Now, If It Could Only Make Coffee . . .

Every couple of years, Microsoft issues a new version of its “Office” suite of applications and, each time, the version grows larger and more sophisticated. Whether or not that’s progress depends, in part, on whether you have any use for the new features. The latest version, Microsoft Office 97, was released last week.

Microsoft Office is a bundle of programs, with the basic version including Microsoft Word, the Excel spreadsheet, the PowerPoint presentation program, and a new addition this year, the Outlook personal information management program that handles e-mail and lets you keep track of addresses, phone numbers and your schedule. Office 97 costs $499, but users of the current version can upgrade for $199.

Office Professional, which also includes the Access database program, costs $549, or $299 to upgrade. Microsoft is also offering a Home Essentials package for $99 that lacks Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint and Access but includes Word 97, Microsoft Works 4.0, Greetings Workshop, Internet Explorer and some games.

Office 97 is an ambitious upgrade with major enhancements in two areas: ease of use and collaboration.

Microsoft has automated an increasing number of tasks and added a new help system, known as Office Assistant. The help system features a choice of cartoon characters. By default, the characters pop up in a corner of your screen as you work, providing you with unsolicited advice when the software thinks you need it.

Despite its sometimes overbearing nature, Office Assistant provides surprisingly sophisticated help even for experienced users like me. I wasn’t sure how to use Word’s new feature that creates an automatic summary of documents, so I clicked on the Assistant, typed “how do I create an auto summary?” and got the answer to my question.

The most irritating aspect of Office 97 is that Microsoft changed the data files created by Word and Excel so they can’t be read by earlier versions. That could cause a major problem for anyone who shares files with others, though you can choose to save files in the older format.

I’m also unhappy with creeping file size. Word data files are much larger than they were before, and the software takes up a lot more disk space (about 120 megabytes for a typical installation). Don’t even consider Office 97 unless you have at least 16 megabytes of memory and Windows 95.

Office 97 does feature plenty of subtle improvements. When entering a formula in Excel, for example, you used to get an error message if you forgot to close a parenthesis. Excel now does it for you automatically. Word also finishes common words for you.

Word also helps you with your writing with a built-in grammar correction feature that includes the ability to check for correct word usage.

There are a number of features designed to help people who collaborate, including a revision tracking system within Word that lets you save multiple versions of documents.

And, of course, Microsoft has gone all out to accommodate the Internet. You can now embed hyperlinks to Web sites or e-mail addresses in any Office document, and you can use Word to create or edit Web pages. Type www.yahoo.com in a Word document, and it automatically creates a link to Yahoo’s Web site.

If you click on that link from within Word, it will launch your Web browser and take you to Yahoo’s page.

New to Office 97 is Outlook, the integrated e-mail and contact management program. The program is well-integrated into the other Office applications, but I found Outlook’s e-mail functions a bit complicated to use and somewhat slower than Eudora Pro and other e-mail programs I’ve used.

Microsoft has also released a new piece of hardware which, not surprisingly, works with Office 97. The new wheel mouse looks like a regular mouse, only there is a small wheel between the two buttons that you turn to scroll up or down a document. The wheel works with all programs in Office 97 and Internet Explorer 3.0, but not with most other Windows programs. It’s not a big deal, but it does make it easier to scroll.

Although the latest version of Office has some excellent new features, I don’t see any compelling reason to rush out and purchase an upgrade. At $199 to $299 per workstation, it’s an expensive proposition, and most users will see relatively little, if any, increase in productivity.