(FORTUNE Magazine) – Office suites don't get much attention, but they remain the digital workhorses of the corporation, performing essential tasks like managing documents, spreadsheets, databases, and e-mail. At the forefront, of course, is Microsoft, whose Office 95 and Office 97 suites for Windows (and Office 98 for the Mac) have become de facto standards in corporate America. Now Microsoft is about to unleash Office 2000, which will debut in late spring and range from $209 for an upgrade to $999 for the high-end package.

Suites are the best and worst of today's packaged software. They have everything you could possibly want, all the latest bells and whistles. No mortal could possibly need all the features included, but software companies, fearful of competitors, feel they simply must stuff their suites with everything. The result? Bloatware that can choke your computer. Fully installed, the beta version of Office 2000 that I tested took up 300 megabytes of disk space.

Microsoft has put a lot of effort into this upgrade. There are still four basic applications: Word, Excel, Publisher, and Outlook, the organizer and e-mail program that Microsoft hopes will be your computer's central nervous system. In more expensive Office 2000 suites you also get the Access database program; PowerPoint, for presentations; and FrontPage, a Web-page designer.

Office 2000 reflects the vision that the modern office worker's world is based on e-mail and the Web. That's why Microsoft devoted most of its effort for this upgrade to Outlook. Like many things Microsoft, Outlook was clumsy and underpowered in its early versions. But thanks to the fact that it came free, as part of Office, the program quickly became the dominant organizer and calendar. Microsoft always plugs away, tortoiselike, and, as always, has turned Outlook into a workable, if inelegant, program. The main drawback with the current version is that Word is still the only major application in the suite with direct links to Outlook--getting to an Excel file from Outlook is still a pain.

As an e-mail program, Outlook has definitely improved. With Office 2000 you can manage several Internet mail accounts and connect to the corporate e-mail system. You can also run a program called a rules wizard, which helps you file, forward, or delete junk mail. Outlook lets you set up distribution lists that combine addresses from your personal and corporate address books.

Microsoft has loaded Word with features--some of which are helpful improvements over the previous version. For instance, you now have French and Spanish dictionaries. To help you navigate these new features, Microsoft offers several cloying animated Office assistants--you get to choose the one with the personality you like best--who prance around at the bottom of your screen and answer questions or make suggestions. The automatic spell checker and grammar checker have improved, but they're still a far cry from a good human copy editor.

The Access database program now connects more easily to the big database programs your company is likely to use. It too is loaded with features, including the ability to show text in languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic.

Excel has long been the strongest performer in the suite. In this case, Microsoft has abided by the if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it rule. Most of the significant tweaks were made in Office 97. The most important additions this time around are the small-business tools that help users in any size company perform complex calculation and database functions. As with all documents created with Office 2000, spreadsheets can be saved as Web pages.

Microsoft is making a lot of the point that you can save and display any document, including your calendar or database, as a Web page. But this is the company's greatest conceit. The Web-centric focus may be useful to small businesses that don't have the expertise or staff to quickly get their documents onto the Internet. But many corporate technology managers are skeptical about Web publishing, and at this stage most people still share documents on paper or by e-mail. Microsoft would like you to believe it's ahead of the curve on this feature, but unless Web publishing becomes the preferred mode for document sharing, this will be one more case of feature overload.

Microsoft's nearest challenger, Corel, which claims a quarter of the suite market with its WordPerfect Office, is also planning a new release in May for $499. Corel has made a decent living for years by walking in the footsteps of Microsoft and surviving. The beta version of the suite contains the latest update of WordPerfect--the best Windows version yet of the once dominant word processor. Quattro Pro, a spreadsheet program, and Paradox, the database, are powerful applications acquired from Borland that now look much more like seamless parts of Corel's suite. Like Microsoft's, Corel's suite makes Web publishing easy. And Corel has thrown in some basic voice-recognition software from Dragon Systems. Still, even though its suite is just as good as Microsoft's, that doesn't address Corel's basic problem: Its software is an island in a Microsoft ocean. Corel has made its applications compatible with Microsoft's. So loyal users have no reason to abandon either brand, since, like it or not, we're all living in a Microsoft world.