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By James E. Powell
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Microsoft Excel in Office97
Think Microsoft Office95 already has everything but the kitchen sink? Well, get ready for "the biggest upgrade" ever.
The most notable changes in Office97 reflect Microsoft's focus on the Internet. If you type, for example, http://www.winmag.com in an application, Office creates a hyperlink you can click on and jump to in your browser. Publisher97's new Wizard helps you create an entire site, and HTML is now just another file format: Open any document from Internet Explorer, and up pops the app needed to edit it.
Meanwhile, workgroup features provide vastly simpler versioning and audit trails. You can share a workbook in Excel and track changes. Similarly, two or more people can simultaneously edit a document in Word, then consolidate changes when it's saved.
Word and Excel have also gained capabilities. For example, Word has picked up innovative grammar-checking; it underlines structural errors such as "their here." In Excel, you can refer to column headings like COST/SALES to launch formulas without predefining cell ranges. Among other changes, the user interface looks like Internet Explorer. Modules such as WordArt, drawing and charting are shared across the entire suite, and they've been enhanced: For instance, WordArt turns text into a 3-D graphic.
Microsoft's goal is for users to run the suite on a 486/33 PC with 8MB of RAM while boosting performance. Microsoft's early benchmarks suggest a 16 percent faster load time for Word, 30 percent for Access, and a 20 to 25 percent cut in recalculation time for Excel. The company hasn't yet announced pricing for Office97, which ships later this year. Office already represents more than half of Microsoft's sales and profits.
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