Microsoft Office is now the dominant office productivity suite for both Windows and Macintosh. Depending on the version you buy, Microsoft Office comes with several applications, including Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook e-mail and personal information manager, Publisher desktop publishing, PowerPoint presentation software and the Access database programme.

The last major upgrade to Office for Windows was in 1997 (1998 for Macintosh), but starting tomorrow, millions of workers in large companies and many people who buy new PCs will be getting their hands on a new version, Office 2000. Prices will range from $209 to $799, depending on the version and whether you're upgrading or buying an Office suite for the first time.

Office 2000 comes in several versions, including the Standard edition(Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook), the Small Business edition (Word, Excel, Publisher, Outlook and some as yet unannounced small-business tools), and the Professional edition (add Access and PowerPoint). What Microsoft calls ``software enthusiasts'' can purchase the Premium edition, which includes the FrontPage Website creation tool and the new PhotoDraw graphics programme.

Office 2000 takes up a minimum of 189 MB of hard disk space and requires at least a 75-megahertz Pentium processor with 32 or more megabytes of memory, but that's well within the specs of any PC purchased in the last couple of years.

In some ways, Office 2000 is the most dramatic revision that Microsoft has done. Yet, despite lots of new features and a strong integration into the Internet, upgrading from Office 97 is a relatively easy, albeit expensive, transition.

Before going into the changes, let's give Microsoft credit for what it didn't change. When the company introduced Office 97, it changed the file format for Word andmost other applications. With the new format, files were considerably larger, and special software was needed for Office 95 users to read Office 97 files. With the exception of Access, the default file format for Office 2000 applications is the same as for Office 97.

Microsoft now gives users the option of saving files in HTML (hypertext markup language) format so they can be immediately used on the Internet or on a company's internal Intranet. There is nothing unusual about a word processor or other programme being able to save as HTML, but with Office 2000 HTML can be used for routine work even if you don't intend to post the file to the Net.

An Office 2000 document saved as HTML has the same characteristics as one created as a regular Office file. Bold, underline, colors and all other attributes are preserved and even formulas in Excel remain active. When printed, the document looks the same as if you had created it as a regular document. Another advantage to this file format is that anyone with abrowser can now view Office files.

It is even possible to create an interactive Excel spreadsheet that can be posted to the Web and manipulated by a user. As a test, I created a simple spreadsheet in Excel, saved it as an HTML file, opened it in Word, enhanced it and saved it on a Website. I could not only see the spreadsheet, but I also could manipulate the data from within the browser.

In keeping with the Internet theme of Office 2000, Microsoft has done a better job at integrating its Office applications with Microsoft Outlook, the communications and personal information management programme that comes with Office. From the file menu in Word, for example, you can select `Send To' and Word will put an e-mail form at the top of the screen, where you can enter the recipient's e-mail address directly or select it from your Outlook contact list. Click `Send a Copy' and a copy of the document (as a message or as an attached file) is placed in your Outlook Outbox to be sent the next time you sign on to theInternet. You could do this with Office 97, but the process was slower and more cumbersome.

Microsoft has made some other enhancements as well, which make the product a bit easier to use. The file open and save dialogue boxes have been changed so that it is much easier to find files. A history folder appears that lists the 75 most recently opened or saved documents. Microsoft has also made it easier to move among documents in use by giving each document its own icon on the Windows task bar. The number of optional commands in programmes such as Word and Excel can be overwhelming to new and casual users. Microsoft has implemented what it calls ``personalised'' menus and tool bars.

By default, the menus and tool bars show only the most popular options, which make them easier to navigate. But at the bottom of each menu is an icon. Click on it and it gives you more options. If you select one of them, it will become part of your regular menu. But if you don't use an option, Office will eventually remove it fromthe menu. You can also easily add or remove buttons from tool bars without having to master Office's complicated customisation tools.

Microsoft has also added a `collect paste' feature that enhances the Windows clipboard so you can copy and paste up to 12 selections from any Office document. If you accidentally delete a required programme file, a `self repair' feature fixes Office applications semi-automatically. There are also some small touches that just make the suite a bit nicer. For instance, if you right-click a word, you get synonyms. If you're in page layout mode, you can use the new `click and type' feature that puts your cursor anywhere on the page, even in the middle of a blank area.