Microsoft Office97 for Developers

The whirlwind tour of Microsoft Office97 for Developers continues: more of what's new, interesting, and important (part two of two).

Late last year, Microsoft Vice President Richard Fade said that what defines this release of the Microsoft Office suite is 'communication and collaboration.' In last month's Hello, World!, Bill Lazar talked about collaboration and programming issues in his review of the new Visual Basic for Applications system, Access97, and the Replication Manager. In this review, I'll focus on the communications features that let Office97 users read and write HTML documents across the Internet. I'll also cover its flashy new toolbar interface.

The most noticeable difference in the Office97 programs, compared not only with previous versions of Office but with anything you've seen from Microsoft before, is the new user interface approach.

It seems that Microsoft has finally realized that menus and toolbars are very similar, and that they also share a more general concept. In Windows, menus contain words and may provide popup submenus or execute an action immediately. Toolbars contain icons or words but only execute actions immediately. In most applications, toolbars are very flexible, existing in separate dockable windows.

Microsoft Office97's toolbar supports drop-down subitems as well as immediate actions, providing a superset of the functionality normally associated with menus. Thus, it unifies all toolbars and menus and makes customization simpler, since you only need one configuration process rather than separate procedures to do so. It also gives you much more flexibility, since you can make hierarchical toolbars.

The programs are also without the main menu that is normally associated with Windows. This too, is simply a toolbar. You can undock it from its historical position at the top of the application window and place it on the bottom, sideways on either edge, leave it floating, or hide it. Additionally, the popup menus feature icons. That's great if your artistic sense demands that everything have an associated icon, but on a more practical note it helps you identify which menu items are equivalent to toolbar buttons.

Besides this newfound logistical flexibility, the toolbars look different. The individual items are no longer drawn as buttons. Instead, they are simply placed next to each other with a small amount of spacing. In this way, they are more like menus. However, buttons containing text (such as style names) tend to run together. As a remedy, you can have separator lines between groups of items as desired. To provide feedback (and to mitigate the running together of words), the item is drawn with a three-dimensional button frame around it when the mouse passes over it.

Since the new toolbar doesn't have space around and between the buttons, a new way had to be introduced for dragging it. To this end, there is a 'grip' area at the left (or top) of each toolbar. You can drag it using this grip, and bring up the toolbar toggle menu by right-clicking on it. That is, use the new grip area for those actions that you previously performed in the margins around the toolbar buttons.

What, No Teddy Bear?

The other major thing you'll notice is the Office Assistant. If you've ever seen Microsoft Bob, you'll recognize the concept. The Assistant is a small window containing your choice of animated creatures: a paper clip, a bouncing red ball, an Einstein character, the 'Hoverbot,' a spinning Office logo, 'Mother Nature' (morphs between Earth and Flower and other round symbols), the PowerPup (which looks a lot like Dogbert), a paper cat, and a Shakespeare character.

Besides being cute, the purpose of the Assistant is to unobtrusively point out a tip or hint. That is, it takes the place of the tip wizard. When the program detects an action it knows about, a light bulb symbol appears in the Assistant window. Clicking on that will bring up the tip's text. It would have been nice to disable specific tips as I learned of them, yet still be shown new things, but that resource wasn't available.

Another use is a personification of the help system. Help windows don't appear as simple top-level windows; instead you get a 'cartoon speech' bubble directed from the Assistant. If the Assistant has been turned off, it reappears just to anchor the help text when needed.

Programmability

All Office97 programs feature Visual Basic for Applications and a much improved Object Model. Details of the new Visual Basic for Applications system, Access, and the Replication Manager were presented by Bill Lazar in last month's Hello, World! column.

Other New Features

An improved drawing engine is common across all Office97 applications. You can use simple shapes, lines and arrows, callouts, text boxes, and 'word art' to annotate Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents.

The entire product suite features support for Microsoft's new mouse that has a dial between the buttons. Using the dial, you can scroll and zoom using the mouse without having to point to the scroll bar or other icons first.

The product suite also supports the Internet in a simple yet useful way. You can load files by giving a URL name, a local file name, or by using the universal naming convention. Thus, you can directly load documents off the World Wide Web. You can also directly save things to FTP sites.

What's in the Box?

Microsoft Office97 includes Word, Excel, Photo Editor, PowerPoint, Access, Binder, and Outlook.

The Developer's Edition also includes Replication Manager, Setup Wizard, Win32 API Viewer, Help Workshop, Visual Basic for Applications, and a selection of ActiveX controls. Rumors that Office97 for Developers includes Visual SourceSafe are not true. Rather, the advertising of 'Access and SourceSafe integration tools' indicates that Source Safe (if purchased separately) can store incremental changes to Access databases.

In addition, the Office97 CD-ROM includes a bonus package of various items such as animated cursors, fonts, and utility programs.

Outlook

Outlook is a new personal information manager program. It takes the place of Exchange Client, Mail, and Schedule+. Outlook will manage a variety of information, as is typical of programs of this genre. It has separate areas for e-mail, an appointment calendar, a contact database, task lists, a personal journal, and 'sticky notes.' A group of people can use Outlook for group activities. For example, scheduling a meeting will invite the participants as well as make a notation on your own appointment book. It is also fully customizable when you use Exchange Client extensions or OLE automation.

Word Features

Word97 now ships with better multilingual support. What previously required different retail packages for different world markets is now handled with a single installation. It also adds another feature to its bag of tricks: auto complete. Earlier versions had an auto-correction where misspelled words would be automatically replaced, and auto-format where special sequences would be interpreted as special meanings such as bullets and smart quotes. With auto complete, if you start a word that it knows about, you'll get a yellow tag (like a tooltip) showing the whole word. When the tag is visible, hitting Enter lets the application type the rest of the word for you.

The tooltip idea has also been applied to footnotes and annotations. It is no longer necessary to open the notes pane to view a footnote. Now, if the mouse cursor pauses over the superscript symbol, the content of the footnote appears as a tooltip window.

The proofing capabilities have also been improved. Grammar checking seems to work much better than in the past. It can be done in the background with green waves showing problem spots, much as spelling errors have been shown in previous versions with red waves. This feature is sure to improve the grammar of its users through constant feedback. Also, spelling and grammar correction have been integrated into one pass. Thus, you can step through each error using a dialog box, rather than just right-clicking on highlighted errors, and both spelling and grammar are covered.

The auto-summarize feature is interesting. It will read your document and present a condensed version. A toolbar lets you alter the percentage extracted as you read it, to strike the right balance between terseness and usefulness. The feature can present the results in several ways. A summary can be generated as a new body of text, or Word can highlight key phrases within the existing document. This latter form is more useful in my opinion, since I can immediately see the context of the summary phrases. Call it computer-aided skimming.

You might wonder how good the proofer is at understanding the structure of the document. Asking Word to create a summary is an interesting way to check your document-are the highlighted points presenting the main ideas of the paper? Making your paper more clear for the machine will generally make it more clear to human readers, too.

A related feature is a document map. This is like an outline with hypertext links. It will typically use the headings and subheadings to form the outline, and works well as a navigational aid.

The find and replace feature also has a new trick up its sleeve. It can match word forms and conjugate the replacement text to match. For example, changing 'saw' to 'hammer' will also, if the word forms option is specified, replace sawing with hammering, but leave 'seen' alone. I tried changing boy to child to see what it did with boys. It did indeed replace boys with children.

On the down side, the search feature still does not allow for special items (such as paragraph marks) when pattern searching is enabled.

Word97 has some refinements that make it better for composing printed publications. Most significant is that the more versatile text box has supplanted the frame feature.

The text box is more like what you would previously find in desktop publishing rather than word processing packages. With it, you can flow text from one text box to another to create newspaper-style layouts. You can also rotate the contents of a text box.

There is also more versatility in embedding items such as imported illustrations or OLE objects on a page. You can place them on a page directly without the need for a frame. The anchorage and text flowing is much more configurable than before. You can even flow text around irregular contours of an illustration, rather than only around square borders of a frame.

Word97 lets you apply special highlighting, shading, and bordering effects to any passage of text, not just entire paragraphs. If that's not enough, you can apply borders to pages as well. Borders can be simple lines or fancy ribbons and artwork, as found in more specialized drawing programs. Hundreds of border styles are included with the program.

In addition to supporting more layout features designed for hard copy publishing, Word97 has a view option for documents that are made to be read online. In this mode, you have one long scrolling region without page breaks. Many HTML-like features are supported, including background bitmap images and hypertext links.

Word97 also facilitates creating World Wide Web pages. You can export a file in HTML format, and then save directly via FTP. However, this does not work like the common GUI World Wide Web authoring tool. Instead, you create and edit a Word .DOC file and convert it to HTML using a one-way process. If you load the HTML file, you get plain text with markup codes, not a GUI representation.

Excel Features

The Excel97 spreadsheet offers many improvements and new features. In addition to the new toolbar design and World Wide Web features common to the whole set of Office97 programs, Excel offers other ergonomic improvements and a few often-requested features.

Much of this is like a fresh coat of paint in your comfortable old study. The first thing you'll notice is how the row and column labels are highlighted to track the active cell on the worksheet. When you select a cell range in response to a dialog box, you can collapse the dialog so it's not in the way. When you're playing around with the new features, you'll like the fully featured undo capability.

Worksheets can be larger, and you are no longer limited to 255 characters in a cell. There are many new functions, and the Assistant can look them up for you (this takes the place of the function wizard). You can also attach comments to a cell. These comments pop up in their own window only in a certain context, such as when the cell in question contains the cursor. This takes the place of Cell Notes. Additionally, the shared workbook feature, introduced in Excel95, has been fleshed out in Excel97. You can edit or change formulas, change formatting, and add new sheets to a shared workbook. Changes made by other users will update your view periodically.

Meanwhile, you can highlight changes much as you can in Word. The details about the edit are displayed, and you can accept or reject changes. You can also log all changes, which provides a good audit trail. This makes shared workbooks practical. If users step on each other's work, each will be alerted to the changes. If too many cooks spoil the broth, the history can be used to untangle the mess.

PowerPoint 97

The most significant new feature for PowerPoint is its programmability. The simple ability to record macros is a welcome addition. PowerPoint also supports ActiveX controls in presentation documents, add-ins, and Visual Basic for Applications. But for the most part, PowerPoint's face lift occurred in the 1995 edition.

A Lot of Opportunity for Enhancement

PowerPoint aside, our special, two-part whirlwind tour has shown that the applications that make up Office97 Developer's Edition have dozens of new and powerful features. With this new edition, developers as well as power users should find plenty of opportunities to enhance the suite's basic functionality.

John Dlugosz is a C++ consultant, developer, and writer. You can reach him through Software Development magazine.