Up until now, Office 98 (Mac) users have had to be careful about exchanging files with Windows users on Office 97, because some formatting features in Office 98 weren't supported in Office 97. If an Office 98 file were opened in Office 97, those advanced features would be lost, so some formatting would actually be different when you opened the file again in Office 98.

With Office 2000, all of Office 98's advanced formatting features are supported, so Mac users in cross-platform environments can make the most of their productivity software. The problem now runs the other way, though: not all of Office 2000's advanced formatting features are supported in Office 98. The good news is that you can still open Office 2000 docs in Office 98, work on them and make changes, then when the document is opened again in Office 2000, the advanced formatting will still be there.

Easy fix

Some of the differences between the two versions of Office are fairly minor, and won't interfere with the way you work. For instance, nested tables in a Word 2000 document (tables within a table cell) will appear as tab-delimited text within a table cell in Word 98. You can edit the text to your heart's content, and as long as you don't actually change the tabbing, it will appear correctly in Office 2000.

Some of the unsupported features aren't as easy to get around, especially in the way Office 2000 applications can embed graphics and flow text around graphics within tables. Office 2000 documents with these features will not display correctly in Office 98, and it will be hard to use the files.

For some users, it may be advisable to ask your Office 2000-using colleagues to save their files using the Office 97 format. Under Office 2000's Tools menu, select Save-Options and select disable features not supported by Office 97. They'll probably want to do this for a while until Office 2000 is more widely deployed anyway, and another version of Office for the Mac might be available by then.

Incidentally, Office 2000 introduces HTML as a "companion" file format, allowing users to save documents as HTML for easy sharing via the Web or intranets. These HTML files can be viewed by Mac users, but the advanced formatting features require the Mac to be running Internet Explorer 4.5. Again, Windows users can widen the accessibility of their documents by ensuring that their HTML files comply with the HTML 3 spec. This can be done using the "Save As . . ." command and selecting "HTML 3".

Filename tip

Although the underlying file formats of Office 2000 and Office 98 are identical, Office 2000 may still fail to correctly identify an Office 98 document as something it can open, unless it has the appropriate DOS file extension. Unfortunately, Office 98 doesn't include a facility to do this automatically (are you listening, Microsoft?) so you have to remember to do it each time. It may not seem like much to add ".doc" or ".xls" or whatever to your documents each time, but you can forget occasionally. There is a shareware product called NameCleaner (look for it on www.shareware.com) that can examine files or groups of files on your hard disk and automatically add the correct DOS extension. Of course, remembering to run NameCleaner isn't any more reliable than just remembering to add the extension yourself!