So, here is today's riddle. What has 5 massive components, is almost impossible to review and may soon be the target of another Janet Reno justice department investigation? The answer, of course, is Microsoft Office 2000. Office 2000 is a major update to Microsoft's Office Suite consisting of word processing software (Microsoft Word), a spreadsheet (Microsoft Excel), presentation software (Microsoft PowerPoint), database software (Microsoft Access) and email software (Microsoft Outlook).

An in depth review of any of these components is a daunting task and one that we shall not attempt. As it turns out, I got Microsoft Office 2000 for 3 very specific purposes - I needed to publish document content on the Internet, I needed create some presentations and I needed to look at spreadsheets that some business partners insisted on sending me. We'll see how Office 2000 was able to handle these tasks.

First, let's look at Word 2000. If you're like me, you own Microsoft Word but you don't use more than 5% of its features. In fact, I'm afraid of Microsoft Word because every time I try a new feature, it seems to mess up the formatting on all my existing documents. It was with a sense of trepidation that I installed Office 2000. In fact, I chose the option that allowed me to keep my existing Office 97 programs in a separate folder so now I can use either Word 97 or Word 2000. Being a computer geek, I chose to do a custom install. This was an interesting process but a bad mistake. As it turns out, the Office 2000 custom installation program doesn't give you the option of 'install this component' or 'don't install this component' - the choices were - install it or use it from the CD - the latter would install the component the first time you tried to use it. Why was my decision a bad mistake? Well, for reasons that I still haven't figured out, whenever I click on Word 2000, I get a dialog box telling me that Office is installing the component. This lasts around 5 seconds and than disappears. Harmless but annoying.

The reason I decided to use Microsoft Word is because my company told me that I needed to update our corporate web site. Yikes! I could learn HTML but that would take forever. I could use a tool like Microsoft FrontPage Express or FrontPage 2000 and I may still do that but clearly, the easiest thing to do would be to use a skill I already had - Microsoft Word - and take advantage of its main new function in Office 2000, the seamless integration between Word documents (with a .DOC extension) and HTML documents (with an HTML extension). The only question in my plan - does the feature work? It's interesting that after years of experience in the software industry, I've gotten so cynical that I do not believe a product or feature works until I've personally tested it. Of course, Microsoft Word 97 was supposed to have been able to save documents as web files also, and that feature didn't work at all, so perhaps my cynicism is justified.

Well, the results of the tests were quite impressive. I first opened an HTML document in Microsoft Word. The document looked exactly the same in Microsoft Word as it did in my browser - Internet Explorer. I was able to edit the document using exactly the same Word functions as I'd always used - bullet lists, bolding, indentation, paragraphs, headings and so forth. I saved the modified file and opened the file using my browser and amazingly, they were absolutely identical. With Word 2000, modifying web sites is easy!

My next task was to publish some of our products documentation on the Internet. Here, the news was good, but not as good. You can certainly take any word document (at least any word document that I've tried) and convert it to HTML, but there are two drawbacks. First, the size of the file increases by a lot! Why do you care - if someone is trying to download your page and, thanks to Microsoft Word, it's two or three times as big as it was before, people are not going to be happy. Second, if you have imbedded objects in your word document such as pictures, when you convert the document to HTML, Word takes those objects and creates an entire folder just for the objects. This creates a bit of a problem if you then want to upload the document to your web site. One really cool feature is the ability to easily create a separate frame for the table of contents. For large documents, you can tell Microsoft Word to create the table of contents in a separate frame and than carry that format over to the web page. The effect in your browser is that you get a table of contents in the left frame and the main document in the right frame. You can click on a header in the left frame and see the text in the right frame.

Two more notes before we leave the subject of publishing documents on the Internet. First, the HTML that gets created is not real easy to modify with conventional tools so if you start with Word, you're pretty much stuck with Word. Second, there may be a better approach to accomplishing the same task - Adobe's Acrobat. Once installed, you can easily create PDF documents from Word files and let people download the PDF documents over the Internet.

My recommendation: IIf you have a mostly text based web site and know Microsoft Word, it is a superb tool for HTML creation and publishing. If you are trying to publish manuals, I'd go the Acrobat route.

Moving on to the second Office component that had I use of - Microsoft PowerPoint, I was quite pleased with the enhancements in this version. Mind you - I can't even name the enhancements in this version - Microsoft indicated that it was 'easier to use', whatever that meant. I can tell you this - I've tried in the past to use PowerPoint and did not encounter much success. PowerPoint 95 and PowerPoint 97 both had a certain randomness in the presentation slides that it would create and while I like randomness when I visit Las Vegas, randomness in software is seldom desired. With PowerPoint 2000, I was able to create a 50 slide product presentation with few problems. In fact, I was able to concentrate on content without the software getting in the way - really the highest complement you can pay to a product of this type. If you've tried PowerPoint in the past and found it difficult to master, try it again - you may find happiness.

I hate spreadsheet software. I've always hated spreadsheet software. I've hated every version of Excel, Lotus 1-2-3, Quattro Plus - you name it and I've hated it. Excel 2000 continues that tradition. Sadly, sometimes, you have GOT to use a spreadsheet because other people send you spreadsheets and you have to read them or, in my case, my company tried to base an expense report system around them. Well. I had no problems doing simple things with Excel, such as reading spreadsheets that other people sent me. I could read them and print them with ease. Sadly, my experience trying to get our expense report submitted was not as pleasant. We create a spreadsheet template with the required formulas, rows neatly presented, columns neatly summed, typed in our expense data, hit enter and presto! Nothing happened. The rows didn't flow. The columns remain unsummed. Why? Well, we went back to the cells with the formulas, double and triple checked everything and even asked the pesky office assistant (The Paper Clip) for help. It winked at us in that cute little paper clip way that it has and remained silent. After around 3 hours of research, lots of searches through Excel's comprehensive yet incomprehensible help facility and calls to my spreadsheet cognizant friends, I determined that I was doing something wrong. Sadly, to this day, I have no clue what it is. I filled out my expense report on paper in around 5 minutes. Please don't misunderstand me here. I'm sure that Excel is an excellent program and I'm sure that millions of people rely on it daily. I'm not one of them.

And that's it. I'd love to tell you about Microsoft Outlook but sadly, I use AOL for email. I would convert to Outlook but AOL does not offer forwarding of e-mail, nor does AOL conform to any known e-mail standards. Thus, if you're on AOL you are stuck with it. It's really a shame because Outlook looks pretty cool.

The only remaining question is - is it worth $260 to upgrade. It was worth it to me - I got an easy way to Edit HTML documents and presentation software that I can use. Who knows - maybe one day, I'll have a use for Microsoft Access or the other components in Microsoft Office. The package clearly offers a lot of stuff and a relatively cheap price. I suppose that it's possible - just possible that Bill Gates and company can find a way to build a spreadsheet that even I can use - if Janet Reno has the good sense to leave them alone.

And on a lighter note: It gets boring sometimes, to review a new application, so when I got Microsoft Office 2000, I decided to try it, review it, and write about it in verse - a song, if you will, to the tune of Gilligan's Island.