Office97 vs. Office2000

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To all:

I’m not sure which forum to post this, but I figure this is as good as any. I’d like to hear some of your opinions regarding Office97 vs. Office2000. Is it worth the upgrade to 2000, both from an end-user’s and a developer’s perspective? We have already decided to go with one Office2000 app — Outlook. The rest of the Office suite, we’re debating.

This is the situation my firm (a big law firm) is facing now. Eventually, when XP becomes stable enough, like a year or more from now, we plan to upgrade to that. I guess the question is: in the interim, is it worth having to re-test existing VBA code, compatibility with 3rd party apps, and dealing with the usual fun large-scale rollout issues for an Office2000 suite that may only be in place for a year?

The 2 most compelling reasons that I see to go with Office2000:

1. Office97 apps not compatible with Outlook2000.

2. VBA6 — increased power over VBA5 and being able to use Visual SourceSafe, which I believe doesn’t work with VBA5. (Someone please correct me if I’m wrong on this.)

However, besides these 2 points, I see little else of true utilitarian value in the laundry lists I’ve seen of the benefits of Office2000 over Office97 — at least from a legal industry perspective. I mean the added bells and whistles like “improved HTML document creation and publishing” in Word2000 is almost meaningless to a typical end-user in a law firm. (Plus, those who do have to create web content here wouldn’t use an app like Word to do it anyway. More likely, something like Dreamweaver.)

Am I wrong in my thinking? On the other hand, despite all the useless added bells and whistles, maybe for developers, getting VBA6 to play with is good enough reason alone to upgrade?

Thanks in advance for your replies.

Stephan

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Hi Stephan,

Although I’m having fun playing with some of the new bells and whistles (like non-modal userforms), I haven’t yet seen anything (in Word 2000) that I’d rate as a must-have in terms of the user’s experience.

Office 2000 is purportedly more stable but we’re only just rolling it out now so I can’t report from experience.

VSS definitely does work with VB5 – we had all our Word 97 templates in VSS – you’d just need to find a copy of Office 97 Developer Edition (I think).

Gary

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You’re correct about VSS working with 97, but you need Visual Studio if you want to share it with other developers. The ODE gives you a single seat license, which isn’t terribly useful.

I like Office 2000 from a developer’s perspective. For end-users, I don’t see that much to recommend it over 97. However, playing the game of “let’s wait until the next version comes out and is stable” at the rate new versions are being pushed out could mean that you never have the current version of the software. My office converted only recently (although I’ve been working with 2000 for longer), and I’m still the only one actually developing in Access 2000. But for developers, native ADO and Access/Excel XML support makes it worth upgrading, while the ability to use VBA with Outlook 2000 is worth its weight in gold.

End users won’t see a tremendous difference, except in the return to the SDI where each Word document or Excel spreadsheet is a separate button on the taskbar.

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Office 2000 does a better job of saving it’s documents, workbooks, & presentations as web pages than Office 97. Also, it seems easier to disable Clippy and his pals in Office 2000 than Office 97.

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I’d say if you have not upgraded to 2000, forget it and go with XP. I’ve been a beta tester and now have the final (volume licencees get it 30+ days before retail release) and I like it a lot. The $%#@$&! SDI issue with Word2000 drove me nuts. Word 2002 has a check box to keep MDI on. Clippit is gone, SmartTags look pretty powerful, and accessing web-based resources is really easy.

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I would like to thank everyone for their replies here. Your input has been very helpful.

Stephan

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