This week I discovered, rather belatedly, that Microsoft has lots of extra add-ons to its Office package that could make life a lot easier for those of us who work with the software all day.

The Office package includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and FrontPage depending on what level of the suite you have installed. The add-ons and tools at Microsoft's Office Online site (http://office.microsoft.com) are all free. Businesses and individuals should spend some time on the site to find out what they need. There's lots there.

For example I've now installed the "HTML Filter" and the "Web Archive" tools, which makes life a lot easier when I'm creating Internet pages from content that I have created in Word. Both tools will be a great help to those who are in charge of adding content to a company's Intranet (for internal communications) or Internet site. The HTML Filter removes those horrible Word-specific mark-up tags that remain embedded when you try to convert a Word document to HTML for your Web pages.

Before I used to take the copy from Word and paste it into FrontPage (Microsoft's Web page software), without using the conversion function. FrontPage would then try to guess the HTML code.

Then I would tediously have to go into the HTML and remove and change the mark-up entries created by Word so that I would have a "clean" page. With the HTML Filter I can now screen out the Word entries so that I have much better HTML.

The filter especially comes in handy when creating complex tables. Now instead of fiddling around with HTML, I can create the tables in Word then use the filter to get the HTML. What's more, the filter allows you to export a cascading style sheet (.css) file based on a Word document or an Office HTML file. Cascading style sheets allow you to set all the specifications for how your site will appear on the Web in a single page.

The filter also works for Excel (a spreadsheet program) if you normally translate such files for the Web. What a find!

The Web Archive tool allows you to save a Web page as a single file, including all of the graphics on the page. This is especially useful if you save your Microsoft Office 2000, Microsoft Office XP, or Microsoft Office 2003 documents as Web pages.

Using the Web Archive to "pack" your documents helps to avoid errors if you send the Web page to someone else by e-mail or need to save it for offline viewing. You can also unpack a Web Archive if you need to restore an archive to its original state of multiple folders and graphics.

Other add-ons include the Money 2000 Business and Personal Filter, the Office Document Open Confirmation Tool and the PVK Digital Certificate Files Importer. The Visual Keyboard allows you to convert your keyboard into a virtual keyboard in another language, for example if you temporarily want to type in Greek.

For businesses there's the "60 Minute Intranet Kit", which makes it easier to build workgroup websites by taking advantage of the Web collaboration features in Office. The kit uses a FrontPage wizard to walk you through each step of creating your site. Once your Web site is created, you and your fellow workers will be able to publish documents directly to the Web, collaborate on documents, view team news and track team events.

For administrators there is the Office 2000 PrepHelp, a tool they can use to build index files for all Office 2000 Help files. There are also piles of free Word and FrontPage templates and graphics for every subject to help you create good looking pages.

If you're trying to help you staff learn about Office there's a section of quizzes you can use to reinforce their knowledge of the suite.

Mac users are not left out in the wonderful goodie fest that's available for Windows users. Microsoft has set up a section for Mac users, called Mactopia, at www.microsoft.com/mac.

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Alice has won the Loebner Prize for the third year in a row for being a compelling chatterbox.

Alice is a computer, or rather a computer program, run by the A.L.I.C.E. AI Foundation, Inc., which is attempting to create the world's first artificial intelligence computer.

The Loebner Prize is based on the Turing Test, named after Alan Turing the brilliant British mathematician. In 1950, Alan Turing posed the question "If a computer could think, how could we tell?" He suggested that if the responses from the computer were indistinguishable from that of a human, the computer could be said to be thinking.

The Loebner prize offers a grand prize of $100,000 for the first computer whose responses were indistinguishable from a human's. No one has one the grand prize yet but each year an annual prize of $2000 and a bronze medal is awarded to the most human computer around.

So far Alice has taken that prize, however others are on the chase. The second place contender is Jabberwacky, a UK-based effort. You can test out their conversational skills online by having a chat with the computers. Go to www.alicebot.org for Alice and www.jabberwacky.com for Jabberwacky. Be prepared for some whacky responses once you get complicated.

Other chatterbots (as they are called) include a German effort called Elbot (www.elbot.com) and Jabberwock (www.abenteuermedien.de/jabberwock/).

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Don't forget to implement the latest Microsoft security updates. In the past week Microsoft released two patches, one for a major security flaw in how Windows handles the JPEG graphics format, the other for a flaw in the WordPerfect file converter in Microsoft Office. Download the patches by going to www.SecureBermuda.com.

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Contact Ahmed at editor@offshoreon.com.