Well, I have already written a review about MS Office 2002 XP Professional, because that version was my first introduction to Office XP. Even people who don’t already use MS Office are probably familiar with it, so I doubt I’m going to convince anyone who isn’t already using Office to switch to it. Instead I’m going to list exactly what I would want to read about in a review of the product: What is different with the new applications, and is it worth the upgrade?

Office XP professional costs $100 more, but this is really hard to be certain of because there are so many deals and special offers floating around that I wouldn’t be surprised if you could get the professional edition for the same price as the regular edition somewhere else. XP Professional has everything this regular version comes with, as well as MS Access. There is now even a more special edition that also has MS Front Page 2002, and MS Publisher. The office I worked at needed Access, so we paid the extra money for that version, but the special edition was merely the professional edition back when we purchased it, a mere four months ago. Sorry if this sounds confusing. It is to me too.

I got it when I purchased for the business a new Dell 4100. New then on Dell’s order page was the ability to have Office XP installed. We purchased XP, since we wanted to check it out, with an emphasis on Excel 2002, and Access 2002. This meant we had to order the professional version in order to include Access.

The big thing that everyone is complaining about even before purchasing it, is the new registration process. Before you can begin using it, you have to enter in the security code from the CD, which is then sent to Microsoft over the Internet or an 800#. I believe you can also call up and read the number for a code, but who doesn’t have access to the Internet anymore? Apparently the registration program looks at the hardware, so if I switched out the graphics card and sound card, it may stop working, and I’ll have to contact Microsoft in order to be able to bring it back up. I’m not looking forward to this, but I understand Microsoft’s desire to curb piracy.

Normally I hate what Microsoft chooses as part of its ‘typical’ installation and instead always go through the tedious process of customizing all of my choices. Does anyone actually use that crash-prone and buggy Office Shortcut Toolbar? With 2002, Microsoft obviously listened to the complaints and suggestions of the public, and changed the typical defaults to be almost perfect for what I need. I only changed one or two minor things, but the rest were exactly what I wanted.

The first program I tried was Excel, since that is what the people in my office use the most. I immediately noticed the new look to the toolbars and windows. At first glance they look pretty much the same. However, I did notice a nice transparency effect when I held the mouse over them. The drop down menus also have an improved graphic effect. When you select a specific menu title on the bar, and it initially only shows the stuff you’ve recently used, it looks very similar. When you wait a moment or select for the full menu to appear there is a sort of accordion effect expanding the list. It's fluff, but nice fluff. Items not on your recently used list have a gray box the left of them showing that it isn't a regular choice. The old method was to have the command text grayed out as well, but people with limited desktop color ranges probably complained about it being hard to see.

There doesn’t appear to be anything new with the paperclip, which I had heard had been removed due to consistent complaints. I’m glad he is still there, if only because poor clippy gets so much grief when all he wants to do is help. I did notice that one of my favorites, Einstein, has been replaced by a more traditional Merlin-type of Wizard. He didn't seem to have any particularly interesting animations. I did notice that all the assistants have been slightly improved graphically. I can’t put my finger on it, but maybe they are a little transparent now. They just seem to look a little better than before. Also, the wizard appears on the Windows Taskbar while you have the Office application open. This can be a quick way to bring him back.

Another thing that Microsoft feels will be a big deal is the Microsoft Application Crash Recovery system. I recently got to use this when I realized that some documents saved in Excel 95 that linked to another worksheet crash to the desktop in Excel 2000. I tried loading them into Excel 2002, and got the same crash to the desktop, but not before a box came up that said I could view and submit the error to Microsoft. It listed this long list of memory addresses that I can’t tell anything from, but probably someone at Microsoft can. It sent it rather quickly, but I have received no follow up, response, or confirmation that it even got through.

There is supposed to be an Office ‘safe mode’ for when startup problems happen, but I haven't been able to experience this yet. I have had two crashes in Office, and both have been in Excel. I actually crashed it within the first 15 minutes of using Excel while trying to play with the new ’Draw Borders’ feature. I held down the control key and moved the mouse around maybe a little to quickly to surround a whole area. What happened was an error box that said the program had crashed, and that MS Excel XP would have to restart with my recovered data. I didn’t have any data, so I couldn’t tell how well it worked.

Another thing Microsoft is boasting about is what is basically built in Object Character Recognition (OCR) software. It will automatically read in images and convert to text or pictures as needed. I really haven’t played with it too much, but another review said that it has excellent character recognition.

The Microsoft Save Settings Wizard allows you to save all your Office settings to a file. This can be used to restore your preferred settings later, or can be loaded onto another machine, like your second machine, or a laptop. I can see this as being a great new feature, and this will be appreciated by anyone who cannot stand the default settings, or has to work on various machines.

Smart tags are probably going to be one of the most helpful improvements with each application in Office XP. They are recognizable initially because of a different type of underlining (purple). Each program may use them in a different way. After something has been auto-corrected in Word, they will have this tag, making it easy to deselect the auto-correction, and then maybe to turn off auto-correction for that feature. After pasting a cell in Excel, the selections may include things like ‘ignore formatting’ or ‘paste only the formatting’. Items like recognized email names are given these, and when you right click on them, you get options that let you do things like add them to your Outlook list. These are also programmable with Visual Basic, so you can program your own to do something like query data from a company database.

When you load up each program, one of the first things you will notice is the New Workbook task menu on the right side taking up about 20% of your screen space. I want my spreadsheets and word documents to have as much room as possible, so this seemed a little annoying at first. Fortunately it is easily closed once you’ve made your selection. It lists options like blank workbook, and choose workbook (in other words open). For open from template, it lists options to get them from your hard drive or from Microsoft's web site. This could be nice, so I checked it out and found a huge supply of new templates to choose from. I should point out however that most seemed to be for Word, a few for Excel, and not much else for the other Office applications.

Office XP now also has some advanced text to speech functionality. In Excel, you can have vocal feedback whenever you finish entering information into a cell. In Word, you can have paragraphs read back to you. There is a floating toolbar in each application when you open office with the various text to speech functions. I wasn’t really setup to test much with these, but it could give the professional dictation software a run for its money if it is implemented well.

I played around with the Word Art, and I only found two things that seemed new. One is that you can now change the alignment from vertical to horizontal easily. This is actually more useful than it sounds if you use Word Art a lot. The other thing is a transparency slider bar going from 0-100%. This looks really nice, but is more useful with shapes (where it is also included) than for Word Art itself. On the 3D toolbar, you can now control the direction of a light source and the intensity. I'm sure it is nice to use with charts, objects and such.

There are also diagrams (reached from any of the new Office apps) that let you do standard Venn diagrams, flowcharts, and pyramid representations of various things. They don't look bad, but most people turn to Visio for these kinds of charts once it gets just a little complicated.

The help has also been changed and is really nice in the way that it has little triangles that you click, and they open up more text, options, or topics. This is similar to the + and – in a file explorer window for folders. This means there will be a lot less going back and forward between help topics. I like this a lot actually. Especially the more I saw and used it!

Also, there is now a help drop down menu in the top right corner that shows you the last couple of things you asked for help on. It is also a good way to get into the searchable help for those people who hate the assistants.

The Office Clipboard is now managed much easier by a pane on the right side. It is very easy to select one of the various cut and paste items. I never found the Office 2000 multiple item copy and paste system very easy. It actually seemed more frustrating then helpful since you had to rely on tool tips to sometimes choose which item to cut and paste. The new pane is definitely an improvement.

I wrote a separate review of Word, Excel, and Power Point XP versions on Epinions. For now I will quickly review Outlook, which just don’t have enough different to do a full Epinion on yet. But Outlook 2002 (XP) does have a few new things about it. The help says it can now automatically complete email addresses as you type. Netscape has been doing this since version 4 for almost three years! What took Microsoft so long, I wonder?

One thing I noticed in their examples that could be really nice is that multiple reminders can now appear in a single dialog box. There is even a ‘Dismiss All’ button. Some people may not like their reminders put together, but I think I would since what normally happens to me is that I would come back to a computer after a full day, and want to do something, but I have to cycle through seven or eight reminders just to start using my computer again.

Another thing that is supposed to be a big deal is the fact that Outlook can now handle multiple email names in a single profile. This means you can have all your emails come through one location, and then be separated into different folders. Some people may really like this, but I thought the point of the separate profiles was to keep your emails distinct from one another. It may end up being a matter of what works best for each individual.

Because of all the talk of email virus infections, Outlook 2002 will now automatically block .BAT, .VBS and .EXE. .COM, .JS, .PIF, .SCR, .URL and about 20 other file types from being transferred by default. This is good to the uninitiated who probably shouldn’t be sending and receiving programs through email in the first place, but I think strong warnings are a smarter choice. Apparently it takes a registry hack to get around this (or compressing or renaming the file), and will annoy people who commonly transfer Java script files (or something else blocked) back and forth for their jobs.

All in All, Microsoft Office 2002 (XP) is definitely full of good improvements. With previous versions there always seems to be a lot of negative things added for all the positive improvements. All I can really complain about this time is the security registration (which I accept), and the fact that it is once again much larger and bloated. I know that it does a lot more, but for people who just want to type a quick letter, there is a lot more program to load.


Here are my other Office XP 2002 reviews:

Power Point XP
http://www.epinions.com/content_37782589060

Excel XP
http://www.epinions.com/content_37801922180

Word XP
http://www.epinions.com/content_37815750276

Office XP Professional
http://www.epinions.com/content_37704797828




Recommended: Yes