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Office 2003 Beta 2 Screen Shots
frooyo writes "ActiveWin is displaying screenshots of Office 2003 Beta 2 including pictures of Outlook, Excel, Word etc. As seen by the screenshot - the task based interface is much more prominent. Also - Outlook's three-vertical-pane interface is now the default." Nice to get a head start on what we'll be cloning next year ;)
HERE!
god I'm such a karma whore.'When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.' -HST
Other than Outlook, I haven't seen an improvement in Office since Office 97, and even THAT was iffy over Office95...
Word XP can do non-consecutive text selections (you have _no_ idea how nice this is until you have it). 2000 introduced a multiple-item clibboard, and it doubled in size in XP--in addition to an overhaul of the word mail-merge wizard, and numerous other small improvements (like the HTML export being almost standard).
Not sure of these are $100 upgrades, but they ARE improvements.
There was virtually no difference between Office and Office 97. The differences between Office 97 and 2000 were mostly visual (and the addition of broken compatibilities). The differences between Windows 98 and Windows ME were just pointless. I still consider Windows XP an expensive, restrictively licensed downgrade to Windows 2000.
In all that, you're right on the money for 98/ME; ME never should have been, and if not for RAMBUS it wouldn't have been. But as for the rest: MS has got lots of small improvements in each iteration of office. Blame planned obsolescence.
* Office 97 was the first package with reasonable HTML built-in. Yes, it's bloated HTML with all of the Office metadata, and yes, they'd have been better if they copied Acrobat's Word-UI. But that's neither here nor there.
* Office 2000 introduced a whole heck of new features--most notably for most of us, those auto-hiding menus, multiple windows in the taskbar, and a built-in clipboard that can hold twelve "cuts."
* Office XP doubled the size of the clipboard, gave word discontinuous selection ability, and introduced that somewhat-useful task pane.
* Windows XP, over 2000, has a major improvement just in explorer.exe. You can customize your start menu to your heart's content, the system tray auto-hide (or mannualy hide) icons, and the gooy GUI is, if nothing else, "new." (And being able to turn off all of the above is rather nice, too.)