| January 1996 / Volume 1, Issue 1 |
 Office 95 Review and Migrationby Woody Leonhard, T. J. Lee, and Lee Hudspeth So What’s It Gonna Cost, Ralphie? For those of you who have made the leap of faith, you’re probably still calculating the true cost of moving to Windows 95 and Office 95 and all the little whatever 95’s. But for those of you have not make the jump yet be aware that Microsoft is sparing no hype to separate you from at least $200 or so. And that’s just the cash up front cost. Like so many things in life there is more here than meets the eye. But the hard costs that you can figure out now are as follows, based on an ad from PC Mall (as of the time of this writing) that offers the Windows 95 upgrade for $89.95, the Plus! Pack for $43.99, the Office 95 Standard Upgrade for $198.99, and the Office 95 Pro & Bookshelf Upgrade for $298.99. And the Choices Are? Windows 95 for $90 or so has been described as pretty much a no-brainer. There are enough new features to warrant the upgrade, primarily the additional stability and the memory management that allows you to run more applications than you could under earlier versions of Windows. Calling Windows 95 an upgrade is a bit of sleight of hand. It is a new operating system and carries a learning curve of sorts. But we do recommend it, highly. And if you’re connected to the Net, the Plus! Pack will pay for itself with one simple application, the Internet Setup Wizard. As in previous versions, the Office upgrade comes in two flavors. The "Standard" version includes Word 95, Excel 95, PowerPoint 95, and Schedule+ 95. The "Pro & Bookshelf" upgrade includes all of the stuff from the Standard version plus Access 95 and Bookshelf 95. To Upgrade or Not to Upgrade Does Office 95 offer enough to warrant the hassle of upgrading from Office 4.x? That is, to quote the melancholy Dane the question. Yes, it gives you 32-bit applications to run with your new Windows 95 sorta 32-bit operating system, but do you go now or wait for a right-of-decimal increment? Office 96.Feb perhaps? |
Well, Microsoft® Word for Windows® 95 Version 7.0 (believe it or not, that’s its official moniker)— Word 95 for short — contains a few new features, but its major advantages are rather subtle. Ditto for Excel 95. We’ve heard that PowerPoint 95 is supposed to be a major upgrade, but our presentation needs are pretty simple and we have no real experience in this program. Schedule+ is a repackaging of the application that was included with Windows for Workgroups. But if you use this feature with others on a network you’ll all have to upgrade. No mix and matching of the previous version and the Windows 95 version.
We think you should take the Office 95 plunge. Oh, we could argue it either way but there are three very nifty features in the upgrade that in total push over the edge on the upgrade question. These features which we’ll detail are true pan-Office features, accessible from all of the Office 95 applications. Advanced Search Engine Word for Windows has had a minor attempt at document management, the File Find feature, going way back. As long as you didn’t mind that it automatically performed the last search you did as soon as you ran it (when you really wanted to do a different search) and as long as your search was pretty straight forward it was better than nothing. But not much. Office 95 has taken the basic idea of Word’s File Find option and turned it into a fancy, fully indexed file finder. Oh, it’s not the most advanced or featured laden indexer or finder, but it provides full Boolean search capabilities and is reasonably feature rich, including the ability to search on text within any document. Yes, it’s a pain to set up searches across multiple root folders; and it only reliably indexes Word 6 or Word 95 documents, while occasionally hiccuping on Word 2 and any text-only documents. But overall it is pretty serviceable. See Figure 1. Continued on page 3. |
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Copyright © 1996 Pinecliffe International. No republication in any media or format without the express written permission of Pinecliffe International.