Jim Eidelman's Office 97 Review

Jim's review of Office 97 for Law Products:

First publication rights: Law Products, a publication of Empire Publishing. THIS IS A DRAFT (2/16/97). Address any comments to the author, Jim Eidelman, at 734-769-1500, Ext 202 or eidelman@lawtech.com

Beyond the Hype: What’s In Office 97 For You

Microsoft’s new Office 97 is an outstanding platform that goes a long way toward meeting the needs of lawyers, secretaries, and technical support staff. It is the first product ever shipped that offers all of the pieces needed to create complete integrated law practice systems.

Microsoft Office 97, released in January, has received glowing reviews in the trade press (Footnote 1). We have been using Office 97 since early beta-test releases, and will shed some light on just what you can expect from Office 97. We can only scratch the surface in this article, and strongly suggest that you point your Web browser to www.microsoft.com/office for more information.

In Praise of Suites.

Any law office will be better off with an integrated suite of products from one vendor – the more the better. While there is much to be said for the "best of breed" theory, I believe in suites of products, and always have. I’ve used WordStar/DataStar/CalcStar, WordPerfect/DataPerfect/PlanPerfect, Microsoft Word/Excel/PowerPoint, and many others. I believe that a single-vendor-suite is easier for lawyers and staff to learn, easier for IS people and consultants to teach and support, and allows the firm to go much farther with them.

It is not my purpose in this article to argue the merits of paragraph numbering or red-lining in one package or another, but to report what you can expect in the new Microsoft Office suite.

Microsoft Office – The Next Generation

Microsoft Office 97 is a new generation of software. In summary:

Each of the original parts (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access) has been enhanced enough to justify an upgrade, based on features alone.
The new Outlook calendar/email/contact manager is a major new product for Microsoft that is a great start in this product category.
The new programming environment, Visual Basic for Applications 5.0, offers unparalleled power in integrating and customizing these applications, although the typical lawyer or staff member should expect a consultant or MIS staff member to do it, as VBA takes some getting used to.
If your firm is into the Web or has an intranet, the suite is chock full of features to publish documents to the Internet and import Web pages and graphics.
Microsoft has made it hard on its competitors by nicely integrating the core Office 97 products with add-on Office 97 products, such as Team Manager, Front Page 97, Publisher 97, programming tools like Visual Basic 5.0, its Web browser, Internet Explorer, and the BackOffice suite of products for its NT Server.

Word Processing with Microsoft Word

Word processing has always been the most important law office application. My comments can be divided by audience:

Current WordPerfect Users: Current WordPefect Users will find the new Microsoft Word to be similar to the previous versions of Microsoft Word. Most WordPerfect users struggle with Word at first, and this version isn't any different in that regard. The concepts are the same. See Side-Bar, "A WordPerfect User's Guide to Microsoft Word." Good news, however, is that conversion works much better, and the Word "What's this?" help cursor gives much of the "reveal codes" information:

Current Microsoft Word Users:

Current Microsoft Word users will be happy to know that everything you know and like about Microsoft Word is still there. Except for programming macros (see below) and a few menu items that have been moved, everything works about the same.

The one major fix for lawyers is in paragraph numbering. Those who have embraced Word's powerful heading styles have been stymied by Word's inability to mix and match heading level numbering styles or to put the text of the body of the paragraph on the same line as the heading. The new dialog box even displays examples of your customized headings on the large buttons.

My favorite new feature is the "Document Map" view. Since the "ThinkTank" program invented the idea of viewing a document as a collapsible outline, I have advocated using outlining software to lawyers. In fact, Microsoft Word was the first program to introduce collapsible outlines to word processing, and I have been using Word ever since. Microsoft has done it again by inventing the idea of a "document map view." If you use outline headings, you can open a window that shows an outline of the document. You can always see the outline in that windows, and you can use it to navigate through the entire document.

There are dozens of other minor but important enhancements, including saving different versions of the same document in one computer file, grammar-checker, much easier and more robust tables, improved handling of graphics and "WordArt," and overall integration with the rest of the Office suite.

"Techies": IS staff and technically oriented lawyers and staff will enjoy the enhanced macro language, once they get used to it. If you are a WordBasic macro programmer, you'll be happy to know that your WordBasic programs will still work in Word 8 as "WordBasic Objects." Most of your old Word 6 or Word 7 DOT files will easily upgrade to Word 8, and they generally will work. You have some major learning to do, however, before you will feel at home in the VBA environment.

Document Assembly Users: Those who want to program documents to create "legal expert systems" will find that not much has changed. Just as before, the macro language is too complex for programming contracts, wills and complex pleadings, and the programs are essentially unreadable. There is a continuing need for "Document Assembly" programs like HotDocs, WinDraft, PowerTXT, MasterDraft and Scrivener.

Side bar: A WordPerfect User's Intro to Word:

Many WordPerfect users spend weeks, months, or even years, trying to make the conversion to Word. Some are mystified, just not "getting" the Word approach. If you understand the Word approach before you begin, it will be much easier to get through the learning curve, and once you get used to it, you won't look back.

Here's the key to understanding Word:

All word processors before Word were designed for daisy-wheel printers. They used start-codes and stop-codes to signal when the printer should begin or end underlining, centering or double-spacing. Wang showed the codes on the screen as symbols, while WordPerfect hid them, showing them when you press "reveal codes."
Word was the first word processing program designed with the laser printer in mind. Microsoft approached the documents more like a desktop publishing program than like a typewriter. You don't need "reveal codes" because there aren't codes to reveal!
Formatting is divided up in three concepts:
- Document and Section formatting (margins, headers, page numbering, etc.)
- Paragraph formatting (indentation, spacing, centering, numbering, etc.)
- Character formatting (font, underline, bold, size, etc.)
Unlike code-driven systems, the formatting instructions come at the end, not at the beginning, of the text. Thus:
- Formatting for each document or section "lives in" the "paragraph mark" (a.k.a. hard return, "¶") at the end of the document or section.
- Formatting for each paragraph "lives in" the paragraph mark ("¶")at the end of each paragraph.
- Thus, if you copy text from one document and paste it into another document, the formatting will vary depending on whether you copy the hard return, whether you paste the text in front of the hard return, etc.
  
  If you want a paragraph to look like another paragraph and are having trouble, just copy the paragraph mark from the end of the paragraph you like to the end of the paragraph you are having trouble formatting!
Microsoft was the first word processing vendor to bring desktop publishing's concept of "styles" to its program. Making effective use of styles is the key to increased ease of use and productivity. If you don't learn and use styles, you'll never "get" Word. If you do, you'll come to love it. (Technically advanced users should set up styles for others.)
- Heading styles automatically:
  - Format paragraph and font
  - Number paragraphs
  - Create an accurate table of contents
  - Update cross-references to heading numbers, heading names, and page numbers.

Creating the templates, including the styles, macros, etc., can be confusing for beginners, so when a firm is first converting, it ought to be done by experienced people (IS department or consultants), and training for users should begin day 1 with how to use and apply the templates, styles, etc.

My experience is that if you teach people the foregoing from the beginning, they will come to love Word after a few weeks (or months), and when they go back to WordPerfect after a few months will say "yuck." If they don't learn these things from the beginning, they may never "get it," and will go for years yearning to get WordPerfect back.

Outlook: Personal Information Management, Groupware and Email

Outlook 97 could be the subject of a complete article devoted to it alone. Outlook is a workgroup "personal information manager." It includes:

E-mail package that upgrades Microsoft's standard Windows 95 messaging/Exchange client software. It acts as a "universal inbox" for mail on the LAN, Microsoft Exchange Server, the Internet, and other services. It is also the "transport," that handles scheduling of meetings and assignment of tasks. Microsoft Word can be your editor, which we have come to love. Autotext, macros, spell-checker, and even document assembly come in handy when working with email.
Network calendar that lets lawyers and staff members view each others' calendars. (The printing options are the best we've seen. You can get your calendar and to-do's to print in dozens of useful formats, from very large to pocket-sized.)
Task list that maintains a tickler system.
Journal. The journal is the most difficult to describe. Depending on how you set it up, it can perform a number of diverse functions, including:
1. Log every document you create, tracking the document name, time, date, user, and description, to some extent acting as a built-in document management system.
2. Note-taking system to replace notes on legal pads.
3. Time entry program.

By the way, there are so many things going on with Outlook that, like Ecco, Outlook will make you long for a bigger screen. Here is how Outlook looks with one journal item and the contact view open on an 800x600 screen:

When combined with Microsoft Team Manager, Outlook integrates your individual the tasks and events from the team's tasks and deadlines. When combined with Microsoft Exchange on an NT Server, Outlook becomes part of an "instant groupware" system for case and client management. That is, Outlook forms can be routed or copied or moved to a shared folder that can be accessed by others in the firm, or even clients.

With authority, a secretary or other staff member can also access and maintain a lawyer's calendar and access his or her contacts, mail and to-do's.

You can use Outlook on the network, or on your laptop or home computer. If properly set up, you can synchronize your office files and mobile computer's files, either by connecting on the LAN, through a modem, or through your Internet connection.

Each of the applications in Outlook has a tabbed interface, and the firm's technical staff can add new forms on new tabs and create custom fields. A discussion of the programming tools (VBScript, Visual Basic for Applications, and ActiveX controls) is beyond the scope of this article. However, I will point out that it is more complicated than you would think, the components don't all work as expected, and there isn't much documentation yet. Programming Outlook can be frustrating, but it is a great "1.0" release, and we look forward to future versions. There are no fields on the standard forms that can easily be used for Client and Matter information. We have added client and matter fields, with database lookup, to our Outlook forms.

I am happy to say that we have been able to get VBA macros to fully integrate Word with Outlook, automatically drafting documents, completing document management profiles, reading data out of the contact manager, updating the calendar, and creating time entries in the journal.

Finally, the system has powerful sorting and filtering tools, so that you can view the data in any number of different ways.

Number-Crunching with Excel

Most lawyers only use basic functionality in Excel and other spreadsheet programs, so the features that make accountants and actuaries glow are lost on us. However, there are some very important features in the new Excel. Publishing to the Web and improved graphing are enough to suggest an upgrade. But the single feature I find most compelling is one that Framework had a decade ago: You can automatically name cells in formulas using the intersection of the row and column heading names. Examples would be "January BillableHours" or "Husband TaxableEstate." Sure beats B7 and G4!

Slide Shows with PowerPoint

PowerPoint is essentially the same as previous versions, but there are enough enhancements that I wouldn't go back to the previous version. If you use PowerPoint, you should upgrade before your next presentation. Publishing your presentation to the Web is easy and works delightfully well. The two items I find most compelling are in the display of computer screen shots:

Graphics port back and forth between different screen sizes. This means you can capture screen shots on a "SuperVGA" 800x600 screen and display them on a VGA 640x480 screen, and vice versa.
Screen shots automatically can be set to fill the whole screen. In the past, it was almost impossible to get an exact, pixel-for-pixel display, so words from screen shots were often illegible.

New "IntelliSense" help:

We would be remiss if we didn't mention Office 97's new help system. There are animated characters, such as the Albert Einstein caricature, that watch what you do and give you advice. They make suggestions on their own when they think you need one, and you can click the mouse on them to ask a question in plain English. Although we thought we would find the animated characters distracting, in fact we found that they are fun and often helpful. The advice they give is hit-or-miss, often just what you need, and sometimes completely off the mark. But it is getting better, as Microsoft posts upgrades to the IntelliSense answer files on its Web site. We could turn it off, but we seldom do.

Conclusion:

Office 97 is an outstanding product that offers so much breadth and depth that it will be another year before we fully understand all of its features and implications. We strongly recommend that current Office users upgrade. Others should consider moving to Office 97 so that they can stay in the exciting mainstream of the Internet and all that Microsoft is doing.

Footnote 1:

Some of the glowing reviews of Office 97:

"Office 97 is a triumph of such depth and vision, it makes one wonder what more remains to be done." Computer Reseller News, 9/30/96

"Most significant breakthroughs since the invention of the PC," PC/Computing, 11/96

Byte Magazine Awards at Comdex, Nov. 96, not only for "Best Application," but also for "Best of Show".

PC Week Labs Analyst's Choice… "a must upgrade for sites already using Office and a serious contender for corporations looking for their first office application suite." PC Week, 12/18/96.

"Once again, Microsoft is the winner in the war of the suites. Microsoft Office 97, Professional Edition's excellent application integration and online help, first-rate features for creating custom tasks and applications, and new Internet tools…its competition's features." PC Magazine, February 18, 1997.

James Eidelman is an attorney and computer consultant, and President of Eidelman Associates in Ann Arbor, MI, (Web: www.lawtech.com). He can be reached at eidelman@lawtech.com or 734-769-1500, ext 202. Expanded information and links related to this article can be found at www.lawtech.com/office97. Eidelman Associates publishes WinDraft, a document automation add-in to Word and WordPerfect, and other add-ins to Microsoft Office.

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