CreamChief's Full Review: Microsoft Office XP Professional Full Version for ...
Once again, the hopes and dreams of a better, bug-fixed office suite are dashed to pieces. Sure, Office XP adds some new interesting features like voice and text recognition, but the resource sucking monster drains the life from a computer. Most of the newer features are great for people who have never used a word processor, spreadsheet, or presentation tool, but for those who know how to format a piece of text, the mind-numbing helpful tools just get in the way.
Overview and installation
I hope to do more than just gripe about Office XP in this review, but let's face it, I will do mostly that. Office XP Premium comes on three disks instead of Office 2000's four disks. The third disk is a Step by Step Interactive tutorial CBT. Like most information distributed by MS these days it is Web browser based. The series of tutorials and quizzes could be helpful for new users, but most of us will stay clear of it. The disk has installations for local or network based setup.
The bulk of what you install is on the first disk. I am not a big fan of the new Microsoft installer. If a component is not installed originally, then upon first use the installer insists that you insert the original disk to install it. Even if you decide to skip installing that component, you may have hosed the installation permanently. For example, the first time that I tried to use the voice recognition the installer asked for the original XP disk. Since I did not have it handy, I cancelled out of that. Later, when I tried to install voice recognition, it absolutely would not install. I needed to completely remove XP and reinstall it. On the plus side, however, the single disk installation is much, much quicker than Office 2000.
The custom installation options give you the same type of control over which components to install or not.
The second disk is loaded with the Media Content. You are presented with the two amazing installation options of Install Now or Complete. Uh, yeah, they are the same. It's all or nothing here. At least you can change the installation directory. Choose wisely here. You get all 562MB of clipart and stuff or none of it.
The Applications
Okay, no more PhotoDraw, thankfully. Office still includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, FrontPage, Access, and Outlook. Across the board, all of the applications have the "Smart Pane." I think that TestMagic did a great job of describing it in his review "((((B-L-O-A-T-E-D))))" All I will add is that there seems to be no way of getting rid of it, and it has become the single most annoying part of Office XP. If you copy to the clipboard more than once, the clipboard opens in the Pane. If you choose a new document, you have to select the type from the Pane. When you insert clipart, you choose it in the Pane. Etc. etc. etc.
Other interesting "helpful" items are the little menus that pop up in the middle of your
document while you are working. When you click on them, you get a pull down menu of possible choices of action. For example, insert a line in Excel, and a little broom pops up to choose what type of formatting you want for that line. These nuggets popup in the strangest places.
They stick around until you do something else in the document. So if you want to get rid of the little popup menu, then you have to start working someplace in the document. In other words, if you paste a little piece of text, you will get the popup clipboard menu. It will never go away until you start typing someplace else in the document.
Access
Access seems to be about the same as Access 2000, but I have yet to delve deeply into it.
Word
Word is quite similar, but there have been some welcomed changes. Tracking changes in a document seems to work better. Well, I guess that's about it for welcomed changes. Paragraph styles are even worse. It was bad enough trying to scroll through 15-20 styles, now I get one for every single combination of type face and style. Managing the layout of graphics is still impossible. Images jump from page to page, top to bottom, and never seem to go where you want them.
Most of the previous annoying features of Word are still there: autoformat, automatic
hyperlinks, background saves. (RANT)Really, what is background save? When I click Save I want to save my document now, not later. I really, really don't understand that. What is "preparing to background save"? And background print?! Isn't that what a print server is for?(/RANT)
Other bugs persist. The auto spell/grammar checker still looks at that sentence or word directly in front of where you are typing. The green or red squiggled underline flashes as you type. In fact, Word is doing that to me right now. Go ahead, copy and paste this review into word and start typing at the end of this paragraph. You will see Excel flash on and off with the underline. Can you say, “sloppy programming”?
Excel
Excel so far seems very similar but with the aforementioned additions. I will be using it more heavily soon and am sure to see more differences.
FrontPage
I like some of the changes to FrontPage. Separate tabs for all of the pages open makes switching between pages much easier. The layout is generally easier to deal with. After all, this is the fourth revision to FrontPage since MS bought it. It has taken that long to integrate it successfully with the rest of Office. It is still a relatively painful way to edit Web pages, though. If you do not like using Web folders or FrontPage extensions on your server, then I would recommend another product like Dreamweaver. For the occassional HTML slaptogether it works.
If you have used FrontPage before, then you know that in HTML view the lines often get garbled up, overlapping each other in a graphical mess. That bug is still ominously present.
PowerPoint
It is the Smart Pane that just makes PowerPoint painful to use now. When I click on new slide, I just want a new slide. When I click on new presentation, I just want a new presentation. Why do the helpful tools have to make things so much more cumbersome? Otherwise, it is much the same. The export to Web feature is quite a bit better, but then again, 2000 was better than ’97. I still recommend exporting to GIF’s and writing your own pages.
I do not think any of the Microsoft developers have ever used a real PowerPoint demenstration themselves. XP has now made it impossible to handle custom animations. If you have overlapping graphics, there is no longer the smaller thumbnail of your slide to allow the selection of different elements. You have to pick them from the main slide and then choose the action on the Smart Pain in the . . . . A pulldown menu lets you choose which element to animate, but only after you have selected it from the main slide.
Those of you who use PowerPoint regularly I hope understand what I am describing. If you need to animate multiple elements on the same slide, then do not upgrade to PowerPoint XP!
Outlook
Ah, Outlook, my nemesis, you have returned. No longer can we coerce Outlook to receive GroupWise mail. Okay, 99% of you do not care about that. How about this – Outlook will refuse to let you open or save an attachment with an “.exe” extension. The message says that you must change the configuration on the mail server. This is an outright lie since it is a “feature” of Outlook, not the Exchange server. So, Microsoft created the e-mail virus phenomenon and now is trying to hold the screen door closed.
Otherwise, for simplicity’s sake you need to wade through Wizards to get to common settings. If you use multiple accounts, you can no longer just choose Tools/Accounts. You choose Tools/Accounts, and then step into a wizard to say uh, yeah, edit existing accounts. Apparently, the window that lists the accounts and offers an “Add” button was not obvious enough.
Oh, I think I am getting a bit sarcastic now. Unfortunately, I cannot yet tone it down because I must write about voice recognition.
Voice recognition
Many people will buy XP for the included voice recognition. In all fairness, it works pretty well. There is the incredibly lame oversight of not allowing the backup of speech data. Please, allow me to explain. You must spend anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes to train the software to recognize your voice. Then, after much use, the software adds more data to your profile, thus becoming more accurate. Great, that’s fine so far. What if perchance your machine crashes or you must reinstall office? Oh, just backup the voice data and restore, right? There is no way to backup and restore the voice data!
Um, do I seem upset about this? I actually posed this question to MS on one of there “Webinars” or whatever they call it. I asked why there was no way to do this when in other applications like ViaVoice or Naturally Speaking it is a simple matter. The answer was that machines are so specific that the data will be different depending upon the machine. Thus, to install on a new machine requires a new training session to setup the speech recognition. He completely ignored the issue of reinstalling on the same machine. I think (just complete conjecture on my part) that Microsoft just forgot or did not really know what they were doing.
Conclusion
I have switched to WordPerfect now for the most part. Seriously, WordPerfect has become a much better word processor. Otherwise, I use Office XP everyday at home and work as part of a site license agreement. If I had to pay for an office suite, I would not buy XP.
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