Faster Smarter Microsoft Office System -- 2003 Edition

The worldwide community of Office users totals more than 300 million people (now that s a big family!), and the needs and wishes of this vast audience are as diverse as the industries and countries they represent. The experience level of those users ranges from brand-new novice user, to advanced user , to developer/expert. Some users would choose speed over power; others want greater flexibility with third-party products; still others want the new Office to be more secure, more stable, or more streamlined in one area or another. All want easier access to information, the ability to smoothly apply data across the range of applications, and processes and procedures that can be personalized to provide solutions for their own unique business challenges.

The Office System is designed specifically to meet the biggest challenges that people who work with information typically face:

• Information fatigue We deal with lots of data ”from reports and Web sites to meetings and phone calls. We listen to presentations, watch television, hear Web broadcasts, and go to seminars . We receive thousands of e- mails a week, subscribe to online newsletters, and visit discussion and newsgroups. Information flies at us from all directions at all times, in a huge array of forms. How do we sift through the glut of data we absorb , and keep only what is useful for our particular job, team, or company? The tools in the Office System for grabbing notes, recording ideas, and sharing thoughts instantly enable you to save and act on ideas as they occur, reducing their chances of being buried beneath a pile of not- so-important reading.

• Inefficient collaboration The concept of workgroups is a terrific one, but it s often an idea that needs a long evolution. How many people worked on your last annual report? Who managed the process? How many hours did your manager spend trying to find suitable meeting times and places? Did using a team approach save you time, or cost you more? The new Office System includes great enhancements for working collaboratively, including a new meeting workspace service that helps you organize and facilitate meetings online.

• Disconnected islands of data Does this sound like your office? Accounting prepared a document last spring that described each of the products in your 2002 line, breaking down the costs according to your various departments. As you re preparing your proposal for the three new products you want to introduce in 2004, you find out that the document was created in Word, but was not part of an Excel spreadsheet. Which means that, when a manager went in and corrected the amounts later in the year, the new totals were never updated. So you have a choice: You can use the previously corrected document, and go in to make the cost corrections by hand, or you can use the Excel spreadsheet with the correct values (but not the cost-center calculations you want), and re-create the information you need. What a lot of work! The Office System helps you use your data more efficiently , by providing Smart Documents, InfoPath, and improved smart tags ”as well as enhanced support for Extensible Markup Language (XML), which enables you to store your data independent of its form, and use it to produce a variety of end results.

• Lack of business process integration Even in the smoothest businesses, there is often a lot of overlap in terms of business process. One department replicates what another department is doing at the other end of the building. With enhanced collaboration features, and improved support for XML, the Office System can help you cut down on duplication of effort, and allow all departments to share access to information that would support each of their efforts in unique ways.

• Under-utilization of productivity tools Each of the core applications in Office are so feature-laden that many businesses don t use them fully; we tend to perform a specific number of tasks with each program, without a sense of how they could all work together to improve and expedite our business processes. The Office System makes productivity improvements in each of the core applications ”Word, Excel, Outlook, Access, and FrontPage ”and enhances the easy way the applications work together to make your work time more productive and more efficient.

Any new release of a software product will fix things that fell short in the last version, but this new version of the Office System brings much more to the table than corrective measures. Although the Office System does lessen Outlook s clunkiness, enhance stability, and beef up security, it s the exciting innovations in the Office System that are likely to inspire you to take a closer look. Whatever your particular obstacles may be right now ”communication dead- ends, repetition of effort, security holes, under-use of existing data and processes, workgroup struggles, or something else ”the Office System may have a shot at dissolving them. In the next section, you ll see how this version of Office is more than a collection of bug fixes and error controls. Instead, it s a new, highly flexible, and fast platform that enables you to capture information instantly, share ideas easily, work with data efficiently, and produce results in a variety of forms that fit the task you want to accomplish today.