Every two to
three years, Microsoft unleashes a new version of its venerable
productivity suite, Microsoft Office, adding both features and bloat
to what has always been a consistently excellent product. And on
that note, Office 2000, which was released publicly in June 1999, is no different:
It's a massive beast, eager to eat up as much hard drive space as
you'll give it. But it's also a worthy and compelling upgrade to the
previous version, Office 97, for certain users.
Should you upgrade?
For many people, this is a non-issue. Like Windows itself, the majority of Office sales come from new PC bundling. Those that get Office 2000 with a new machine can rejoice: They will certainly have the hardware muscle needed to best take advantage of the product. For users with older Windows 95 machines, the picture is a little less clear because Office 2000 requires a pretty hefty system. There's also a money issue: Is Office 2000 worth the $250 or so that it will cost most people to upgrade?
Over the course of this multi-part review, I'll attempt to answer these questions, which are made a bit more difficult by the shear number of ways you'll be able to get Office. Office 2000 is shipping in five distinct editions, including:
Microsoft Office 2000 Standard Edition: Includes Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint.
Microsoft Office 2000 Small Business Edition: Includes Word, Excel, Outlook, Publisher, and Microsoft Office Small Business Tools.
Microsoft Office 2000 Professional Edition: Includes Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, and Microsoft Office Small Business Tools.
Microsoft Office 2000 Premium Edition: Includes Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access, FrontPage, Publisher, PhotoDraw (previously released), and Microsoft Office Small Business Tools.
Microsoft Office 2000 Developer Edition: Includes Office 2000 Premium Edition with tools and documentation for Office developers.
Basically, each of
these editions builds on the previous edition, adding new features,
programs, tools, and of course pricing. The edition you choose
should be based on cost and the number of features you require. Though
this is a review of the Premium Edition, those interested in other
editions will be happy to note that the review covers all of the
programs in each of the Office 2000 editions except for Developer,
which I found confusing and disjointed. Office developers know who
they are and will be getting this edition regardless of my opinion.
New features in Office 2000
After the
completion of Office 97, the Microsoft Office team met to discuss
features for the next major revision. The team decided to contact
its biggest customers and, in a unique change of pace for the
company, actually find out what features they wanted. In typical
Microsoft fashion, however, they also added a host of features no
one was really asking for (at least directly) in an attempt to drive
home the "Webification" of Microsoft's product lines.
Office 2000, therefore, would embrace the Web like no other Office
suite before it. And the results, as you might expect, are mixed.
Given this little bit of history, here are the three primary goals
of Office 2000:
Any attempt at
understanding Office 2000 must take into account these goals. I
personally find it hard, if not impossible, to believe that anyone
was asking for Web integration, for example, yet it's telling that
this is the first item on Microsoft's list of goals. And they even
snuck in a mention of the Web on the second goal, which probably was
a customer request until that was added.
Looking over the list of new
features in Office 2000, it's pretty easy to understand where some
of these ideas came from. Others--like the nasty new Office 2000
Clipboard--are puzzling in their complexity. And the Web emphasis,
well, it's just plain crazy. Microsoft's literature for Office 2000
reads "Web, Web, Web" and its hard to see anything else.
Fortunately, there are plenty of new features for even the
Web-disadvantaged. Let's take a look.
All of the Office 2000 applications feature new Open and Save
dialogs (Figure 1 and Figure
2) which represent a significant improvement over the system
Open and Save dialogs in Windows 9x. In fact, the Open and Save
dialogs in Office 2000 are so good, they're going to be used in
Windows 2000 too. But that's the problem: Office isn't the place to
be adding new system features like this. And users of Windows 95 and
98 will be faced with two different sets of dialogs, those used by
Office 2000 and those used by every other program. This feature
should have been left for Windows 2000, so that users wouldn't need
to deal with this confusion.
On the other hand, the dialogs are quite nice and easy to use. They
feature far more in the way of file management than the older
dialogs, with an Outlook bar of frequently-visited locations on the
left and a full range of file system tools on the top (Go up one
folder, Create new folder, and the like).
Overall, this feature is a mixed blessing: The dialogs are great but
currently they are also 100% different from the common dialogs found
on every Windows system on the planet.
The Office 2000 Clipboard (Figure 3) is easily the most controversial new
feature that's been added to the suite in this release. Using the
standard Windows Clipboard, users are able to copy or cut one
item--be it text, graphics, whatever--into a special hidden
"folder" so that this item might be later pasted
elsewhere. This system has become quite natural over the years and
most Windows users are probably pretty comfortable with it. Office
2000 adds a new Clipboard (that only works in some Office 2000
applications) that can store up to 12 items. And while it
might seem like a good idea at first glance, the actual
implementation of this feature leaves a lot to be desired.
The problem with the Office Clipboard is that it pops up a small
windowed toolbar, right in the center of the screen. If you attempt
to dock the toolbar with the other Office 2000 toolbars in the app
you're using, it will simply pop back into the center of the screen
the next time you use it. There is simply no way to configure the
little bugger and it gets excruciatingly annoying after a few
appearances. On the plus side, it will turn itself off if you close
the toolbar window three times in a row.
This particular feature should have been left to a later release or,
more obviously, to a later version of Windows itself (perhaps 2000).
I've discussed this with Office team members who were surprisingly
forthcoming with the Clipboard's problems while sheepishly
explaining that it was going to ship as-is, broken though it may be.
It was suggested to me that a future version of this feature would
indeed be integrated into Windows when they've fixed all the
problems. I expect users to hate this feature and I recommend
shutting it down immediately (using the three closes in a row) so
that you never need to deal with it again. This feature should not
have been included as-is in Office.
Another mixed-bag, depending on how you setup Office, the new suite
features an Install on Demand feature that allows you to install a
subset of the total suite and have the applications automatically
install new features as you need them. It's a great idea for those
of us doing a network install (and let's face it, Office is sold
primarily to large corporations) but for us home users, it's going
to be a pain because every time a new feature needs to be installed,
you'll be prompted for the Office 2000 CD-ROM. Oh joy.
I guess the point here is that home users should be sure to install
everything they need the first time, unless they plan on leaving the
CD-ROM in the drive.
In a related note, Office 2000 applications are also self-repairing.
This means that a corrupted or accidentally deleted WINWORD.EXE
won't require a total reinstall. Office 2000 is smart enough to
realize when files are missing or corrupted and will automatically
replace them. Again, home users will be prompted for the CD-ROM, but
corporate environments with network installations will have a
seamless, self-repairing environment.
For both of these features, home users are going to be somewhat in
the lurch. They'll work, but you'll need to have your install CD
handy.
In a stunning bit of inconsistency, Microsoft has elected to change
some--but not all--of its Office 2000 applications to a Single
Document Interface (SDI), where every document is contained in its
own parent window (Figure 4). In earlier versions of Office, documents were all
contained within a single parent window. This type of window is
called Multiple Document Interface (MDI) because a single window
contains multiple documents.
So what's the big deal? Certainly, SDI is easier. If you're working
with two Word documents, for example, they will both show up
individually in the Windows taskbar and you can ALT+TAB between
them; this is far easier than groping for the Window menu with the
mouse pointer, as you had to do in Office 97. But the feature was
inconsistently implemented as many Office 2000 applications--like
FrontPage--do not feature an SDI interface, but still rely on the
old MDI style of window.
I guess I have to say I love this feature because I use Word every
day and I often have multiple documents open. But I wish they had
made its use more consistent across the Office apps.
In another grand attempt to bypass the operating system, the Office
team has added personalized menus and toolbars to Office 2000. This
feature, which will become a standard part of the operating system
with Windows 2000, is bound to be a love/hate issue for people: Some
will be overjoyed with the feature while others will loathe it. My
only problem with it is that this feature should have been added to
Windows, not Office.
In any event, the menus and toolbars are configurable and if you're
dead-set against them, you can turn them off. By default, most (but
not all, go figure) Office applications place both toolbars on the
same horizontal plane (Figure 7) so that they take up less space. But unless
you are running Windows at 1600x1200 (all two of you raise your
hands), this means that you won't see all of the toolbar buttons at
once. You can still get the hidden buttons using a small drop-down
menu, but this is rather bogus.
As for the menus, less-often used choices are hidden (Figure
5) unless you
hover over a menu for a few seconds or click the chevrons found at
the bottom of each menu (Figure 6). The chevrons, which resembles a double
down-arrow, toggle the menus between the standard view and the full
view, which will show you all of the options.
Overall, this is a good idea and its
done right. I just think that certain
people are going to hate it.
Despite the fact that I placed this single feature near the bottom
of the list, Microsoft touts its various Internet integration
features prominently at the top of its own list. While some of the
Web integration features are certainly impressive, few of them will
have any use outside of Intranets in all-Microsoft shops as they
rely heavily on Internet Explorer 5.0. For example, in Office 2000, you can take
advantage of a new "Save as HTML" ("Universal viewing" and
Web round-tripping) feature, that will save most (but not all, once
again) Office documents to the Web, and allow you to later edit them
from an Office application without any loss of quality. That's
actually kind of cool and the six people that use this feature will
love it.
Other Internet integration features such as Web Themes, Web discussions,
and the like leave me cold. I can't imagine that many people have
much use for this drivel, but you're welcome to visit Microsoft's
Web site for more information if you think it's compelling. I think
it's a waste of time.
Office email, however, is an excellent new feature (Figure
8) that many users will be able to take advantage of. Email
capabilities have been integrated into most (but not every, once
again) Office 2000 application so that you can easily send Office
documents via email.
Aside from Office email, the new Web integration features are
nothing special for typical Office users. And if it sounds like I'm deliberately ignoring
these features, you're right: Microsoft too often pushes their own
goals ahead of the needs of its customers. This is an obvious
example.
Office 2000 Help is a close second to "Collect and Paste"
on the annoyance scale. When you initiate a Help window now,
it resizes your Office application so that the two windows occupy
the entire screen, with the Help window squeezing in on the right
and that annoying little Office Assistant (assuming you haven't
throttled the thing) flying up to the top of the screen (Figure
9). Though I
hate this approach, I understand why they did it: The Office team is
attempting to allow people to read Help and following along as they
work in their document at the same time, without the need to switch
back and forth between the windows. But God, it's awful. I find
myself almost screaming at the monitor in frustration as I try to
get Help to act like a normal window.
And that little Office Assistant (Figure
10). What can I say? I hate it.
And I suspect that most other people will hate it too. The good news is that
you can actually disable it cleanly now (unlike in Office 97) by
simply unchecking a single choice in its Option dialog. Ah,
progress. But the bad new is that, if you actually like these
things, they're not in every Office application (!), but are rather
only in the "main" apps (Word, Excel, and the like). You
gotta give Microsoft credit: They're consistently inconsistent.
Installing Office 2000
Installing
Office 2000 is, as you might expect of a program this big, a bit of
a chore. The Windows Installer-based installation program steps you
through the setup process rather cleanly until and unless you choose
a custom setup, which is recommended. At this point, things
start to get ugly.
But first things first.
When you insert the first Office 2000 CD-ROM, the Windows Installer
kick-starts to life (Figure 1) and examines your system. A few
seconds later, the Installation Wizard (Figure 2) begins, providing
you with relatively easy step-by-step instructions. In the first
step, you enter your name, initials, organization, and a massive
25-character CD-Key (Figure 3).
In the second portion of the Wizard, you are asked to accept the
End-User License Agreement (EULA, Figure 4). I could very well be
the only person outside of Microsoft that actually reads this. It's
not that exciting.
Part three is the most important part. You are given two choices in
this dialog (Figure 5), though the choices will vary depending on
your configuration. If you have an earlier version of Office, you
will be able to choose between "Upgrade Now" and
"Customize." The upgrade option replaces the earlier
version of Office with the new version and it provides you with
Microsoft's "typical" installation of Office 2000. The
custom install will allow you to run Office 2000 concurrently with
previous Office apps if desired (not recommended, if only for the
wasted hard drive space) and allow you to specify which components
to install. If you're installing Office 2000 on a system with no
previous version of Office, you'll be given "Typical
install" and "Customize" options where typical also
provides you with Microsoft's idea of a typical installation. In
either scenario, I recommend the custom install.
When you choose the Customize option, you are presented with the
Installation Location phase (Figure 6), where you can determine
which drive and folder that Office will be installed to. This is a
handy dialog, with a nice graphical representation of the remaining
space in each partition.
If you are installing Office 2000 on a system that does have a
previous version Office installed, the next dialog will ask you
which Office applications, if any, should be overwritten by the new
version. This lets you pick and choose, for whatever reason, which
older apps are removed and which aren't. Honestly, there's no good
reason to do this.
Finally, you arrive at the meat of the Installation Wizard, the
Selecting Features phase (Figure 7). Users of Plus! 98 will be
familiar with this style of installation. Each component of Office
is represented by a node on the installation tree. You can
right-click each node and choose from a list of choices (Figure 8)
that will affect all options contained by that node. Also, you can
expand and contract levels of the tree as needed (Figure 9) to
completely customize your Office install.
It's a bear. And yet, it's also a good thing: I mean, we want this
level of control, don't we? I think so, but then I also think
that the architects of Office didn't go far enough. Ever since the
release of Office 97, I've been calling for a truly componentized
version of Office where you could literally pick and choose the
components you'd like to install. And at first glance, it looks like
they've granted my every wish. I mean, doesn't this qualify as a
stunning response to my own complaints?
No.
Here's why: In a truly componentized version of Outlook 2000, for
example, the components I could pick and choose between would be the
very components in Outlook: Email, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, and
Notes. So I should be able to install a version of Outlook with only
Email and Calendar, if I wanted to. But I can't. Because Office
isn't truly componentized, it's simply the same huge, monolithic
application it's always been, with a slew of add-ons and optional
features. That's not the same thing and it's a major disappointment
that three years of development haven't given us a more
componentized suite.
OK, so you probably think I hate the new setup, but I don't: It's no
better or worse than the old way of picking and choosing which
options to install. It's just different. But on a positive note, it
does conform to Microsoft's new installation guidelines, so we're
probably going to see a lot of other apps use this type of install
as well. Just don't be fooled into believing that there have been
any major architectural changes to Office. There's aren't any. And
most people will be positively bewildered by all of the options.
It's just a huge set of programs.
Once you're done playing with the options to install (and granted,
this could take a long, long time), The Office installer will
configure for the options you've chosen (Figure 10) and physically
install the proper files on your hard drive (Figure 11). No reboot
is necessary. For some reason, the act of copying the files take a
long time, even on very fast SCSI III-based systems.
Another side note: The first Office 2000 CD-ROM only installs the
"main" Office applications: Word, Excel, Access,
PowerPoint, FrontPage, and Outlook. If you want to install PhotoDraw
or Publisher, those installs are separate and available from
different CD-ROMs. I think it's cheap that Microsoft provided no way
to do this from a single installation point.
As always, Office defies logic and spews icons all over your Start
menu, rather than creating its own Program group like every other
application on the planet. This little bit of arrogance--especially
in the face of repeated complaints from customers--is hard to
take and, frankly, I'm sick of it. Like many people, one of the first
things I do when I install Office is move all of its icons into a
single "Microsoft Office" group. Why the company couldn't
have done this automatically is beyond me.
Anyway, Microsoft adds two icons, "New Office
Document" and "Open Office Document," to the top of
the Start menu. I delete this immediately and have yet to meet
anyone that uses these. It then spews the icons for Word, Excel,
Outlook, Access, FrontPage and PowerPoint into the Programs group
along with a new group called Office Tools. Hey thanks!
The first time you run any Office application, you will be presented
by an offer to register the product. If you have an Internet
connection, I recommend that you do so: Unlike the dubious behavior
of the online registration programs in Office 97 and 2000, this one
won't be sending any hidden information to Microsoft. And
registering the product electronically is the best way to ensure
that you won't be asked to register again later.
Microsoft Access 2000
Microsoft Access 2000 (Figure
1) is a personal database management system and while it established
itself as the product to beat long ago, this new revision does offer
a couple of compelling new features.
Unfortunately, this is also the sole Office 2000 application to
change its document format so heavy users of Access are going to
want to think twice before upgrading: Access 2000 will attempt to
convert existing databases to Access 2000 format; if you don't allow
this, the databases will open in read-only format (Figure
2).
The goals for Access 2000 included a more user-friendly interface
and consistency with other Office 2000 applications. Unfortunately,
Access remains an anachronism in this release, offering only a
partial similarity with other Office apps. And because Access 2000
adopts the new "Single Document Interface (SDI)" existing
Access users will be confused by the windows that proliferate all
over the taskbar as your using it.
If you're familiar with Access, you know that you spend a lot of
time in the Database window, the "hub" of Access (Figure
3). This window has been significantly updated in this release, with
an Outlook Bar-based user interface, variable view list box, and the
ability to create custom Outlook Bar groups. Frankly, I'm not sure
that the Outlook Bar creates any particular "consistency"
with other Office apps, but it doesn't matter: The new Database
window is a winner.
The Outlook Bar is divided into two sections by default, Objects
and Groups. The Objects section deals with the Access objects we all
know and love, such as Tables, Queries, Forms, and the like, as well
as a few newcomers such as [Data Access] Pages. The Groups section
provides quick access to locations on your hard drive, such as
Favorites (Figure 4). You can add custom locations if desired.
Using the new list box view styles, you can view objects in the
same way you do with files in My Computer: Large Icons, Small Icons,
List, and Details (Figure 5).
Working with database objects in Access 2000 is very similar to
previous releases with a few changes. For example, when you open or
design a table, the window opens "outside" of the Access
IDE, spawning a new taskbar button. This allows you to ALT+TAB
between open Access windows, which is confusing at first, but nice
when you're used to it. Of course, users that have a lot of windows
open might find this unappealing, but I think it was a decent change
(Figure 6).
A new Internet feature in Access 2000, Data Access Pages (Figure 7)
allows users to bind data from Access into Web pages that can be
viewed over the Internet or mailed to other users on a network.
Microsoft is really pushing the Web capabilities in Access and while
my first reaction to this feature is one of dismissal, it's possible
that Data Access Pages--when combined with Access 2000's native SQL
Server 7.0 integration (see below)--may have some merit. However, I
question the technical brightness of anyone that places live Access
data on a public Web site. Access, unlike SQL Server isn't designed
to handle more than 10 users at a time and Web sites based on this
database will quickly stall under the
weight of its users.
However, Data Access Pages is still interesting. In addition to the
static views of data we've come to expect on the Web, Data Access
Pages allows users to edit data (if desired) over the Web, which is
pretty powerful, especially when it's automated as it is here. Web
developers that use SQL Server on the back-end are going to want to
give this feature a look, especially since the SQL Server Web
Publishing Wizard is so limited and the only other alternative is
hand-coding Active Server Pages.
Unlike the partial support for SQL Server databases found in Access
97, Access 2000 can now work as a full-featured front-end for SQL
Server. This means that you can leverage the awesome graphical tools
in Access to create and work with more powerful and scalable
SQL Server databases (Figure 8), literally a "best of both
worlds" scenario.
Access 2000 can connect to remote SQL Server databases (Figure 9)
anywhere on the Web or, alternatively, to a SQL Server database on
your local machine. Office 2000 even ships with an engine-only
version of SQL Server so that you can move to the more powerful SQL
Server as quickly as possible. Using this special free version of
SQL Server, you can create and work with SQL Server databases
without even needing to buy SQL Server.
SQL Server 6.5 and 7.0 users should order Access 2000 as soon as
possible: The visual tools in Access 2000 blow away anything you get
with SQL Server or Visual Studio (Figure
10). This is the ultimate
way to work with SQL Server databases.
Microsoft Excel 2000
Microsoft Excel 2000 (Figure
1) is a personal spreadsheet application
that left any competition, such as Lotus 1-2-3, in its wake long
ago. First released as a leading-edge program from Apple's then-new
Macintosh, Excel was also the first program ported to Microsoft's
then-fledgling Windows in the mid-1980's. As such, Excel has
influenced the design of other Office applications, including
Microsoft Word, which were required to fall into line with the Excel
juggernaut.
For Office 2000, Microsoft has updated the already-excellent Excel
modestly, eschewing the odd Single Document Interface (SDI) used by
many of the other Office applications. This, frankly is another bit
of inconsistent weirdism: How come every worksheet in Excel doesn't
get its own taskbar icon? (Figure 2).
Unlike Access, the look and feel of Excel 2000 is virtually
identical to its predecessor (Figure 3).
A host of small features have been added, such as support for the
Euro, "see-through-view" (which retains the color of
selected text rather than using the more typical inverse colors),
improvements in the number of supported cell characters (now 32,000,
up from 255 characters in Excel 97), and the number of supported
rows per worksheet (65,536, up from 16,384). Queries now run as a
background task, freeing up Excel for the user.
Some concessions to modern programming have been made as well: In
addition to the Unicode and mutlilanguage support added to all
Office applications, Excel now supports a four digit date format in
addition to its previous methods of handling dates, a nod to Y2K
issues.
Microsoft has also added a capability called List AutoFill that
automatically copies formatting and formulas over an entire list.
Again, nice but not earth-shattering.
In Excel 97, Microsoft introduced a new, and still barely
understood, feature called PivotTables, which allows
you to quickly summarize large amounts of data. Rows and columns can
be rotated to see different summaries based on the same source data,
and data can be filtered for more specific results. In Excel 2000,
this feature has been updated with a host of new features, such as
PivotTable AutoFormat and PivotChart Reports, which allows you to
create interact reports which can dynamic show and hide specified
chart items when accessed by a user.
In short, Excel 2000 is a fine product, but it was excellent to
begin with and there's precious little need to upgrade Office solely
for this product: The improvements in this edition are
minimal.
Microsoft FrontPage 2000
With
FrontPage 2000, Microsoft has finally created a visual Web site
development tool that I can call my own.
And you have no idea what a huge turnaround this is for me: I hated
FrontPage 98. With a vengeance.
Flashback to late 1997: FrontPage 98 was then still in beta (and yet
to be added, officially, to the Office suite: it was simply a member
of the "Office family"). The product was turning out to be
a lukewarm refresh of FrontPage 97, itself a sad little half-breed
that was still making the transition from its small developer roots
into a full-fledged piece of Microsoft bloatware. Numerous things
needed to be changed to make FrontPage 98 worthwhile and I add a
full list: "Don't let it mess with my code," I complained.
"Make it truly visual, like Visual Basic," I begged.
"Make it act more like Office applications," I suggested.
No, said Microsoft. In fact, I soon found out, the feature-set for
FrontPage 98 had been frozen (that is decided, and set in stone)
before the beta test even began. The technical beta testers, as it
turned out, were there simply to find bugs. I was literally told
exactly this, in response to my complaints.
I quit the beta. Immediately. And FrontPage 98 went on to
become one of the best-selling pieces of software Microsoft ever
created. It was the number one selling Web development package in
the world, outselling its nearest competition nearly 2-to-1.
And it was an utter piece of crap.
It was, perhaps obviously, with some unwillingness that I approached
FrontPage 2000. And it is now, with some amazement, that I must tell
you that this product is incredible. A piece of art. A tour d'
force.
I use it every day.
No, I'm not kidding. FrontPage 2000 (Figure
1) is a complete re-thinking of the FrontPage product. Gone are
the bizarre and separate Explorer and Edit windows, replaced by a
simple single window that vaguely resembles Microsoft Word with an
Explorer bar attached on the left. FrontPage 2000 will let you
hand-code HTML and then actually preserve the formatting and style
of that code (can I hear a "Halleluiah"?), unlike its
predecessor. You can even train it to write its own code in your
style. It's almost too good to be true.
Creating tables is a breeze (Figure 2),
formatting documents almost effortless. I've been a Visual InterDev
devotee since late 1996 when it was still known as Internet Studio,
but I've turned to FrontPage 2000 for virtually all of my Web sites
now, including this very one. It's that good: The only time I start
up InterDev is when I've got some serious database interactivity to
work on. For everything else, especially static HTML, FrontPage 2000
wins hands down. And the integrated spell checking is wonderful,
life-saving even (though the omission of grammar checking is both
puzzling and retarded).
Adding features such as forms, Java or ActiveX components, Office
documents, and the like is all automated with Wizards and easy to
use dialogs. Formatting objects works just like similar actions in
other Office products, and using the Word-like tools for text is
simple and obvious. FrontPage 2000 also offers nice Web site
management tools, a tasks tool I never use, and a host of other
niceties that make it a complete, one-stop tool for Web developers
that don't need NT-based database access. For that sole exception,
I'd pick Visual InterDev over FrontPage any day.
Alas, nothing is perfect: FrontPage 2000 has plenty of room for
improvement, the most obvious being that it bears absolutely no
resemblance to the other applications in Office 2000: An Office
97-like double toolbar adorns the top of the FrontPage window and
documents are loaded in the older MDI style, rather than in the new
SDI style. Furthermore, FrontPage 2000 even messes with the MDI
style by offering its own type of child window with a peculiar
status bar on the top with no ability to minimize or restore (Figure
3). Strange.
And because FrontPage is designed to manage, as well as work with, a
collection of documents (the so-called "Web" in
Microsoft-speak; the rest of the planet refers to this collection as
a "Web site"), the Folder List and Views Bar are jarring
add-ons which reduce its resemblance to other Office applications.
Granted, this is by necessity, but one can't help but think that
there must have been a better way.
Another oddity: FrontPage defaults to browser-inherited values for
page backgrounds and text colors (Figure
4). I want the background of my Web documents to be colored
white generally and if I don't specify this explicitly on a page by
page basis (Figure 5), the background
will appear gray in older browsers. There is a workaround to this,
of course: FrontPage allows you to create your own document
templates, a cool feature. I wish I had known about this problem,
however, before I created my templates: By the time I figured out
what happened, I had created over 100 documents with no explicit
background color setting. There should also be a way to set this
kind of thing globally, but the settings in Tools-->Options are
surprisingly limited.
Speaking of which: FrontPage doesn't remember your settings at all.
Once I close the program, my location in the Web at the time of
closing is lost. Every time I restart the program and create a new
hyperlink, add a new image, or whatever, I have to manually tab
through the Folder List to find my place. It's annoying and
unnecessary.
I'd also like to be able to set it up to always specify the width
and height of any image I add to a page. Manually setting this via a
property sheet is tedious.
Despite its problems, however, FrontPage 2000 is best of class. And
like I said, I use it every day. I can't think of a higher
compliment than that.
Microsoft Outlook 2000
Outlook releases are
starting to trend like STAR TREK movies: The odd numbered ones suck. And
in this case, Outlook 2000 (nee Outlook 9.0) has arrived on the raw
end of the stick with a release that is decidedly unusable for
Internet email. After the resounding success of Outlook 98 (see
my review), I find this confusing and disappointing.
When you first install Outlook 2000 (Figure
1), it places one of those weird, special Shell icons right on
your desktop (Figure 2). Now,
most people will probably want this there, but why isn't it a normal
shortcut icon? But the weirdisms don't stop there: The very first
dialog in the Outlook 2000 setup routine asks you which email
account, if any, you'd like to import from (Figure
3). Then, in the next step, you have the option to choose the
type of email support you'd like: Internet only, Corporate (Exchange
Server based), or no email (Figure 4).
If "no email" is a choice, why would you import email from
another program first? Duh.
Even the "Internet Email" option is deceptive: If you
choose it, for example, you'll lose the ability to send and receive
faxes from Outlook 2000. Thankfully, there is a warning to this
effect. But I can't for the life of me understand why "Internet
Email and Fax" isn't a possibility.
After blundering your way through the initial choices, you setup
your mail account. In my case, I did choose Internet mail, so I
received dialogs very similar to the ones you'd see in Outlook
Express: I've always found this type of setup very straightforward
aside from the password fiasco where you enter your password in the
Wizard, have the Microsoft email application (in this case Outlook)
launch, and the watch it download your mail when you intended to
leave the mail on the server: This feature can only be set after the
program launches. The workaround is to not enter your password in
the Wizard, but anyone that wanted to leave mail on the server has
been burned at least once by this omission. It's an obvious bug and
I'm surprised it made it into this revision (but then, I was also
surprised to see it in Outlook Express 5.0).
In any case, once you've got Outlook configured, the little beast
loads, not full-screen like the rest of Office, but in a floating
window that isn't even wide enough to contain its sample email
message (Figure 1 again). From
here, it's almost all downhill.
You'd expect Outlook 2000 to be the ultimate email client and
personal information manager. After all, it's the follow-up to the
excellent Outlook 98. What could have gone wrong? For starters,
Outlook tries to be too much for too many people. It's an Email
program, it's a PIM, it's a file manager, hell, it's a Web browser
too (what isn't these days?). The inclusion of the IE Favorites menu
should be telling: Who wouldn't want to access Web sites from
directly within Outlook? (Figure 5)
Well, me, actually. Who wouldn't want to browse their local
file system from Outlook? Take a guess, I dare you.
I suspect there may be a small subset of people out there that like
the all-in-one approach, but I'd prefer a single app that did one
thing right. Outlook, however, does few things
correctly. But maybe I'm a little jaded: Most of
Outlook's improvements aren't related to Internet email at all. For
example, you can now view Web pages in Exchange public folders...
you know, from Outlook. Calendar scheduling has been improved
dramatically. And... that's about it.
As for Email, Microsoft has added a new Rules Wizard, which is
admittedly pretty nice (Figure 6).
It was even better until a court ruled that Microsoft's Rules Wizard
was unfairly filtering out mail from a small (and seemingly lame)
online greeting card company, forcing Microsoft to remove key
features at the last minute. And Outlook is less brutal about using
Microsoft Word as an email editor than it was in the previous
version. Instead of practically demanding that you use Word, its
just an option.
So why do I hate Outlook so? For starters, the Options dialog
is a disaster, full of confusing options and command buttons that
open dialog after dialog (Figure 7).
Looking for options related to email? Try the following:
So, quick: I want to use Plain Text
formatting for all messages I send and receive, but I want those
messages to appear in 10 point Verdana inside of Outlook. Where do I
set this? Can I even set this? Here's a "sort of"
answer: You can set outgoing message font properties by point size,
but incoming messages can only be set using a lame
"medium--smaller-smallest" style of sizing. Love that
consistency, Microsoft.
Let's assume you're able to grok all of these confusing options and
actually setup Outlook exactly the way you want it. Then what?
Is it any good then? No: Outlook 2000 is hampered by all kinds
of deficiencies, including a complete lack of features that I use
and love in Outlook Express, Outlook's kid brother, which comes free
with Internet Explorer 5.0. For example, let's say I want to send an
email to Larry McJunkin. I've got Larry setup in my address
book with a nickname of larry, so it's easy to type. In
Outlook Express, I simply type the letter l (that's a
lowercase "L") in the To: line of a new message and
Larry's name auto-completes for me (Figure
8). What a great feature. Too bad it's a pipe dream in
Outlook: In Microsoft's flagship product, I have to type out the
entire nickname, with no auto-complete (Figure
9) at all: In fact, only when I send the message will I know
whether what I typed in the To: field actually equates to a name in
my address book. Can you say "brain-dead"?
Outlook is also a resource disaster, requiring more RAM and
processing power than just about any other Office application. And
since this is the type of thing you'd leave running constantly, that
can be a real issue for anyone without the latest and greatest
hardware.
I could go on, but what's the point: I hate Outlook 2000. You may
feel differently, however, especially if you're more enamored of the
PIM features. So my final recommendation is to check it out, with
reservations. For me personally, I prefer Outlook Express 5.0 for
email: It's smaller, faster, and actually has more features.
