Office 2000, which first appeared in summer, is a bumper bundle with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other programs depending on the pack you buy. Here is something to tickle the fancy of the most fanciful. If you would rather not be doing any of that, there is still enough to be doing. Word, for example, looks and feels as familiar as any typist would want it to be. They can stash of all sorts of material here and copy graphs, bits of Web pages, and pictures from an encyclopaedia before finally returning to Word to paste it all on the page.
Tables are cleverer and well worth getting to grips with.
You can adjust the sizes of columns and rows, dragging their borders to suit the page or do a trick where you hold down ALT to fit them to an exact size. Or you can forget fiddling with column sizes altogether as Word will widen the columns to fit the text as you type. Tables now really come into their own for laying out a page as you can drag them to another part of the page and have the text run around their borders. Quite usefully you drag a table's corner and the whole table will resize and yet keep its columns in proportion. In line with today's trend towards electronic information, Word's ability to save work as Web pages is much enhanced.