Office 97 Service Release due in July

Microsoft has announced that a service release for Office 97, due in July,will help customers migrate to the new suite by providing backward compatibility with older versions of the suite.

Office 97 Service Release 1 will fix the number one complaint about theproduct: the RTF converter in Word 97. According to Dennis Tevlin, a Microsoft desktop applications marketing director, Office 97's originalrich text format (RTF) file converter was used rather than a binary converter for existing versions. The RTF version had some technical advantages, supposedly, but produced some unexpected side effects that made migration more difficult for customers. Soon, complaints came in frompeople asking for a true binary converter.

"Eighty percent of the people are happy, but we're not happy until 100% ofthe people are happy," Tevlin says