Best-Selling Microsoft Publisher Program Now Brings Easy Web Publishing to Small Businesses and Home Users

REDMOND, Wash., Sept. 9, 1996 — Microsoft Corp. today announced Microsoft® Publisher 97, an extensively updated version of the world’s most popular business desktop publishing program for the Windows® operating system. Continuing to enjoy a customer satisfaction rate of 97 percent, Publisher offers a myriad of tools designed to help small businesses quickly and easily create professional-looking publications, including newsletters, fliers and brochures. Microsoft Publisher 97 now extends its power to electronic publishing by enabling users to create and publish Web sites as easily as they can create printed documents.

Publisher 97 offers significant new features, including high-quality content, design help, and powerful tools to enable users to create and mail professional-looking publications easily. The new tools provide enhanced design expertise to empower small-business owners to create a variety of high-quality materials that project a professional image, enabling them to compete effectively with larger competitors.

The ready-made content in Microsoft Publisher 97 has also been dramatically expanded. It includes a rich, 5,000-image Clip Gallery that now supports OLE objects, including video clips and sounds, in addition to clip art and digital stock photos. Microsoft Publisher innovated an online feature called Microsoft Clip Gallery Live, an extension of the Microsoft Clip Gallery, where users can access additional content from the World Wide Web for their print and Web publications. Microsoft Publisher includes online links to Clip Gallery Live, which automatically installs downloaded content into the appropriate categories in the Clip Gallery. Users can store the content, find it, and reuse it later easily.

“Our design goals for Publisher 97 were to continue to make powerful functionality easy to use and discoverable,”
said Alex Loeb, Publisher product unit manager at Microsoft.

Users will find it even easier to create professional-looking print publications and to extend the automated design capabilities to the World Wide Web. Publisher is so versatile and flexible that it’s an essential tool for any organization wanting to promote itself cost-effectively with
high-impact marketing materials, including Web pages.”

New Features of Publisher 97 at a Glance

Microsoft is proud to offer the following technology features in Publisher 97 to the
small-business community:

  • Web Site Wizard. Enables users to create professional-looking sites on the World Wide Web quickly, easily and cost-effectively. The Web Site Wizard keeps the complexity of HTML hidden and, unlike other Web authoring tools embedded in desktop applications, it handles everything needed for a professional-looking page: layout, text, design elements, graphics and navigational links.

  • Expanded Clip Gallery and new Clip Gallery Live. The Clip Gallery has been expanded to 5,000 pieces of high-quality content. The Clip Gallery Live is a single, free (connect-time charges may apply) and easily accessible image clip resource on Microsoft’s Web site for Publisher 97 owners. It extends Publisher’s already vast Clip Gallery with a continuing supply of fresh and innovative content, including video and audio clips optimized for use on multimedia Web pages.

  • Mail merge. Users can now create address lists from within Publisher or import lists from Word or Works and Microsoft Access, FoxPro® and other databases for easy mailing of Publisher communications. Publisher 97 also provides several new Avery label templates that can be used with the mail merge function.

  • Postcard PageWizard. Small businesses often rely on postcards to announce events or to update customers on sales or send them fast reminders. Postcards can be an effective marketing tool, at a fraction of the cost of other direct mail pitches. Publisher 97 adds a PageWizard for postcards that includes as a default the font preferred by the U.S. Postal Service for its scanning equipment.

  • Expanded Design Checker. The intelligent Design Checker takes the Layout Checker to the next level by reviewing both print documents and Web pages, identifying layout or technical errors, and offering suggestions for solving the problem.

  • Font Preview menu. It’s now one-step easy to see what a font looks like, right from the pull-down menu, before applying it to a publication. Publisher 97 now includes 150 TrueType fonts.

  • Borders and custom borders. Allow access to more than 160 types of borders and enable users to create their own custom borders from clip art or picture files.

In addition to the many new capabilities, Publisher 97 retains the many ease-of-use features and automated design wizards of earlier versions, including these:

  • PageWizards. The fast and easy way to create customized, professional-quality publications, because they guide users step-by-step through the design process to develop a layout based on the answers to a series of questions.

  • Design Gallery. Where users can customize the look of their product with all kinds of coordinated Publisher design elements: titles, headlines, pull quotes, sidebars, tables of contents, ornamental design elements, etc.

  • TipPages. Publisher anticipates when a user needs help and offers appropriate advice. TipPages are tips that pop up to suggest more convenient ways to get the results users need.

  • Side-By-Side Help. A help guide that sits off to the side of a working document and is designed to offer unobtrusive assistance.

  • Design tools. Publisher offers a variety of design tools to provide a
    “professional”
    finish to publications. A few are WordArt special text effects, the Fancy First Letter Gallery, and the ability to rotate an object and text and to apply gradient fills and tints.

“Working with inserted products such as spreadsheets is just a breeze,”
said Ron Todd, mayor of Newcastle, Wash.
“I don’t have the time to put together a newsletter to communicate with the community. Just being able to point and click is the greatest timesaver. This product is head and shoulders above the other desktop publishing products I have tried.”

Publisher a Great Complement to Microsoft Office Suite

Microsoft Publisher 97 supports the Windows95 operating system, integrates with the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software products, and shares the Clip Gallery Live with Microsoft Office applications, including the PowerPoint® presentation graphics program. This integration makes Publisher 97 the perfect complement for users of Microsoft Office

Users familiar with Microsoft Word will find Publisher 97 integrates well through Publisher’s built-in Word Story Editor, which makes it easy for users to edit Publisher stories in Word and then return to Publisher to design the document. Publisher can also import text from Microsoft Works and Corel WordPerfect and, because it supports OLE, allows users to embed information charts and graphs from Microsoft Excel.

Pricing and Availability

Microsoft Publisher 97 will be available in stores for approximately $79.95. The program is available on both CD-ROM and 3.5-inch diskettes. The CD-ROM version provides additional clip art, fonts and borders.

The product is also scheduled to be available in 11 language versions. The North American and international English versions are expected to be available in October. French, German and Swedish versions of Publisher are scheduled to be available in November, and Brazilian Portugese, Danish, Dutch, Italian, Norwegian and Spanish versions are scheduled to be available by the end of the year. Founded in 1975, Microsoft (NASDAQ
“MSFT”
) is the worldwide leader in software for personal computers. The company offers a wide range of products and services for business and personal use, each designed with the mission of making it easier and more enjoyable for people to take advantage of the full power of personal computing every day.

Microsoft, Windows, FoxPro and PowerPoint are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries..

For general customer information:

(800) 426-9400

Note to editors: If you are interested in viewing additional information on Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft Web page at http://microsoft.com/presspass/ on Microsoft’s corporate information pages.

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