2 Chapter 1. An Overview of Office 2000 In this chapter What's New in Office 2000 An Overview of Office 2000 Applications Office Applets and Utilities Online Help for Expert Users Advanced Support Options Troubleshooting Secrets of the Office Masters: Creating Shortcuts to Help Files What's New in Office 2000 More than 70 million people around the world use one version of Office or another. With a user base that big, it's difficult to imagine that anyone is seeing Word, Excel, and the rest of Office for the first time. If you work for a large corporation or just never found a particularly compelling reason to upgrade, you may have skipped over a version or two to get to Office 2000. If you upgraded from Office 95 or even Office 4, the original 16-bit version of Office that dates back to the early 1990s, you have a lot to absorb, because Microsoft has made wholesale changes to Office over the inter- vening five or six years. For the sake of this book, we're going to assume you have at least a nodding familiarity with one version of Office or another. Office 95 users will see a completely new interface, with different toolbar buttons and redesigned dialog boxes that are immediately apparent. If you've just upgraded from Office 97, on the other hand, the differences aren't so obvious--at least not at first boot. The basic Office interface--including toolbars, menus, and the individual applications that make up Office-- should look refreshingly familiar to any Office 97 veteran. And with one exception (we'll get to that in a minute, when we cover Access), Office 2000 file formats are identical to their Office 97 coun- terparts; so you should be able to open, edit, and save all your documents, worksheets, and pre- sentations without any hitches. Still, it won't take much digging into Office 2000 to find some pleasant surprises as well as a few irritating flaws--sometimes on the same screen. So what's new? In general, the changes fall into three broad categories: improvements designed to make everyday features easier to use; dramatic changes in every Office program's capability to create and edit Web changes; and new Office tools, including improvements in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and a completely redesigned In- staller.