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Microsoft Office 2000 Offers New Apps and Web Tools

A $20 preview beta of Office adds Publisher, FrontPage, and other popular applications to its quiver, along with a slew of Web features and a few dubious improvements.

  

Microsoft Office 2000 is here--in spirit. True, the upgrade to the 800-pound gorilla of office suites won't ship until the second quarter of this year. But in the meantime, Microsoft's site is hawking a $20 beta version it calls a "Preview." Available now, nearly feature complete, and surprisingly stable, the Preview provides a solid picture of what to expect in the final version.

If you want to create content for Web sites or a corporate intranet, Office 2000 looks like a winner--it's brimming with new Internet features. But mostly, this upgrade focuses on sensible tweaks to existing tools. Few of the changes will revolutionize the way you work; others may even annoy you. And while Microsoft hasn't made the wholesale changes to file formats that it did with Office 97, I ran into some compatibility problems in my tests when running PowerPoint.

Even experienced Office users may need to spend time adjusting to alterations in the interface. Some changes are sure to be crowd-pleasers. For instance, the clipboard can finally hold more than one item. It now tracks up to 12 elements, letting you paste them selectively.

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