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Member since:06.03.2001
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I have just been shown Microsoft’s newest version of ‘Office’ – Office XP which will be released to the general public on May 31st 2001. The XP stands for eXPerience, or so we were told. Cheesiness aside, it all looked rather good.
This opinion is written for people with a working knowledge of Office already, as if I described the Office suite and also said what’s new in XP you would still be reading at Christmas!
Firstly, they have been rather clever in the anti-piracy stakes. As you purchase your Office package, install it on your PC, you then need to ‘activate’ it. It will allow you to get started immediately and not activate if you wish but you only have 50 launches, so as you are nearing your deadline it prompts you to log on (or call) and activate the disks. This means that the disks are only for you, as if you pass them onto a friend to then put on his machine, he cannot activate them as you will have already used the activation code.
The actual product
is great, I enjoy using Office 2000 at the moment at work and at home, but there are certain niggles, Microsoft seemed to have tried very hard to put these right this time.
Firstly, they surveyed lots of people about their niggles and found the dratted office assistant was by far the worst thing about the package!! We all hate the little paperclip! In Office XP, the office assistant is still there but you have to go and turn him on yourself if you like him, he will never appear of his own accord…saying ”it looks like your writing a letter, do you want me to...” ggrrhh!! Don’t you just want to tell him exactly what you want him to do at this point!?!?!
Anyway back to the plot. Office XP has ‘Smart Tags’ these are tiny little blue oblongs which appear as you are typing, when Word changes something you have written, for example; if your postcode is WS1 4TH - look at how Word has decided to write it. In Office XP a Smart Tag will appear beneath this and you just click and it will revert back to whatever you want it to say.
Has anyone else got really annoyed when trying to do numbered items? You know, you write points 1, 2 and 3, then you want to write a piece then continue with 4, 5 and 6. Will Word let you do this at the moment? No way, my work always goes haywire if I try this, with XP click on your smart tag and simply tell it what you are trying to do and it’ll do it!
If you are writing a letter and you put the person’s name on it and that person is one of your contacts in Outlook, a click of your Smart Tag can add their address onto your letter to save you typing it or it will generate an email from you to them.
When you are cutting, copying and pasting it will open a task pad on the right so you can see at a glance exactly what is on your clipboard and choose which one you want to paste.
In Excel, the auto sum has a smart tag, it guesses what sum you are trying to create and show up possible errors you have made. Documents are easier to produce using half the number of mouse clicks, to do tasks such as creating a coloured border on your spreadsheet. Now all tabs on spreadsheets are colour coded too.
In PowerPoint, again they have gone for fewer mouse clicks to speed up the process, animations in PowerPoint are much easier to do. Adding borders, backgrounds etc are easy and you can see your whole presentation down the left hand side and choose to work from there, for example a couple of clicks will enable you to put a background on pages 1, 3, 4 and 8 without opening these pages of the presentation separately.
In Outlook, you can add different accounts to it now, so you can access Outlook and Hotmail for instance from one place – keeping business and personal stuff separate, when you come to write a mail it just asks which account it should be sent from.
It also has auto-recover, picture the scene, you’ve spent an hour doing a spreadsheet, loads of figures, you have a headache and suddenly for no apparent reason, your PC says “this programme has performed an illegal operation and will shut down” before Office XP, crying, swearing and starting again were the 3 options. Now when you reboot the programme you find your lovely little Office programme has thoughtfully saved your work for you in a temporary folder. Ahh bless it!!
Now I think we need some tecky bits – the recommended requirements are as follows;
300mhz processor,128MB of RAM, Windows 98 or later (or NT 4 or later), 360MB hard disk space, CDRom, Super VGA (800x600)or higher resolution monitor with 256 colours and compatible pointing device (that’s a mouse, to normal folk!)
If you fancy upgrading your older version of Office, bear in mind you can only upgrade from 97 or 2000 to XP and no other versions. Also this time you cannot upgrade from Works.
The different SKU’s are;
Standard – which has Word 2002, Excel 2002, Outlook 2002 and PowerPoint 2002
Professional – which has all the above plus Access 2002
Developers edition – which has all the above plus FrontPage 2002 and Developer 2002
Interestingly Publisher 2002 is only available on the OEM version, this means you cannot buy a copy of Office with Publisher over the counter, OEM’s are the disks you get when you buy your computer and cannot be sold separately.
Presumably they will release Publisher 2002 on it’s own to purchase.
I also assume they will release a ‘Student License’ for it, and once I have gone into work and looked at the pricing on Student Licenses I shall also write an op on those, as they are a good, CHEAPER way to get Office on your PC. So watch this space – as they say!
I hope my Opinion has been helpful and has maybe wetted your appetite for the new Office XP. I was very impressed in the presentation we had, and I’m sure I have missed out some of the things I saw, as there were so many good points about it.
Further information can be seen at www.microsoft.com/uk/office/
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
Well I wanted it before and now I want it even more, good informative op, thanks.
BTW if you all hate clippy that much you may find this amusing, www.officeclippy.com :) I do like those flash movies.
SusanLesley 23.04.2001 16:24
This sounds a seriously good piece of kit! Susan
in1072 23.04.2001 15:14
I had been invited to see XP but couldn't get there, so it is nice to know what is going on! I guess we won't see it at the Uni' for another - oooo - 3 or 4 years!!! Well written and very informative - keep us posted! D :)
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Advantages: Outlook 2002 now quite fast downloading mail. Speech recognition seems accurate. Easy to use as its almost identical to Office 2000 Disadvantages: Too pricy for Office 2000 users
Advantages: Very modern, new look, fast, reliable, runs like a dream, brilliant in retrospect. Disadvantages: Non that I can think of but it is very expensive.
Apr 23rd, 2001
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