Office 95 Review and Migration -- continued from page 1 --

Figure 1: Advanced Find Options

From any Office 95 application’s File Open dialog box a click on the Advanced button pops up the Advanced Find box shown in Figure 1. You can also access this dialog from the Start Menu in Windows 95, just click on Start then Open Office Document and in the File Open box click on Advanced. If you’ve been thinking about spending $50 to $200 for an indexing and searching program, think again. This may be all you need.

Office Shortcut Bar They used to call ’er MOM, for Microsoft Office Manager. That’s not to be confused with MOM, which is what we call the Mother of All Windows Books, and its namesake.

Mother of All Windows Books and the reigning sex symbol in Mother of All PC Books, and I’m about to appear in the Mother of All Windows 95 Books. If you don’t like it, you can lump it. There’s this thing called a contract, sonny, and it says that I’m Mom, and they’re my books, and that’s that. So there. Sheeesh."

Aha. Sorry Mom. As we were trying to say, the Office Shortcut Bar (as the old MOM icon bar is now called) is very cool. The main problem is that people tend to think it can only be used as it comes out of the box. WRONG! In fact, Office Shortcut Bar (OSB) could be the neatest program launcher in the business, even if you never use it for an Office application! Right now, Woody’s OSB looks like this:

Figure 2: A Custom OSB

Those pictures are really tiny, but they show up fine on the monitor — and they sit unobtrusively at the top of the screen, where they almost never get in the way of anything. The first square thing is the OSB control button. When Woody pushes each of the other buttons he gets, respectively: Word 95; Regedit (the Registration Database editor, which you’ll probably be using a lot); Excel 95; Explorer, rooted in my C: directory; WinZIP 95; ImageView from Spry (a neat graphic file viewer); and Collage Capture, which he uses for taking screen shots. Just about 90% of all the work I do every day is on that bar.

There’s a trick to using OSB (isn’t there always?). Elsewhere in this issue is the whole story on OSB by contributing editor Michael Gordon. Check it out.

People have been known to pay for application launchers. Under Windows 3.x the price of a good launcher was between $20 and $50 which makes this "free" feature in Windows 95 a great find.

At Last an Address Book

The third major new pan-Office application is the Address Book, billed as being part of Schedule+, but in fact the same Address Book works in Schedule+, Word, and Exchange. It’s a fair step along the road to (finally!) a single PIM (Personal Information Manager) that works in all applications. Unfortunately, the road is still unpaved.

The Address Book has the greatest potential of the three pan-Office applications. Sure the implementation leaves a lot to be desired but on the plus side, this Address Book provides a single repository for all address, e-mail, phone, and general phone book information. That’s great. It’s also easily accessible from Word — one click, type in a name, and the address is suddenly in your document. Cool.

But, you knew there’d be a "but" didn’t you? The Word hook into the address book only lets you search on the name field. Exchange’s implementation forces you to put multiple entries in the Address Book — one for each type of e-mail address. For example, if a friend of yours has both a CompuServe account number and an Internet address, you’ll want to have two separate entries. Schedule+ works only with this new 32-bit version of the Address Book, and as we mentioned if you want to work with others on a network everybody has to upgrade. There’s little to no flexibility in how you view or search the entries. The list of kvetches goes on and on.

Do the benefits outweigh the problems? There’s no clear answer. But it’s a start and long overdue.

And a Host of Others

There are other pan-Office goodies included in Office 95. Binders come to mind — OLE containers that let you put diverse documents and spreadsheets and presentations together, then treat the bundle as a single file. This is pretty handy in concept and is another of those things that will hopefully improve. Okay, some of the Woody’s Underground Office staff and contributing editors think Binders are handier than a pocket on a shirt, the difference of opinion is what makes a horse race. By and large, though, we haven’t found much use for them. Some day Binders will be more flexible and allow you to interleave pages from DOC files, and XLS files and PPT files, changing orientation and the like, while providing a unified set of headers and footers. When that happens we’ll embrace this feature a bit more warmly.

A Word About Word

The new feature list in Word 95 is short. Real short. But there are some improvements. Word does not crash as often as it used to when stressed (Woody keeps a log and Word 95 is definitely more stable than its last incarnation). So stability is a tangible improvement.

We’ve already mentioned the enhanced Find and Address Book (which is a pan-Office feature). Because Word 95 is a native Windows 95 application it supports long file names, it has a middling cool yellow-marker highlighting function, and even more new "smart" functions, which we found profoundly annoying and turned off.

The new tag-along spell-checking ability is a nifty new feature, where Word watches what you type and indicates misspelled words with a squiggly red underline. You can right-click on one of those underlined words, pick the correct spelling and release the mouse button, and the correctly-spelled word appears immediately in your document. If that sounds familiar to you WOPR folks, well, WOPR has had a right-click spell-check that’s almost identical to the one in Word 95 — and it’s had that capability for more that a year, in fact, since early in the product cycle of Word 6! But we digress.

Excel’s Embellishments

Our votes for the top three embellishments rendered in Excel 95 for day-in, day-out, workhorse worksheet users are: (1) vastly improved drag-and-drop operations, (2) AutoComplete, and (3) AutoCalculate, with simplifications to number formatting vying valiantly with AutoCalculate for third place. Let’s take ’em one at a time.

Excel 5 — that’s right, version 5, not version 95 (a.k.a. version 7) — had some serious drag-and-drop limitations. Jim and Lee spelled these out clearly in their prescient tome The Underground Guide to Excel 5.0 for Windows (Addison-Wesley), "You can’t drag-and-drop between sheets in different books. You can’t drag-and-drop between the same sheet displayed in different windows. You can’t drag-and-drop between different sheets in the same book … [but] what Excel 5 doesn’t do, WinWord 6 does." Along comes Excel version 95 with fixes to all three of these major d&d obstacles. A neat hat trick!

Vast number-crunching capabilities aside, we all know that one of Excel’s most compelling features is list management, where "list" is Microsoft’s Making It Easier(tm) lexicon for "database." This next feature is so cool we’re really bummed that we didn’t think of it.

Picture yourself entering employee last names into a column. Most sets of data contain some repeating values, so along comes the second case of "Brzezinski" and let’s assume there are no other entries starting with the letter "b." As soon as you type the "b," Excel puts Brzezinski into the current cell and waits for you to decide what to do; actually, it smartly highlights just "rzezinski" so you can quickly overtype Excel’s assumption (nice!). There’s more solid intelligence here. Say there was a "Brown" up the column somewhere then Excel would do nothing when you typed "br" but "bro" would trigger Brown and "brz" Brzezinski. There’s more … say you right-click an empty cell at the bottom of a list, choose the "Pick from list…" command and you get an on-sheet drop-down list of all the unique values in the column. That’s AutoComplete!

AutoCalculate is subtle but tremendously useful. Select a range; right-click on the AutoCalculate area of the status bar; and pick from Average, Count, Count Nums, Max, Min, or Sum (the factory default). The answer’s displayed right there on the status bar. This is a feature that’s begging to be extended to include additional built-in functions (hey, why not all of them?) as well as user-defined functions. Check back with us on this when Excel 96 is released.

In the meantime, just for grins, see what the Answer Wizard has to say about "autocalculate." It doesn’t, rather it politely replies, "Sorry, but I don’t know what you mean. Please rephrase your question." This nifty feature isn’t available in the help file’s Find tab either, but thankfully it does appear in the Index. Go figure.

PowerPoint’s Hot Picks

Let’s get PowerPoint 95’s main downfall out of the way first. PowerPoint has an entirely new, non-backward compatible file format. Arguably a reasonable price to pay for progress. So, PowerPoint 95 can’t directly open PowerPoint 4 presentations and vice versa. (Unlike Excel 95 and Word 95 which can directly open — no translator or converter required — their predecessor files, Excel 5 and Word 6 respectively. And Excel 5 and Word 6 can of course open their big siblings’ files unencumbered.) Instead you have to use the provided translator for version 4-to-95 opens and for 95-to-4 you have to File Save As and choose "PowerPoint 4.0" in the Save as type drop-down list box, thereby creating a second PPT file. ’Nuff said.

If you struggled to get black-and-white slide output on paper with prior versions, you’ll love the new View / Black and White command. Our next tip o’ the hat is for a feature that should have been common amongst all Office applications in Office 4, but hey, better late than never — PowerPoint now has multiple undo. And if you’re a meeting enthusiast (or just forced by the boss to attend seemingly endless streams of them) then you’ll really dig Meeting Minder.

During a slide show, right-click and choose Meeting Minder. You’ll get a dialog with three tabs — Meeting Minutes, Notes Pages, and Action Items. Type away in any or all of ’em as appropriate. When you’re done with your show, the Action Items content becomes a new, last slide. Multimedia and animation lovers will appreciate a whole array of new features in these categories, just remember the old adage to keep a light hand on the effects and focus on content, content, content.

Bucks for Bill

In the final analysis, if you migrate to Windows 95 we feel that you should go the whole route and get Office 95 as well if you use any two of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. If you don’t own Office it’s cheaper to buy Office Pro for $548.99 (PC Mall again) than Excel and Word for $298.99 apiece. Go for it.

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