It includes a calendar, a contact list, a file manager, a journal that keeps track of the time you have spent using Office applications, virtual sticky notes you can post on the screen and much more. Hypertext links are easy to insert into documents, though I found a bug in the process.Īnd then there is the all-new Outlook. You can run your Web browser from a little bar that appears inside the Office applications. A new set of drawing tools may prove handy. Excel can correct such common errors as omitted parentheses. After making decent guesses about the most important sentences in a file, the new auto-summarizer can highlight them or save them separately. You can set up Word to save all versions of your document in one file and let you step back to retrieve material you might have otherwise discarded, though the file may grow to unwieldy size.
Some of the most useful improvements are little things, such as the character counter in Word that finally takes account of spaces. Read the help information on new features, or risk missing them entirely.
#Microsoft office 97 professional edition manuals
The printed manuals are skinny, and most on-screen tutorials have been abandoned. You may also have to correct Start Menu shortcuts that point to files that no longer exist. The program may not transfer them, and you may have to restore them by hand.
#Microsoft office 97 professional edition upgrade
Unless customers insist that Microsoft exorcise the ghost of the undead Bob, customized cartoons (perhaps a jittery version of your company's logo) may one day be your only route to help.īefore you upgrade to Office 97 from a previous version, make notes about the options you have customized. If you want to use certain functions, such as the sometimes helpful natural-language search function introduced in Office 95, or get certain special information, such as expanded examples of grammatical errors, you must turn on the cartoon channel. Unfortunately, that help is presented solely in the form of dialogue balloons attached to one of eight cartoon characters, most of which make irrelevant, distracting movements and sounds until you turn them off.īut these toon-zombies are as insistent on popping up again as Wile E. The new Office Assistant feature offers something Office has never had before: a help facility that makes reasonable guesses about what you might be looking for in a particular situation. In a space smaller than a single help page, it is all a hapless reviewer can do to record a few general impressions. Offering to sell your soul to the devil provided you could first finish examining Office's every nook and cranny would lead to a long, long life.
Office 97 is a Leviathan of a program that in a "typical" installation requires more than 120 megabytes of hard disk space. For $100 more, the Professional version throws in the Access xTC database and Bookshelf's dictionary, thesaurus and quotations.