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OFFICE 2000

INTERACT Presenter, Greg Melvill-Smith talks to Microsoft's Kevin Milehan about the long awaited replacement to Office 97: Office 2000.

GREG: Kevin, what's new in the new Office Suite?

KEVIN: We focused on Web integration and ease of use in terms of administration and management.

GREG: Tell us about the Web Integration part of it.

KEVIN: Microsoft has made HTML a companion file format for the entire Office suite. So it's behind Word, Excel, Outlook and Powerpoint. So in the past, if you wanted to save a Word document as an HTML file, you'd click on "File", "Save as Web Page" or "Save as HTML". Then you would export it to the browser and you'd have an HTML page, but what often happened is that things would get lost: formatting, macros, etc. What we've done now is make it a lot easier. Simply by clicking on "Web Page Preview", Windows opens up the Browser and you now see the document that you're working on, in the browser.

GREG: And what about converting back to Word?.

KEVIN: Absolutely - there's my browser with my document. We click on this new button that's got a "Word" icon on it. Hey Presto - it opens up Word again and it will allow me to edit the document in Word.

GREG: So you don't have to know how to edit in HTML?

KEVIN: I don't have to know HTML at all. The fact that I know Word allows me to edit it. That applies equally to things like Excel and Power Point. I can save an entire Power Point presentation onto a Web server and broadcast it out through the Web.

The other aspect that I spoke about was ease of use, in terms of management, deployment and installation. Let's take a look at that briefly.

In all the products, we've really made it easy for Network Administrators to role out the product across a company's network. I can set it up so that when I do my deployment across the company, no Powerpoint gets installed on any machines. Then, what I'd say is, through a little icon on the Start menu, when a client user goes to Programs, there will be a Power Point icon, and the first time you click that Power Point icon, it will then go and look for the software and install it at that time.

It's also added a lot of functionality. Take the integration between Word and Power Point - I'm just going to scroll down in this Power Point document here. There's my table - and exactly as in Word. I can draw additional columns, I can format it, I can add colour to cells, etc. and it looks like it should look.

GREG: Would you be able to, in Power Point, do calculations through tables the same way as you could in Excel?

Exactly the same as in, well, not quite as in Excel, but the same functionality that you have got in Word.

One of the other things we've added in Power Point, is numbering. We always had Bullets in Power Point and one of the most commonly requested features in Power Point was to add the ability to number, so I just click here and you type in here. "Watch sales soar" and it automatically numbered the next point 5 and if I keep typing, "Create Promo merchandise", you'll see what it does - it automatically re-sizes the text to fit onto the slide.

GREG: Well, that's Office 2000, from Microsoft. Thanks Kevin.

KEVIN: Thank you, Greg.