Word 2000 has taken an intuitive, mouse-oriented approach to table creation. Click and drag to make a box, then click and drag inside it to draw the cells. There are tons of other features in Word 2000, but chief among them are the new World Wide Web design tools and other doodads that only systems developers will appreciate. You can now copy and paste dates from Word to Excel without the days and months being scrambled. Excel now obeys the Regional Settings control panel in Windows 95 and 98.
Improvements are minimal.
There are a few new functions and now you can type in the Euro currency symbol. The bulk of Excel 2000's features have to do with Web integration. Moving data in and out of Web databases and even creating interactive charted queries on the Web are now possible. Powerful stuff indeed, but of interest only to a few. Microsoft's Word 2000 is a Swiss Army knife with its myriad tools to get almost anything done.