Return to 1997 SPRING Index
January 1997 saw the release of the much-awaited Microsoft Office 1997. This is Microsoft's second generation, 32-bit Office suite, claimed to work equally well on Windows 95, and the new Windows NT. I tested Office 97 Professional on a Multimedia PC, sporting a 133Mhz Pentium processor and 32 MB RAM. This seemingly heavyweight processing power is becoming an increasingly common configuration today's PC. The main test machine was running Windows NT Server rather than Windows 95.
As Microsoft posted a press release crowing about how well it had done to launch this new software package on time, I was struggling trying to get my copy to install! The installation program throws a bit of a wobbler when installing to NT Server..
Having manually copied a stack of files across from the CD ROM to my hard drive, I loaded it up for the first time, and was very impressed with its speed and ease of use. At its heart it comprises of four serious business software applications. Firstly, there is Word Version 8 - the latest incarnation of Microsoft's world famous word processor. Then you have Excel version 8, the latest Version of the computing industry's leading spreadsheet.
Database power is provided by Access version 8. Finally there is version 8 of Powerpoint Microsoft's de facto industry standard presentation software.
Unlike earlier versions of Office Professional, all four programs use the same macro language, VisualBasic for Applications. Translated into English this means that users now only need to learn one programming language in order to develop very powerful programs of their own, using Access, Word or Excel as the engine.
In addition Office Professional boasts a big clip art library, and a powerful but cumbersome Email system called Outlook.
Office 97 is packed with nice features, although Microsoft has managed to avoid adding loads of confusing new buttons in order to achieve this extra functionality. My favourite doodad is the real time spelling and grammar checking system in Word.
As you type a misspelt word, it underlines it in red, whilst phrases which fail the grammar checker are highlighted in green.
Simply click the offending word or phase with the right mouse button, and a pop-up menu gives you a range of likely choices to correct the error.
A bit a head of its time for many UK users, Office boasts that all its applications will save HTML files - the internationally accepted format for the Internet.
I used this in anger for a few of my own web pages - and it works fairly well, although Internet files written in Word can behave very strangely, due to certain codes Word inserts into the HTML file.
The inevitable downside is that all this new power demands new file formats. For example, files saved in Word version 8 format cannot be read by earlier versions of Word. Word 8 will save and open files in the earlier format upon request, but this is slow, and can take up to ten times longer than saving to the new format.
Overall, Office 97 is a very powerful suite of programs, as long as you can afford the hardware to run it! It ships on CD ROM, although a floppy disk version is also available. Office 97 professional currently discounts at around £300, with upgrade deals available for users of earlier versions of Office.