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Are the suite wars over? In terms of market share, unquestionably. Superpower Microsoft Office accounts for a jaw-dropping 96 percent of retail suite sales, according to research firm PC Data. But Microsoft isn't done battling for our bucks. Every two years or so, it tries to sell the world on a new version of Office. Its next salvo, code-named Office 10, is due around the summer of 2001. Key enhancements improve ease of use, Web features, and workgroup tools--and add built-in speech recognition.

Sound familiar? Well, it should. When Office 2000 shipped in 1999, it concentrated on usability, the Internet, and workgroups; and Corel WordPerfect and Lotus SmartSuite have long offered voice recognition. Judging from the beta version we tested, Office 10 will nudge the suite forward a bit in many respects.

Work in Progress

But like any early beta release, this one is, in effect, a first draft. Some planned features are missing; others (like the voice recognition) are too raw to judge properly. Publisher and PhotoDraw are absent altogether, and the upgrade's name isn't set yet--much less the price. What we saw is a promising preview with a few rough spots.

With roots dating back to the 1980s, Office and its core components--Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access, and FrontPage--are as mature as software gets. So it's no surprise that most of this upgrade's improvements are nips and tucks, not radical innovations. Predictably, Microsoft seems poised to sidestep compatibility glitches by keeping intact almost all of Office 2000's file formats. The one partial exception: Access 10 will offer an optional new file format designed to speed up large databases.

Many of the major changes aim to simplify existing features (see "Office Renovation: What's Up With the Apps"). For example, Word's new Drawing Canvas keeps complex graphics creations from reformatting unexpectedly. Other innovations are Web-centric, including Outlook's integration with Microsoft's Hotmail and MSN Messenger services. And some offer a little bit of both: Excel's revised Web Query feature, for instance, streamlines snagging data from the Web and refreshing it on the fly.

Two nifty interface tweaks--the Task Pane and Smart Tags--offer instant access to information and options otherwise buried in menus and dialogs. Seemingly inspired by features in WordPerfect and Microsoft's own Internet Explorer, the Task Pane appears alongside documents to speed searching, formatting, and other jobs. It also makes cutting and pasting much easier by displaying all elements in the Office Clipboard (which can now store 24 items, up from 12 in Office 2000).

Smart Tags, meanwhile, are context-sensitive icons that show up as needed within documents. For example, when you paste a formula in Excel, a Smart Tag appears next to the cell; click it, and a menu lists formatting options that would otherwise show up only if you remembered to choose 'Paste Special' from the Edit menu. Smart Tags also let you disable AutoCorrect features such as automatic bulleted lists, either permanently or case by case.

Talk and Teamwork

Office 10's new built-in speech recognition capability may be its gee-whizziest addition. Word, Excel, and other apps now offer dictation and voice navigation features. In our informal tests, recognition was erratic at first but improved once we trained the system. But it's too early to gauge how this feature stacks up against third-party packages such as IBM's ViaVoice and Lernout Hauspie's Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

In contrast, the new collaborative features seem almost ready for prime time. In fact, Word's revamped tools for wrangling revisions might justify the upgrade all by themselves if you use a tag-team approach to editing documents. Multiple users can now edit a file simultaneously; you can view changes as callouts in page margins (so they don't disturb page layouts); and you can compare and merge edits into a final version. Some of these features are present in other Office applications as well.

Better Web Tools

Office 10's workgroup Web tools far outshine their so-so Office 2000 predecessors. You can quickly set up and customize a slick Web site with message boards, scheduling tools, surveys, and document folders. But there's still room for improvement. For instance, integration between Outlook and the site's contact, event, and task lists is only rudimentary.

Even if Microsoft does ship Office 10 in mid-2001, it will face reinvigorated rivals. Lotus plans a SmartSuite upgrade by year's end; Corel's next WordPerfect Office upgrade is due during the first half of 2001. Sun Microsystems hopes to finally launch StarPortal--its free, Web-based suite--by the end of 2000. Stay tuned for details on these suite underdogs--and for further Office 10 updates.

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