Office 2000 - Cool New Features

Session 5810

SHARE 97 MinneapolisPatricia Egen

Patricia Egen Consulting

pregen@egenconsulting.com

Summary Slide

• Overall Enhancements – Part 1• Overall Enhancements – Part II• Overall Enhancements – Part III• Overall Enhancements – Part IV• Overall Enhancements – Part V• The Good, the bad and the ugly• The Office Help Assistant• Other Annoyances

Summary Slide (cont.)

• Word Enhancements – Part I• Word Enhancements – Part II• Excel Enhancements – Part I• Excel Enhancements – Part II• Excel Enhancements – Part III• Powerpoint Enhancements

Part I• Powerpoint Enhancements

Part II

Summary Slide (cont.)

• Powerpoint – Cool Tips I

• Powerpoint – Cool Tips II

• Access Enhancements - Part I

• Access Enhancements - Part II

Overall Enhancements – Part 1

• Change to overall look and feel– Adaptive menus – i.e. they change based on how you

work (maybe not such a great enhancement)• Hiding menu items on dropdowns to make screen more

readable

– Hot menus – hold a menu item open a minute and it expands

– Side menu like Internet Explorer – including a History button with last 20-50 objects used

• Interchangeable native file formats

Overall Enhancements – Part II

• Collect and Paste– The clipboard keeps track of items – Click on Copy multiple times (up to 12) and until you click

on paste, Office stores the items and allows you to choose which item to paste.

– Click VIEW – TOOLBARS – CLIPBOARD to see the clipboard in any Office program

• The ClipArt Gallery has been improved and is easier to use

Overall Enhancements – Part III

• Collaboration – Discussion threads and comments allow you to hold

online or written conversations regarding documents– NetMeeting integration

• Greatly enhanced HTML support and web tools– Web Options on Tools – different features for each

product in suite– Work with documents in their native format (such as

HTML)– Web Folders to allow easy publishing to a web server

or intranet

Overall Enhancements – Part IV

• Install on demand– No need to install everything – when you click on an

item, if the component is not installed you will be prompted to install it.

• Note- you will need access to the source software in order to do the install

• Detect and repair– Found under Help on the Menu bar– Automatic for registry and DLL repair– Must be invoked to repair file issues such as fonts &

templates

Overall Enhancements – Part V

• Integrated Visual Basic for Applications tools

• Office email integration– From anywhere in any product you can invoke Office

email

• Network based User profile folders – logon anywhere and get your profile settings

The Good, the bad and the ugly• The Good:

– There are many good new features in Office. Fortunately, the ones that are not your favorite can be removed or hidden

• Really good news – when you save files in Word, Excel and Powerpoint, Office 97 will open them. Only the new features will not be available.

• The Bad and Ugly– Following are some features I consider annoying

The Office Help Assistant• Clippie

– If you like him, cool – now he’s always there

– If you don’t, you can change to another office assistant or turn him off by clicking on Options when Help first is invoked.

– Use the Office Add/Remove Components menu to permanently remove the assistant.

Other Annoyances

• Loading Multiple Copies of Programs– You can invoke multiple copies of Office applications

opening documents• This may be what you wanted• Or, it may take up more memory than your memory-constrained

machine can handle

• Adjusting Menus– I dislike needing to click on the >> button to see more of my

icons. Plus I keep losing my toolbars by accident

• Intelligent (??) AutoCorrect– Microsoft spells and corrects the way it “believes” something

is supposed to be typed

Word Enhancements – Part I

• Click and type – Place your cursor anywhere on the page and start

typing – similar to WordPerfect

• Table changes– Wrap text around a table– Add a table in a table (nested tables)

• Preserve all (even unrecognized) HTML tags• Themed Web Pages or documents

Word Enhancements – Part II

• WYSIWYG frames– Important in web pages or intranets

• Personalized menus• Right click Synonyms• Turn off Auto-Numbering (at last!)• New toolbars

– Clipboard, Visual Basic, Web, Frame, and Web Tools, PDFwriter

• Picture Bullets

Excel Enhancements – Part I

• Pivot tables– Refreshable charts tied to PivotTables – Autoformat PivotTables – PivotTable Reports

• Charts– Interactive charting on the Web – Improved formatting

Excel Enhancements – Part II

• List AutoFill

• Drag and drop data from browser

• See-Through View

• Save your “Import Text” options

• Better integration with Access

Excel Enhancements – Part III

• Significant Web Enhancements– Save to HTML

• Now part of package and not a separate option

– Create documents on the web

– Enhanced Web queries

– Interactive PivotTables on web

Powerpoint EnhancementsPart I

• Tri-pane view

• Save files to HTML or directly to Web server

• Fit to window

Powerpoint EnhancementsPart II

• AutoFit slide text – As you adjust the size of your Powerpoint slide,

the text adjusts. – If you remove/add text, the program adjusts the

slide as it “assumes” you would want

• Table-creation capabilities (finally)• Auto-numbered bullets • Presentation broadcast

Powerpoint – Cool Tips I

• Tweak the Layout of PowerPoint Slides by holding the CTRL key and moving the arrow keys

• Pause a slide show

• Display Shortcuts During a Slide Show by pressing F1

Powerpoint – Cool Tips II

• Creating a Summary Slide in PowerPoint

• Keep Track of Action Items During a Slide Show

Access Enhancements - Part I• Outlook-like database explorer

– Objects are vertically displayed and options are horizontally displayed

Access Enhancements– Part II

• Save to earlier versions of Access (yeah!)

• Automatic updates of database objects on name changes

• Unicode support for foreign languages

• Drag and drop data to Excel Groups (again, yeah!)

• Must upgrade your database (ugh!!!)