Benefits to upgrading to Office 2000

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What are the benefits to upgrading from Office 97 to 2000? Or, are there drawbacks/bugs/problems? I have heard there are problems with the normal.dot file. I also heard that Word 2000 is a single-document interface. Does that create problems? Would you suggest just waiting till Office 10? I went to the Microsoft site, but obviously, that’s not a very unbiased source. Thanks for your input.

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Good question. I can only give you a limited opinion. I have NOT used Word 97 (well, a little), but have used Word 2000 with SR-1a. Just as Word 95 fixed some bugs in Word 6 (& created others), Word 2000 fixed some bugs in Word 97 & created others.

I have not had a problem with Word 2000 normal.dot. I’ve seen much fewer posts about problems with Word 2000, but that may only reflect fewer people using Word 2000.

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Hi mmcmanis! Well–it is a MS application suite, so each shrink-wrapped beta, SP and SR comes with its own set of issues… …But that’s what makes life fun, isn’t it?

I, like Phil, have worked predominantly with Word 6, 95 and 2000; and am familiar with the other bundled Office products. Word’s interface takes getting used to, and is a bit spooky after training yourself to make certain you only have one instance of Word open at a time. It comes with understanding that although you see several task bar items: (a) you still can select from the Window menu or use your familiar shortcuts; and ( it isn’t several instances of Word — just a different way to display the files. I’ve oversimplified this, but it’s just a matter of tweaking your interpretation of what you see.

It has taken me a while to get used to some features, and I’ve just down-right disabled others (such as the telescoping menus and Auto-update styles). I love the document map; I adore the new tables features; I like the more logical placement of some commands (such as insert / bookmark instead of edit / bookmark).

I run O2K on a Win98 at home, and on a Win2K server/Win2K workstation at work and they have both been remarkably reliable.

As to your question “Would you suggest just waiting till Office 10? ” No, I wouldn’t. No more so than I would suggest someone waiting to upgrade their computer, marry, have children or make any other change in the hopes that things will of a necessity be better in the future. I guarantee you, here and now… I stake my limited reputation that OX (as we lovingly refer to Office 10) will ship with a whole new set of issues… and I can’t wait to play with them too.

I guess what I’m saying is that the ball is back in your court. You need to analyze your usage, your collaborations, your needs. Do you use Word primarily for business and interact with clients? Do they see your electronic files (not just hard copies)? Do you work with others who have upgraded, and if so — which of the enhancements cause problems?

You can see what the specific product enhancements are by visting MS Office Tour. Select the individual apps on the selection bar at the bottom of the page to see if you think the features will be of benefit to you.

Oh Dear! Somebody stop me… please!!!

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Karen, you have just invented a new genre: homespun philosophical technical advice!

I’ve only been using Ofc2K for about a month now, and agree with the tone of Phil and Karen’s comments, in that I’ve been pretty favorably surprised, especially after hearing the occasional scare story.

“The SDI and Me”: I’d read and heard so much about this subject, that I was really dreading having to deal with this aspect of Word 2K. After a month of heavy use, I fail to see what all the fuss was about – it’s really not very different from how I was using Word 97, other than having the extra items on my taskbar for each open file. (and btw, I believe each open doc is a separate instance of Word 2K)

There are some specific usages of Word where the SDI might prove clunky – working back and forth between two tiled documents is one – but at least in my own work I just don’t need to do that anyway. And like Karen, I quickly turned off that “smart” toolbar/menu feature (I can customize my own toolbars, thank you).

From a programming perspective, Word 2K is a nice advance, supporting VB6 and introducing a number of useful events (such as DocumentBeforeSave – hmm, the possibilities), as well as handy things like inserting table rows before or after.

Anyway, I remember mmcmanis from the old Lounge, as quite a power user. So I’d recommend she (was it she?) get onto Ofc2K, and teach us a few new things about it!

Regards,
Gary

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Gary,

You mentioned the programming perspective. What I’ve found with that and the SDI is that it opens up the possibility of the active document not being the same as the one your macro is working on.

There’s a few new programming features- for instance, the “replace” should have been in VB/VBA years ago. There’s been some nice enhancements to existing features as well. That doe smake it moer complicated though if you’re on O2K and you’re also programming for O97 people.

The big advantage of O2K on our site has been its maintainability. It’s far easier to set up and maintain than O97 for our LAN support people- particularly where we use a thick client. The client only needs to install aminimum of features if necessary- if a new feature is required, it’s automatically installed from the LAN. So the cost of keeping it going is reduced.

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One thing that should be mentioned about the SDI is that it is only the rule if you have Active Desktop installed. I don’t, so my Word behaves like it always has, ditto Excel.

FYI, you can turn off those pesky adaptive menus by right clicking any toolbar in any Office application, selecting Customize, clicking the Options tab, and deselecting “Menus show recently used commands first”. It’s easy when you know how.

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Charlotte,

What do you mean by the active desktop? How is it installed/uninstalled?

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It’s part of your Internet Explorer installation. Active Desktop offers you some cute features like being able to reorder menus and having Wiindows explore windows with HTML in them, but it annoys me so much that I always turn it off in the installation.

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Hi PMFJI but I have a *real* annoying problem with this. I have managed to turn off the personalised menus OK, but I can’t sort out the issue of the ordering of folders.
In other words, when I go OPEN , the places dialogue box opens and all my folders in MY DOCUMENTS are in what seems to be the last used first order, if you see what I mean.
This is just *so* much slower than having them in alphabetic order. This subject doesn’t seem to be covered in “Using Office 2000” but I bet you know how to fix it!
Thanks
Jim

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your sort order is by date – right click in an open area and choose alphabetical order. or change to details and click a header row.

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Thanks, MaryJ.
I had tried right clicking and got nothing that made any sense, and had gone thru’ tools and properties and just couldn’t change things, but reading your post I realised that you must have a different view to mine….yup, just told it to arrange icons…thanks again.
Jim.

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Charlotte – are you saying you only get MDI with active desktop installed? I’m runing Office 2K on Windows 2K without AD and get mutiple ‘tabs’ for both Word and Excel.

Also, FWIW, taskmanager lists multiple ‘Applications’ of Word (one for each document open) but only one ‘Process’ of Winword.exe running.

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No, I’m saying you only get SDI if you have ActiveDesktop installed. MDI is what Office 97 had. Windows 2K may work a bit differently since IE is a more integral part of its interface. I’m running NT.

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Gotcha.
I can’t stand Active Desktop, but it looks like you get some of the advantages with W2K such as being able to manually re-order menus.

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Charlotte,

The reason I asked about Active Desktop is that (apart from not knowing what it was about) I hadn’t seen any way of getting rid of the SDI and changing to MDI (in W2K at least) excewpt for writing a complex set of macros.

From what I understand you’re saying, you just have to get rid of the Active Desktop, and Voila- you’re back to the normal old MDI like Word 97.

Hey, if that’s what you’re saying, you’re one step ahead of Woody and a whole lot of other people.

I’ve got hundreds of users who would treat you like a saint if that was right.

O2K is installed already- can we get rid of the Active Desktop afer installation, and let everybody go back to what they’ve been wanting since SDI?

If you can do this, I can grant you the right to bestow warts on anybody!

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no, that’s not what she saying – you can’t go back to SDI with word, only access and excel. doesn’t matter the os.

you can use macros to hide the doc windows or wait and upgrade. now that i’m used to them, i love the MDI and hate SDI. I work with several open docs at once and it’s much easier to find the right one. It took me forever to get used to it though.

It confuses people because each window is in task manager and they think there are that many copies of word running (“oh no, my resources are being used by all these copies of word”!), when it’s really only one process – one copy.

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Whoa! I don’t qualify for sainthood. Word is its own animal, and some apps like Outlook and Access have always had an SDI. The rest of Office behaves if you don’t install the active desktop. I don’t know if turning it off has the same effect. I never use the taskbar (alt tab works for me, thank you), so even in Word, I don’t really notice it, and I kind of like being able to alt-tab between documents.

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Why stop you when your doing such a great job explaining!

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Thank you all so much for your input. I appreciate the time you too. Yes, I was on the other board, and hope to learn W2K well enough that I can contribute something to this board one day.

Thanks!!!
Melanie

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Still using 97 (cause the new features seem to be stuff I don’t presently see a use for) but have been following the discussions of O2K.

One, to the point criticism appears in “MS Office & VBA Developer” http://www.OfficeVBA.com[/url%5D, in a recent 4 part series regarding Mail Merge. It appears that MS has ignored this useful word processing specific feature for internet features, which will always be handled better with a html editor (whether you like Dreamweaver, HotDog, TextPad or FrontPage). Office is kind of a “mature” producet that doesn’t get as much better as it does bigger.

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