Office 2000 launched

It is out a year ahead, going by its nomenclature. Office 2000, Microsoft's office suite package, is through with its beta rounds now and its formal launch in India coincided with the worldwide launch on June 7^th.

It is bound to be well received in India going by initial responses. Its beta testing was done at 120 Indian companies out of a total of 260 who had registered for the test. Companies in the public sector, banks, infotech and manufacturing sectors were involved in this product (beta) test, which was done with over 20,000 users world-wide and, for the first time, in India. Office 2000 met with a positive response among these testers. 94 percent of them voted in favour of the package while 91 percent expressed their intention to install Office 2000 in their organisations.

Its price line -- Rs. 15,500 for the standard version, Rs.19, 500 for the Professional version and Rs.26,500 for the Premium version -- is similar to those of its earlier release, Office '97. The upgrade versions come at Rs.11,700 and Rs.16,500 for the standard and professional versions respectively.

Web integration, data tracking and analysis tools, Internet enabled applications and collaborating features are expected to be the key features in this version of the product.

The company is planning an enhancement early next year, featuring a Hindi enabled version of the word processor MS Word, for the Indian market. This is likely to be followed by other languages later. Microsoft is involved with Indian software companies like Sonata and C-DAC for this purpose.

Despite the fact that the program files need more memory space on the hard disk (190 MB as compared to 100 MB for Office 97) there are several new features.

The single most mentionable feature about Office 2000 is its similarity to the Internet browsers. It has the look and feel of a browser. While all its traditional software like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access are part of the package, Office 2000 itself is tuned towards the operating system Windows 2000, due to be released shortly.

Office 2000 also enables work groups to be created on Windows NT platform or on the Intranet, wherein members can communicate with each other, link documents, exchange files within their groups making for some kind of collaborative computing. This integration of different components makes it very flexible to export and import data from one component to the other.

Other features like visiting card folders, I-calendar to schedule meetings using the internet and create distribution lists would be welcomed by the 'global manager'.

Its font features are a lot more enhanced giving a more realistic look in the document on screen. Excel has been 'fortified' with data tracking and analysis tools and backend integration with networks. It can also send mails, surf the web, schedule phone calls and faxes. Another interesting feature is that documents can be begun from anywhere, not necessarily from the top left of the page.

The pluses: Many practical improvements for the heavy user of Word, Excel and Outlook. Major benefits for corporate users in Access, which now interfaces well as a front-end with SQL databases. Spell check and multiple item clipboard are good features.

Deleted or corrupted files can be fixed without too much hassle.

For Word 2000, its web authoring tools are worth a mention while Excel 2000 has a better pivot table facility. In PowerPoint, its autoformat and three window view (one with the slice, another with the comments/ notes and the third has the entire outline) should be its best features.

And the minuses: Compatibility problems on web tools front: problems in web page formats, with Netscape Navigator, with HTML files and connecting to other applications are some of the major ones.

Microsoft has always been savvy at the marketplace. Proof? Office 2000 has to be registered either over the Internet or via fax within 45 days of installation and use of any component of the software. This beats the software pirate and expect Microsoft to know about it all.

What is the verdict? Casual users would not find too much worth upgrading, but then if you do, it might be worth it if you liked the web interface styles, which we saw earlier in Windows '98.