   Microsoft Office 97 Intranet Product Enhancement Guide: New
            Features in Microsoft Office 97 in Detail

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New Features in Detail in Microsoft Office 97

Connectivity has become pervasive among software users. In fact,
65 percent of all computer users are now connected in some way
--to an online service, an Internet service provider, or a
public or private network. International Data Corporation
research shows that 73 percent of corporations with 1,000
employees or more will have capabilities for an intranet by the
end of 1996.

This connectivity has encouraged more users to collaborate and
share information in documents online. Office 97 makes it easier
to manage and exchange information with others and to connect
documents to data on a network, an intranet, or the Internet.

Integration with Internet Explorer

Microsoft Office 97 integrates seamlessly with Microsoft
Internet Explorer 3.0 or later to allow users to easily access,
view and edit information contained in Office documents
regardless of where it resides. With ActiveX Document
Technology, Internet Explorer users who link to or open an
Office document will view this information inside Internet
Explorer, providing full access to all the tools of the Office
application. This highly integrated solution eliminates the need
for user to have multiple windows open on the desktop at one
time.

This is an example of an ActiveX document within Internet
Explorer 3.0 (Contains a Microsoft Excel 97 PivotTable Report).

Web Find Fast

Office 97 allows users to use the navigation and searching
metaphors of the Web to quickly find what they are looking for.
Find Fast technology allows full-text searching of both HTML and
Office documents on a company network.

The user initiates a search by clicking the Search button on the
Web toolbar or in a browser. After filling in the search
criteria such as title, author, or other standard Office
properties, the user clicks Search. The results are returned in
an HTML page with hyperlinks to each of the found documents.
Find Fast technology supports several search types and indexing
characteristics.

                  Search option  | Description

    Full-text searching  | The full text of every document is
                    indexed and searchable.

Phrase searching  | Find Fast looks for phrases such as Business
                        Plan or John Doe.

   Proximity searching  | Find Fast looks for words that occur
  within a certain distance; for example, the search text Plan
      NEAR Catalog finds Proposed Plan for Online Catalog.

 Property searching  | Properties, such as author and title, are
                    indexed and searchable.

  Multiple volume indexing  | Documents can reside on multiple
file servers, so a user does not have to move documents to index
                              them.

  Relevancy ranking  | Results are returned sorted by relevance;
 in other words, documents that most likely pertain to the query
                        are listed first.

  Centralized index  | The index is stored centrally for greater
               simplicity and better performance.

Hyperlinks

Hyperlinks between documents make it easier for the reader (or
author) to go to related information. For example, the
specification for a new bicycle might include hyperlinks to the
descriptions of individual parts that make up the bicycle.

Office 97 includes a simple dialog box that is shared across all
Office applications to make it easy for any user to create and
edit hyperlinks. These hyperlinks can go virtually anywhere --
to other Office documents, HTML files, or any file with a
recognized address -- through a fully qualified path using a
URL, UNC, or FTP address. Office 97 users can attach a hyperlink
to a variety of objects, including text, graphics, objects,
tables, presentation slides, worksheet cells, and custom
database form fields.

Basket is hyperlinked to a workbook called Basket Sales.

Hyperlinks also make it easy to apply a friendly name to a URL
in a document so that the URL is easy to reference when
connecting to another document.

Friendly name for a hyperlink in a document

Web Toolbar

To make it easier for users to use hyperlinks to move between
documents, the Web toolbar is shared by Microsoft Access 97,
Microsoft Excel 97, PowerPoint 97, and Word 97. The Web toolbar
is similar to the navigation tools found in standard Web
browsers, with common buttons for going forward, back, and to
the home page. The Search button lets users do full-content
index searching. A drop-down list box allows users to enter a
URL or file location, and tracks the most recently visited
sites.

Similar to the toolbar in Microsoft Internet Explorer, the Web
toolbar has a Favorites list for easy access to the most often
visited sites. With the Web toolbar, users also have one-click
access to create hyperlinks, and a single button that optimizes
the screen for online document viewing.

The Office 97 Web Toolbar

Opening from or Saving to a URL

Office 97 gives users the flexibility to open files residing not
only on the corporate network, but also on Web servers
accessible through HTTP or FTP servers. In addition, once users
have created Office documents, they can save them to URLs using
the Save command (File menu).

URLs included in the Open dialog box (File menu)

Online Publishing

Working effectively in a connected environment means that users
must be able to publish information online as easily as they now
print and save documents. Office 97 extends familiar ways of
publishing information to the online environment in several ways.

Save as HTML

Microsoft Office is designed to provide the flexibility to
publish information in a variety of formats. Every Office 97
application provides built-in support for viewing and creating
HTML. Now, users can create rich content for the Internet or an
intranet using the tools they are most familiar with.

Microsoft Office Viewers

To make it easy for all users to navigate to and share Office
documents, Microsoft provides (or will provide) free file
viewers for Microsoft Word 97, Microsoft Excel 97 and PowerPoint
97. These viewers enable users to view and print Office
documents without requiring the applications to be installed.
They also expose certain application features like document
views in Microsoft Word, or AutoFilter in Microsoft Excel.
Office viewers will be available for 16-bit Windows, 32-bit
Windows, and the Macintosh (PowerPC only).

In-Place Comments

When users review printed versions of documents, they often fill
the margins with comments. Similarly, users reviewing documents
online want to write comments. With Microsoft Excel 97, Word 97,
and PowerPoint 97 users can write and read comments when
reviewing documents online.

Comment displayed in a document

Change Tracking

Each comment can now be read in context and includes the full
name of the reviewer; light yellow shading indicates that there
are comments present in the text. To display a comment, the user
pauses the mouse pointer over the text or clicks the Next
Comment button on the Reviewing toolbar.

Word 2.0 introduced revision marking to support online review
and tracking of changes. In Word 97, Microsoft made further
enhancements to revision marks and also changed the feature name
to Track Changes to facilitate discovery, and to more closely
match the way users talk about editing documents. ScreenTips
tell users the date, time, and type of changes made; they appear
when users pause the mouse pointer over changed text.

Tracking changes with improved revision marks

Document Merging

Word 97 and Microsoft Excel 97 allow users to consolidate all
changes or rewrites from different authors in one easy step.
Instead of having to manually merge documents or worksheets by
copying and pasting changes across several versions, users can
choose multiple files and seamlessly merge the changes back to
the original. Word 97 and Microsoft Excel 97 track and merge not
only information changes, but also formatting changes.


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