COMMENTARY-- If you were responsible for building Microsoft Office, what would you do with the next version? This is a constant question at Microsoft, where they generally think a couple of releases ahead but still end up cramming in a bunch of last-minute changes to keep up with the current market.

I don't know the precise schedule, but I'd expect the next release of Office to show up in a year or less. That means there's still plenty of time to make such late changes--and I have a few I'd like to suggest. For example:

1. Take out Microsoft Access, the database program. Or at least put it in a separate version of the suite, so people who never use it don't have to install it. For those users, make Excel a better low-end database manager. That's how those customers are using it anyway (in addition to building plain old spreadsheets, of course).

2. Include Visio. That's a suggestion from Michael Cherry, a frequent radio guest of mine who writes for the Directions On Microsoft newsletter. Visio, in case you've never seen it, is a powerful diagramming tool that Microsoft sells separately. Cherry says a basic version of it should be a part of Office. And I agree with him.

3. Add an initial settings wizard. Every time we install Office here at AnchorDesk, we have to go in and turn off a bunch of formatting features--such as curly quotes and ordinals and em dashes--that don't work with our publishing system. Of course, some of us forget to do this, and end up submitting columns packed with all those funny characters. It would be better to set these options all at once as part of the installation process.

4. Give Outlook better spam filtering. The current Junk Mail/Adult Content filters do nothing more than highlight messages in the Inbox. And the filtering mechanism itself isn't particularly good. Sure, third-party products like SpamNet work with Outlook. But Microsoft ought to be able to a better job itself.

5. Merge the apps. I have a dream, that someday the individual applications in Office will go away and, instead of using Word on some documents and Excel on others, I'll have a single app capable of doing whatever I need. Microsoft has this vision, too: They call it "Universal Canvas" and include it as part of .Net. Using XML, all types of data (word processing, spreadsheets, databases, slides) could reside in a single document format and be properly displayed to the user.

   One thing this would do: Get rid of the pesky little interface inconsistencies that still exist among different Office apps. Those inconsistencies may be small (compare, for example, the way Word and Excel deal with wild-card characters). But for those of us who live in Office, they can be frustrating.

6. Make Office a platform for Web-services development. We hear a lot about how these new Internet-based applications are the wave of the future in computing. I'm not saying we should all learn programming. But I think people like you and me should be able to create active, Web-enabled documents using the apps we know without any special training.

7. Expand "smart tags." I'm a big fan of these automatic hyperlinks, and would like to see Microsoft use them more. For example, I really like the tag that pops up when I copy text from one document into another (or from the Net to an Office doc), which prompts me to select the formatting for the stuff I just pasted. More, please!

8. A universal spelling checker. I'd like a single spelling checker to work across my entire desktop--especially messaging programs and including third-party applications. That way I wouldn't have to teach a bunch of different apps how I like to spell things--I could do it once and be done with it.

9. Better media editing. Office could--and should--have better tools for creating and manipulating images and sound. This isn't 1995. We all do more with our PCs than manage text. We should be able to do so with Office.

10. Teach IE how to print. No, it's not technically a part of Office. But Internet Explorer is so completely intertwined with the application suite, I'll include this pet peeve, too: IE needs to do a better job of printing Web pages. It should, for example, learn how to auto-size so I get entire pages when I print, rather than pages with the right edge cut off.

Question is, would I be willing to pay an upgrade fee for these things? Maybe.

With the release of Office XP, Microsoft tried to make less-commonly-used features more visible to users, to show customers more of what the programs could do. I think MS did a good job with that. But, depending on the hardware I'm using at the moment, I can still switch among Office 2000, XP, 95, and even the two Mac versions without any significant productivity loss--the interfaces haven't changed that much.

That says Microsoft has done a very good job designing Office over the years. But it also points to the difficulty in adding enough new features to induce people to part with their money for an upgrade.

As I've pointed out in the past, this design bind pushes Microsoft toward selling software subscriptions (with free upgrades) and away from issuing optional standalone upgrades.

But what do you think? What features would Microsoft have to add to Office to make you want to buy the next version? Is there a new Office feature you'd be willing to pay for? TalkBack below. Believe me: Your comments will be read by people at Microsoft and may have a real impact on what Office looks like next time around.

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