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December 1996 Reviews This Month
By James E. Powell
The forthcoming Office 97 has a number of "bonus" applications that will ship on the CD, such as Internet Explorer 3.0 (Microsoft's Web browser) and Microsoft Camcorder.
The Camcorder application captures and replays screen actions, in much the same way as Lotus ScreenCam. But Camcorder saves its files, or movies, in AVI format that most people can use, while ScreenCam uses a proprietary format.
There are other differences as well. Camcorder lets you create an executable from a movie, including the compressed AVI file, driver and codec.
Microsoft says you'll need 4MB of memory free for optimal performance, but I found its operation acceptably fast even with only 1MB free.
Camcorder doesn't let you record the video and audio tracks separately, and you can't append one movie to another. It doesn't install automatically with Office 97 so you have to add it manually. But, judging from the beta I saw, Camcorder is an extremely good first attempt.
-- INFO FILE --
Price: Included in Office 97
Platforms: 95, NT
Microsoft Corp.
800-426-9400, 206-882-8080
WinMag Box Score: 3
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