A lot of the added features to the Office suite are centered around sharing data, especially with a product called SharePoint Services. The main idea is that companies have multiple team members working on the same data or document, and now Office is designed to make collaboration efforts a little easier. In that same vein is better integration with XML, which in a nutshell, is an easy way for people to exchange data no matter what platform or software they are using. However, as these product enhancements are usually of little value to home user, we will move on to more exciting features.

The biggest change you’re going to see is in Outlook — it wins the most improved award. The interface underwent a major overhaul, which is both good and bad. Good because it includes better organization and a serious spam catcher, but bad because it is so different looking that you will almost have to re-learn it! However, once you get used to it you’ll wonder how you ever got along without it. As you can see from Figure 1, there is a larger read mail window, a better organized inbox, and a cleaner navigation pane.

One of the other neat things I noticed is the blocked content feature, which blocks out any pictures included in the e-mail. Why is this good? Well, I get a lot of junk mail, and I’d rather not waste the time waiting for these beautifully-pictured spam messages to download, not to mention the fact that some of the spam pictures are ones that I don’t want to see — ever. Trust me, once you get used to this new interface, you’re going to love it!

Excel offers enhanced smart tags, which were introduced in Office 2000. These allow you to see additional information about data you’ve typed in, like information from your Calendar in Outlook, or even financial information about a stock symbol entered. In addition, there are improved statistical functions added to Excel, to better assist in analyzing data.

PowerPoint has some neat improvements worth mentioning, the best of which is save to CD. That’s right, for all of you PowerPoint gurus that like to add all kinds of sounds, animation and video to your presentations — increasing the size of the file to over 10 MBs — we now have a solution for you. Before, you would have to go through the hassle of opening your CD burning software, finding your massive presentation file and the PowerPoint viewer if you were giving the presentation on a machine without PowerPoint, and then burning it to your blank CD. Now all you have to do is select package for CD from the file menu in PowerPoint, and poof! you have the total solution right at your fingertips. It allows you to not only select extra files for the CD, but it also includes all the linked files and the necessary viewer files as well. How’s that for convenience? A few other improvements to PowerPoint include better video capability, an improved slide show interface, and support for smart tags (yea!). 

Last but certainly never least, is Access. There is finally support for AutoCorrect! I’ve covered AutoCorrect in great detail in previous columns — it’s a great way to save time typing and correct common mistakes. In that same vein is an error checking feature for forms and reports that flags more common errors. Whether this feature is useful or not definitely remains to be seen, considering the fact that I usually turn off both the automatic grammar and spell check features in my programs. There is now a pretty neat secondary menu addition called object dependencies, which when invoked from an object like a form or report that is related to another form or report, will display both what depends on it and what it depends on. The final new enhancement allows you to backup your Access database from within Access, instead of Windows Explorer as I have been doing for years. :) What’s really neat about it is that Access compresses the database for you, while it’s backing it up.

It would be scandalous for me not to mention the new programs that will be available with Office 2003 (probably as a separate purchase), especially a very exciting new program called OneNote. There are actually two new products that will be introduced — the first is called InfoPath, which again is another collaboration program. Yes, it is important to be able to collaborate, I understand, but frankly I’m more interested in programs I can use everyday as a regular unleaded user. That’s where OneNote comes in. It’s a program that lets you write notes, just like you would on a notepad, but yet also allows you to type and edit like you would in Word. Honestly, we all know Word isn’t the greatest graphical environment. I heard of people doing documents in Publisher for that very reason. Now you will be able to freestyle draw, using a stylus or Tablet PCs. I’m so excited about this software — combined with the Tablet PC, I have no doubt that it will give traditional paper notebooks a run for their money. Finally, you get the best of both worlds — you can make your own freestyle notes and type added notes in a notebook-like environment. You can record audio notes that correspond to the written notes, and drag-and-drop information from Websites to store in your notes! It’s all integrated with Office products, so you can use your notes anywhere. 

So that is the new lineup in regards to Microsoft Office products. I hope you can find some of the new features useful, to counter the frustration you will inevitably feel when you have to search for many of your commands and buttons!