One of the most important changes in Office 97 from Office 95 is the tight integration between applications. For example, all now share a common drawing application that is much improved from previous tools. Internet and web support is now built in to all components. No more fiddling with "Internet Assistants" and other add-ons. All applications now support "Save as HTML" directly. In addition, Word 97 does a pretty reasonable job of editing HTML pages. Right-clicking on an HTML document will show the option "Edit with Word". PowerPoint presentations can now be made web-ready by providing ActiveMovie (streaming video), Real Audio support, and animations.

On-the-fly spell checking was already in Word before, but now on-the-fly grammar checking has been added. And if you use Outlook as your e-mail client, Word is the default e-mail editor. It performs dynamic formatting of messages, highlights URLs, etc. Very nice. If we were using Microsoft's Exchange server, Outlook can also be used to setup meetings, manage calendars, etc. quite easily. Some press articles have mentioned that Office 97 uses a different file format than Office 95. That is true: Word 97 files are not usable by Word 95. However, Office 97 provides a "Save as Word 95" option if you want to maintain backwards compatibility. Support for collaboration, notes and annotations, and revision control is now also provided. There is also smarted "wizards" that are actually pretty good at helping you with common tasks. Office 97 runs on Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.x. It takes about 120M in a "typical" install, or about 180M in a full install.

More information is available directly from the Empire at http://www.microsoft.com/msoffice/.