capable of handling far more complex tasks than I will need to write and is equally easy to use for lightweight work.

Photo Editor

Photo Editor is a handy accessory that is bundled with Office 97. As its name implies, it is useful for editing bitmaps of any type, including scanned images. It can connect with your scanner so that you can start a scan with a click of a button or you can operate your scanner with its own front end software. It is not quite a paint tool, but it has some handy features such as setting transparency and exporting to a different format, which I use for some web images.

Imperfections

I have mentioned earlier that there are some quirks, which is to be expected in such a major package. Apparently, many people have objected to the changes in file formats and the need to use converters when sharing files with previous versions. So, I am not surprised to see a report that a major patch is on its way.

Recommendation

O97 represents a genuine reason to upgrade from an older version, or to buy, if you are making your first purchase. It is integrated with the Internet environment that has enveloped many businesses and homes. Although few people would be maintaining web sites, they may have the need to make small contributions to existing sites and O97 makes this task easy.

Reprinted from the July 1997 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia