This review is based on FrontPage 2000 beta 2 included in the Microsoft Office 2000 Consumer Preview Program.

Check out information from ZD-Net in their review of Office 2000.

Microsoft's Web site editor, FrontPage 2000, now displays its editing and site-management views in the same window and no longer damages imported HTML code. Graphics themes can be modified directly inside FrontPage, and the automated navigation toolbars built by the program can include external links, although these toolbars can't be customized as much as many Webmasters would like.

FrontPage finally uses the same File/Open dialog boxes as the rest of the Office suite, and also makes it easier to build a Web site in an ordinary disk folder instead of through the often-confusing Personal Web Server. Advanced users can program VisualBasic macros to automate FrontPage's operations, but macros can't be recorded like macros in Excel, PowerPoint, or Word. Despite some usability problems, FrontPage remains by far the best tool for building complex Web sites without having to learn HTML.

And ZD-Net on Microsoft Frontpage 2000 BETA

The overall interface has been improved tremendously. The Views area on the left of your desktop lets you select from Page, the basic editing tool; Folders, for viewing your directory structure; and Reports, which analyze your sites and files in numerous ways. You can also choose Navigation, which lets you create navigation bars for those pages you select, regardless of their place in the site; Hyperlinks, which shows how the pages and links relate to each other; and Tasks, which tracks notes of what work needs to be done and, in a network environment, who's doing it.

Details will be forthcoming as I work with it. The stuff that follows is at present incomplete and not well organized.

The separation between FrontPage Explorer and FrontPage Editor is blurred. When you open a file by selecting it from a file list in Explorer, the page appears in the right window of Explorer. Actually it is no longer called Explorer.

There is an option to check spelling as you type, same as with Word.

You can specify which files you want to publish. By default, files are marked for publishing, but you can change this setting. For example, if you have not finished editing a page but you want to publish your Web site, you can prevent the page from being published by marking it Don't Publish. When you want to publish the file, mark the page Publish.