WITH Office 97, Microsoft has made great strides in integration and consistency between the component programs of its office software suite. Many of the most impressive new features are available across all the applications and Microsoft has also added natural language intelligence to improve everything from spelling and grammar checking to formula validation in the Excel spreadsheet.
The main improvements are:
. Better integration among Office applications;
. More tutorials and step by step guides that simplify both common and complex tasks;
. Enhanced Internet features, such as improved Web development tools and easy import and export of Web pages.
Microsoft also boasts that the applications use more shared code, but the package still hogs disk space. A typical install requires about 120MB.
Anyone accustomed to Internet Explorer 3.0 will find the changed look and feel of Office 97 familiar. Toolbars behave just as they do in Explorer - icons highlight as the mouse pointer passes over them - and they can be moved and re sized with a click and drag of the mouse. The menu bar can also be moved, resized, even detached into a floating window.
The Office Assistant, which lets the user ask for help in plain English or "natural languages" queries, replaces the Answer Wizard of earlier Office releases. It comes with a set of animated characters (including a red ball, a dog, a paper clip, and Shakespeare and Einstein look alikes) that dance about while you're getting help. Thankfully the Assistant can be turned off when it's not needed.
Creating tables has become much easier, with a free form pencil tool to trace a rectangle wherever the user wants to place a table. The same tool is used to draw lines in the table to subdivide it into smaller cells. This is a major improvement over Office 95's awkward table tools.
Excel 97 offers good work group collaboration features. Any number of users can share a file at the same time and combine revisions later. Natural language formula writing means that a formula can be expressed in terms of the labels alongside the data rather than through the sort of obscure cell references - SUM(A2:$B$3) for example - that befuddle new spreadsheet users.
The key feature of Office 97 is its raft of Internet features. Every type of Office document now supports hyperlinks which can point to Web addresses, files on the local or networked drives, or bookmarked locations elsewhere in the same document.
All the programs can automatically recognise and format hyperlinks, so in a Word document which contains a Web address one click jumps the user out of Word and off to the Internet. This works well on a computer with a permanent Internet connection, but it can be very irritating for someone with a dial up connection to find that an accidental click on a link has started the modem wheezing and dialling.
"Save as HTML" is a prominent option on the File menu and the conversion to the format used on the Web works much better than the Internet Assistants supplied free by Microsoft as add ons to Office 95. In particular, the Excel HTML conversion will win the gratitude of anyone who has suffered the drudgery of entering tables in HTML manually. There are Web page wizards for creating home pages and presentations, and formatting tools to add backgrounds and animated text to documents.
Overall, Office 97's improvements are impressive. The focus on ease of use, Internet and integration should please long time Office users. The question they may ask is "Why didn't we have this the first time round?" As to whether it's a must have upgrade, well, the price tag of £400 and the diskspace overhead may determine that for you.