Office 2000 is equipped with a great many tools to help make your work easier and more efficient. The problem (and the benefit) is that many of the tools exist in more than one program. How do you decide which to use for a particular task? How do you choose between Microsoft Access and Microsoft Excel when you want to create a list, for example? This month's focus aims to help you make these decisions by comparing the features available to perform a variety of common tasks.

Familiar tools for basic tasks

You can do almost anything you need to do in the program you are most comfortable working in. A good example of this is note taking. If you normally do a lot of work in Microsoft PowerPoint®, for example, you might just want to take your notes in it as well. Find out more by reading Which Office program should you use for note taking?

Specific tools for specific tasks

Even though you may be an expert Word user and you may want to do all your work in Microsoft Word, you might find there are things that Word just doesn't do or that you can do more easily in another product. The same is true for the other Office programs.

Lists Where do you keep your lists? Is a formatted, simple, alphabetically sorted list what you want, or do you want to be able to sort and filter? Or, is your list so large and complex that you need a relational database? Make lists in Word, Excel, and Access may help you answer those questions.

Contact management   If you need to decide on where best to manage your contact information, read Manage contact information in Outlook or Access.

Text columns   Do you need to create a document with newspaper (or snaking) columns of text? Both Publisher and Word can create text columns, but depending on the type of layout you prefer or need for your content, one program may work better for you. To make an informed decision on which program to use, read Create columns in Word or Publisher.

Web pages   Office 2000 enables you to easily save documents in HTML and save them to the Web. But which program should you use? Microsoft FrontPage® 2000 is specifically designed for creating Web pages and Web sites, but you can also create Web pages in Microsoft Publisher, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Create a Web page in your favorite Office program provides an overview of creating Web pages in each of these programs.