It's upgrade time once again. If you're looking to migrate to Office 2000, you have several options. The new version of Office comes in four different editions: Standard, Small Business, Professional, and Premium. Here's what you get with each edition:

Oddly, the Small Business version doesn't include PowerPoint. Perhaps Microsoft thinks everyone is following the lead of Sun's Scott McNealy in banning PowerPoint from the office. In any case, all editions share one major change from Office 97: they're now fully Web-enabled.

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Office on the Web

With Office 2000, Microsoft has extensively revamped its bread-winning product to support the Web. Unlike Office 97, Office 2000 doesn't introduce any file incompatibilities with previous versions of Office (except for a minor change in Access). However, it does promote the lingua franca of the Web, HTML, to first-class status. All Office programs now work with HTML as a native format, in addition to their proprietary formats, such as DOC, PPT, or XLS.

If you've used Office 95 or Office 97, you know you could already save a document in HTML format from programs such as Word. You also know that the file that resulted from the conversion was less than perfect. In Office 2000, saving a Word file in HTML format results in a flawless recreation of your original DOC-based file. To accomplish this seamless transition from Word to HTML, Microsoft has turned to two bleeding-edge technologies: Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and the Extensible Markup Language (XML). To view the HTML version of documents created with Office 2000, you need a Web browser that supports both CSS and XML. It's no coincidence that Internet Explorer 5 (IE5) provides the best support of CSS and XML of any browser currently available.

As an example, look at this PowerPoint 2000 slide (155K) taken from a lecture on software engineering project management. Now look at the same slide in HTML format and viewed using IE5 (133K). They are virtually identical. The upshot is that Office 2000 gives you the power to publish your material on the Web with very little effort.

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The Upgrade Process

Upgrading from Office 97 to Office 2000 is very simple. There's a new installation wizard that migrates your current settings to the new setup. Office 2000 also introduces a more advanced installation procedure. Components can be installed, marked as "install on first use," or left out completely. Be forewarned though: selecting "install on first use" might become a problem if you're using Office 2000 on a notebook computer, say on an airplane, and it asks you to insert an Office CD to load a particular piece of functionality.

If you have the disk space to spare, I suggest loading everything at once. It's a good thing that disks are getting bigger, because so is the software. Installing all of Office 2000 Premium takes over 530 megabytes, and even that leaves a lot of clipart from PhotoDraw on one of the CDs.

Although the upgrade went very smoothly for me, it took a long time. Whereas installing Office 97 takes less than 15 minutes, upgrading to Office 2000 took over 2 hours on my computer. There was nothing for me to do during this process, other than swap the occasional CD (there are 4 in the Premium edition), but still ... that's longer than it takes to install Windows 98 from scratch.

There was one change in the file structure that surprised me. Office 2000 has moved the location of the templates for the common office programs. In Office 97, they are kept (by default) in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Templates. In Office 2000, they've moved to C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates. However, not all of them are there. For example, the templates for Outlook are in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\1033. The 1033 represents US English (I think). This makes things a little confusing if you tailor the templates, as I do. I was dutifully editing the EMAIL.DOT template, but I never noticed any change. It turned out I was editing the Office 97 version, not the new Office 2000 version.

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After the Upgrade

After the upgrade was complete, I started to experiment with the individual applications. There were several surprises, which I'll cover in more depth in future SIGPC articles. One change you see immediately is that the icons are different. All Office icons now have a similar look to them, differing mainly in their color.

Perhaps the most dramatic change in the user interface is the introduction of "smart" menus. With so much functionality built into complex products such as Word, the menus were becoming rather long and difficult to follow. Microsoft has altered all the menus in the Office 2000 suite to display only the most often-used items. The bottom of each menu has a small down arrow that, if the cursor remains over it for a few seconds, causes the entire menu to be shown. The Office programs automatically promote entries that you often use to be shown all the time.

I've found that this new menu structure takes a little getting used to. There are times when I'm looking for a particular function that I know is available on the Format menu, for example, but it doesn't appear when the menu is first displayed. This makes me think I was mistaken about its location, but then all menu entries appear and voila! There's the functionality I was searching for. Luckily, this "improved" menu structure can be disabled if you wish.

The biggest negative impact I've experienced with the Office 2000 upgrade is that Adobe Acrobat 4 has stopped working. The PDF reader still works, but Distiller (the application used to create PDF files), doesn't work as it used to. Microsoft claims it's Adobe's responsibility, not theirs. Adobe representatives claim they know about the problem and are working on a fix. Considering that Acrobat 4 came out just weeks before Office 2000, I find this situation incredulous. There is a workaround, involving directly invoking Distiller instead of using the menu icons, but I only found this out after much experimentation.

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Is the Upgrade Worthwhile?

After weighing the pluses and minuses, I think the Office 2000 upgrade is worthwhile. But only if you do a lot of work on the Web. If you rarely work in HTML, then Office 97 is probably still fine for you.

However, if you want to Web-enable your work, then Office 2000 is a relatively easy way to do so. But it's not without costs, both in terms of lost time (such as investigating why Distiller stops working) and a considerable amount of cash. The Office 2000 Premium upgrade retails in my area for $439

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