DOIM IS Guideline: On Microsoft Office 2000

Guideline:

1) For a variety of reasons listed below, we DO NOT recommend anyone in the Department upgrading to Microsoft Office 2000.

2) If you do choose to upgrade, make your default save file format "Word 2000 RTF".

3) These recommendations will be reviewed in December, 2000. - Revised 1-30-2002

Commentary:

MS Office 2000 is considerably different from the usual MSOffice 97. As should be expected it contains many bugs and requires a lot of disk memory to install AND a lot of RAM memory to RUN! Microsoft has already issued the first service pack patching some of the bugs in Office 2000.  This service pack may be downloaded from the Microsoft Web site. Still, it will take a very, very long time if you are lucky (its size is about 40-60MB). Alternatively, Microsoft will ship the service pack free by regular mail on request (it is said).

MS Word 2000 may be easily set to save its files in the RTF format. If you choice to upgrade, that we recommend to MAKE THE DEFAULT if you are using any version of MSWord.

MS Access 2000 creates files INCOMPATIBLE with previous versions of MS Access so that your databases will be of no use to other people who are wise enough not to install MSOffice 2000 :(

MS Excel 2000 exports its table into such HTML code that contains 95% of junk code that will additionally choke Netscape browsers.

MS Powerpoint 2000 exports slides into HTML format in such a way that they useless for the Internet placement, they are viewable only with MS Internet Explorer.

We do not recommend upgrading your MS Office 97 to MS Office 2000 at the present time until the revised versions are released and your computer hardware is upgraded to have at least 128 MB of RAM and 40 GB of disk storage.

MS Office 97 currently is a stable, widely used suite of applications that requires only modest computer memory resources to run and is recommended for use across the department.

7/6/2000, revised 6/14/2004