Microsoft Office 97

What's New?
The new look Office 97 suite is said o fully integrate the ease of intelligent applications with the power of the Web.

Competitors such as Corel and Lotus have already done with same with their original products. Word Perfect Office from Corel is already available in the market, while SmartSuite is just expected to make an appearance.

Meanwhile, by making Internet technology an integral part of the suite, Office 97 will make it easy for users to create and publish Web documents, find information, and collaborate with others on the Internet or a corporate internet.

But what’s really new in MS Office 97 is the Outlook desktop information manager, which provides an easy way for users to organize and track their desktop information and communicate with others.
“Office 97 is our most significant release of the suite to date,” said Bill Gates, chairman and CEO of Microsoft. “We’ve invested nearly three years of development time and over 25,000 hours of usability testing to deliver the new capabilities our customers have requested. Office 97 marks a great step forward in productivity applications, bringing to business users the benefits of the Internet plus the results of our on-going research in areas such as natural language processing, user-interface design and software componentization.”

Old Wine in a new bottle?
Microsoft Office  97 includes new versions of each of the component applications, including Microsoft word, Microsoft Excel, the Power Point presentation graphics program and Microsoft Access, as well as the new Microsoft Outlook. Common to these Office 97 applications is the integration of new Internet technologies.

“Using the same applications they are already familiar with, users of Office 97 can create, publish and manage information without having to learn separate tools. In short, Office 97 supports what already exists, while bringing users into the next technology frontier,”: explained Microsoft sources.
The company has much been emphasizing on its new add on Microsoft Outlook. Outlook, according to company sources, is the new hub for desktop communications, integrating E-mail, scheduling, contacts, task and access to documents to hope users easily organize and share information.

“Microsoft has done two amazing things with Office 97. It has turned each application into a standalone component that can be easily used to build powerful custom software solution that integrate seamlessly with Microsoft Back Office. At the same time, Microsoft has pulled the entire suite together with Outlook, allowing users to move from activity to activity without knowingly switching from application to application.”

Microsoft Office 97 offers a host of innovations to help users and organizations get their work done faster and more effectively than ever before.

The improvements
Office 97 includes a host of improvements based on IntelliSense technology that enable the software to watch what the user is doing and automatically produce the desired result. Background grammar checking in Microsoft Word finds and fixes common grammatical errors as users type.

Formula Auto Correct in Microsoft Excel automatically corrects common formula mistakes, and natural language formulas lets users build formulas using their own words.

The Save-as-HTML Wizard in PowerPoint automatically creates complete Web presentations including navigation controls, frames and animations that take advantage of the PowerPoint Animation Player browser extension.

Office Art is a new set of powerful drawing tools shared across all the Office applications, making it easy for novice and experienced users to create drawings and graphics.

Internet-ready
Office 97 integrates Web functionality based on Internet standards into each application to enable users to take full advantage of the Web.

Office 97 also provides powerful new collaboration capabilities that make it easier for users to work together on documents, track changes, and same multiple versions of a document in a single file. With support for Active Documents, users can open Office files directly from within Microsoft Internet Explorer and use the full power of applications such as Word and Microsoft Excel without leaving their browser.  

Smoother migration
In line with the recently announced “Zero Administration” initiative for Windows, which is designed to allow companies to reduce the cost of owning PCs significantly, Office 97 provides several new and improved tools to minimize the organizational costs of upgrading.