Tech Toys XIV The Office 2000s by Robert Fabian

With days of each other, Microsoft and Corel released Office 2000 suites. I couldn't pass up the opportunity to investigate. This is a report on my initial observations about the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two suites.

All of the office suites include a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, database, and personal information manager. Microsoft, in its Premium package, also includes Internet Explorer, Publisher, FrontPage, and PhotoDraw. It's a large and ambitious suite.

For me, the heart and soul of an office suite is the word processor. Spreadsheets can be handy, but will never be a large part of my work; the same is true for databases. And all current presentation packages have more capabilities than I need, or most people should use.

I have an active dislike for the integrated Personal Information Managers. I don't want everything to be integrated; my computer becomes too "delicate". Small changes to my computing environment can too easily lead to a broken PIM.

This time around, both Microsoft and Corel have introduced sexy, new features that I immediately turned off. Microsoft has smart menus that start displaying only the choices that Microsoft (in it's wisdom) feels you need. No thank you.

Corel's WordPerfect has its own sexy, new automatic preview. The page jumps around to give you an automatic preview as you scroll through available fonts, or point sizes, or paragraph alignments, or ... It's a pure irritation. Again, no thank you.

The approach Microsoft and Corel have taken to generating web pages illustrates the difference between these two office suites. Microsoft provides "round trip" html. Save a Word document as html and all of the features are preserved. It's neat.

What isn't apparent is that you are (almost) required to use Microsoft Office 2000 applications to see that full html document. You can see it using another browser, but it's a pale imitation of what can be seen with the correct (Microsoft) software.

Corel has finally recognized that it must be compatible with as much software as possible. It does a pretty good job reading and writing Word documents. And it provides a least common denominator web page that conforms to the html 3.2 that most browsers understand.

There are two interesting extensions to Corel's word processor. First, it comes with the ability to directly publish Adobe pdf files. This is the nearly universal way for people to share formatted documents. Corel also publishes directly to Trellix.

This is a tool, from the inventor of VisiCalc, that allows anyone to establish and maintain a multi-page hyperlinked document. I find Trellix useful because it allows me to establish a client web site that does not require sophisticated, and costly, personnel to maintain.

For those working in an integrated, all Microsoft environment, the new Office 2000 suite does deliver benefits. Realizing those benefits demands a high level of commitment to Microsoft. The benefits are reduced for those of us reluctant to exclusively follow the Microsoft way.

WordPerfect should be seriously considered by all individuals thinking about an upgrade to their office applications. Notwithstanding the name, it's not "perfect". But it does offer effective and non-proprietary connections into the Internet.

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