Microsoft released Office 2000 this week. I've got no plans to upgrade and I won't be recommending an upgrade at work, even though Microsoft are touting it as the saviour of the Intranet. One reason is that most large companies are preparing for freezes on new software in readiness for the year 2000, and a large scale roll out at this time of year is very unlikely. The second reason, and the crucial one really, is that there is no compelling reason to upgrade. I had a reason to upgrade to Office 97 - it was the first real 32 bit version of Office (95 was just a straight recompile of 4.2) so it made sense to run it. But to me and to most of the people I know, it's feature complete - especially for Word and Excel, which are about the only two packages I use on a regular basis. What exactly does Office 2000 bring to the party?

"Microsoft Office 2000 can save your documents to HTML format without any change in their original formatting for easy posting to your intranet. Because anyone with a Web browser can view HTML files, you can now share information with anyoneregardless of what software they use. "

"When you save a document to HTML, Office 2000 automatically selects the appropriate graphic format (such as GIF or JPEG) based on the graphic's content. "

"Copy up to 12 pieces of information from any Microsoft Office document, then paste them, either individually or all at once, into another document. "

"The self-repairing programs in Office 2000 automatically search for missing or corrupted files and repair them so you don't have to worry about it. "