The Web Office

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

Sometimes, when I'm feeling uncharacteristically sensitive, I manage a tiny empathetic shudder for Microsoft. The company is getting pummeled every which way. At the top, it's taking a shellacking from the Justice Department, which has effectively painted it as the slickest monopoly since Standard Oil. At the bottom, the hacker underground is attacking it with viruses like Melissa and Happy99.exe. And at Microsoft's very core, its next-generation operating system, Windows 2000, is MIA. The long-promised Windows overhaul, due months ago, might not even reach consumers by the millennium. The company has apparently just discovered that home users are a huge market; rather than force an industrial-strength operating system on housewives and schoolkids, it will give them a retooled Windows 98 stopgap in the fall. Whoopee.

At least Office 2000, that collection of must-have programs for grown-ups, will be shipping this century. The first corporate customers will be getting their copies in the next few weeks; consumers, should they want to, can buy it in June ($449 for the upgrade; $799 for the first-time buyer's package).

If you do any serious work on a computer, chances are you were pulled into Microsoft's Office web long ago. Since it controls 75% of the market, you probably use one or more of its applications: Word (for word processing), Outlook (for e-mail), Excel (for spreadsheets), Access (for databases) and Powerpoint (to make tedious, overhead-style slides for interminable meetings). The premium package adds the Web-page builder FrontPage; the image manipulator PhotoDraw; and Publisher, a desktop publishing program. It comes on an intimidating four (!) CD-ROMs, but I needed to install only the first disk to get started; the others hold supplementary material that many users won't need.

That was a relief. I figured that Office 2000 would be another case of Microsoft bulking up its software, giving me features I'd never be able to figure out, let alone use. So far that hasn't been my experience. Word, for instance, looks like my old program but has a number of improvements, such as better grammar and spelling checkers and menus that adapt to the way you use them.

Still, Office 2000 attempts to spin the Microsoft web even further, adding tools that will benefit mainly corporate, rather than home, users. The Web, in fact, is what the millennial Office is all about. Virtually every program is designed to interact with the Net. When you create a Word document, for instance, you can save it in the Web's native language, HTML, and upload it to your website. Or add hypertext links to your Word file, or implant e-mail addresses without knowing how to write a line of code. And when Word converts your text to HTML, it saves your formatting so that headline-size fonts, italic text and so on show up online pretty much as they appeared on your screen. Likewise, if you save your files to a Web server, co-workers can grab, change and replace them automatically using the same program--Word, Excel, FrontPage--that created them.

Microsoft claims that Office 2000 permits "universal viewing" by all browsers, even Netscape's. But some of its goodies somehow work best with Microsoft's own browser, Internet Explorer 5. Other features, the company notes, will be greatly enhanced by--you guessed it--Windows 2000. And that also makes me shudder for Microsoft. But not in an empathetic way.

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