hm8080's Full Review: Microsoft Office XP Professional Full Version for ...
Microsoft Office XP so soon?
Microsoft Office XP already? Why, it was not too long ago that our office upgraded to Office 2000! What exactly is MS trying to hide up its sleeves? Is that how it’s going to be from now on? With each new release of Windows, we’re going to get a new release of Office? Bother! Squeeze more money from them corporate folks, otherwise, how else to remain the world’s richest company huh?
Now that aside, how is Microsoft Office really? Very nice and easy to use actually. By far the most used Office program for me is Microsoft Word. I mean I do use Excel and PowerPoint a fair amount but all the newer features I have not yet really had the chance to explore. But I will note that Excel comes with a selection of data analysis add-in “tool-paks” which I find to be very useful especially the statistical analysis tool-pak. This is not installed by default and has to be activated and installed manually.
In all honesty, I actually like MS Office XP. I find it to be far more stable than Office 2000 which I have at work and which will crash with the autocorrect features turn on! Can never get that bugger fixed. But Office XP not only offer more functionality and user-friendly features but it seems to start up faster and is more stable too.
Installation size
Surprisingly, unlike Windows XP, Office XP does not take up to 1GB of hard disk space! The installation size is just right, around 250 for a standard installation. You may also choose to install a custom installation where you can choose what specific components to install along with the standard applications like MS Word etc.
Old annoyance still there…
Sadly, the stupid Clippit help character is still around and I thought MS was keen on killing it? It pops up obstrusively everytime you click help and you need to manually turn that bugger off permanently (it doesn’t come turned off by default).
What’s new
So what’s new? Some of the more obvious improvements are:
- New styles menu and toolbar. You can format your documents easier this time around with the new styles and formatting pane and toolbar and this lets you choose and display only selected styles that you most frequently use like heading one, two etc.
- MS Office XP now comes equipped with speech and handwriting recognition! Yes that’s right and if you want to bring out the best in Office XP, you have to go with Windows XP too on your PC. Handwriting recognition now allows you to write on a tablet or use a mouse and enter text directly into the computer. This is recognized and translated into normal PC text.
- Ability to publish web documents directly from Word. You can convert your documents (.doc) on the fly into .html documents.
- Improved tables support. Creating tables and formatting them have never been easier, you can merge, create tables within tables and all that you could never do with Office 97 before!
- A pop up everyday tasks pane appears each time you start Word and it lists the most commonly used features as well as recently opened documents. A nice handy feature but can take up screen space if you are like me and still using a 15” monitor displaying an 800 x 600 screen resolution!
- A help bar area is now available for you to type in your questions directly and is located to the right of the menu items. Nice addition!
- A nice language translation program is included for English to French, Spanish and vice-versa.
- Scanning utility included for use with your existing scanner! This gets both thumbs up, this is a terrific addition and a great intuition on MS’s part.
Elsewhere, much remains the same from Office 2000. So if you do not need all these bells and whistles like speech and handwriting recognition, you do not have to upgrade to Office XP which is unnecessary expenditure. Documents created in Office 2002 (XP) like Word can still be opened with Word 97 with very very slight formatting loss such as a change in bulleted lists because Office XP sports advance bullets and list styles.
Ease of use
The single most important factor in deciding how usable or how popular a productivity software package is, I feel, has got to be the ease of use. At one time, WordPerfect was the best and most popular word processing program out there, what with its DOS versions and all. But MS perfected the word processor starting with MS Word 2.0. I still remember creating a full paged newsletter with frames, graphics and columns with a simple MS Word 2.0 program and it was very easy to use.
The competition’s loss is MS’s gain…
Consider the competition like IBM Lotus SmartSuite and Corel WordPerfect. Even though Lotus SmartSuite and WordPerfect Suites are both sometimes bundled for free with new computers or available at rock bottom prices, they have not been so easy to use compared to MS Office. I tried getting used to Lotus SmartSuite but I just didn’t like it at all. I was way to used to finding features like subscripts, superscripts, indents etc on the MS Office toolbar and the toolbars were easily customized too. In SmartSuite and WordPerfect, I had to dig in deep to find such features. SmartSuite also did not provide the functionality and newer features of MS Office 97, 2000 and XP such as advanced tables creation introduced in Office 2000. This I find to be a superb addition as you can create tables of all styles, tables within tables, text boxes within tables and merge cells and adjust individual cell characteristics. Great! So, ever since Microsoft Office 95 which I bought in 1996 at a discounted Student pricing, I have stuck with MS Office ever since. Even though I did give the competition a try, MS’s products have always come up on top.
Integration of the applications
Integration is seamless and each and every Office component starts up quickly within a second. You can import and export and embed Office documents such as Excel workbook files easily into Microsoft Word documents and vice-versa. You can even embed an Excel document into a PowerPoint slide for presentation purposes and all this is done with no crash or problems at all on my PC. Of course, you need a very capable PC to be running both Office XP and Windows XP at the same time. Both are slow when I turn off the extra 128MB of RAM that I have. All is smooth with 256MB of RAM and I would consider that the absolute minimum to run both these software together.
Document creation
The old wizards are back in Office XP. They are very much the same Wizards found in Office 97 and 2000. Go to file and select new and out pops the new document creation pane on the left side of the screen from which you can choose to create a blank new document or use a template or start a document wizard. If you choose the latter, you will be presented choices of wizards for various document types and designs. In Word, I selected the brochure Wizard and within minutes I had created a very impressive brochure. Access also now comes with an improved interface and more control for creating your databases. I find this new interface much easier to work with especially working with inter-linked items, tables and querries etc. The database Wizards are there as usual, offering versatility and inspiration all at the click of a button. If you don’t want to use their templates exactly as they are, simply start a wizard for and use the resulting database as a template to modify and suit your own database design needs. I like to think of Access 2002 as databases made easy for the novice.
Also, I love how PowerPoint now has some really useful feaures like applying design schemes and animation schemes via the panels that pop up t the right of the screen or workspace. You can choose, for example, to apply a design scheme to only the master slide or all slides with a pull down menu button, very easily accessed and convenient. For animations, you can choose automated or manual animation via the custom animation menu. This pop up menu is very easy to use and you can select the objects one by one and there’s also a whole new bunch of neat animations like “Exciting” etc. Try them, I am preparing a presentation using these new features and I love them!
Extensive application help
As mentioned above, there is a space for you to type in your questions for help that is continuously present at the top of the screen to the right. So if you need help with anything say, you need more help in understanding how Access databases and links work, just type in your question exactly like how you would ask an expert and the results are then displayed for you to click on in a drop-down menu. Also, you need not have to put up with the annoying Clippit character all the time you need help, simply right click on him and select “Hide assistant.”
Overall, very satisfactory
Though the many improvements are rather minor and not mainstream (such as speech recognition and handwriting, who uses that everyday anyway?), Office XP remains a satisfactory upgrade from Office 2000, I actually do not regret it and have not had any single jam or crash ever since I installed it and started using it. I have since used it to create so many documents and not one complaint thus far as far as documents are concerned. So what’s next from Microsoft in the year 2003? Microsoft Windows XP2? Office XP2? XP3? XP4? Or a totally new name for essentially an upgrade to older Office versions?
Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 is the most complete personal and business productivity solution that enables people to manage customers an...More at eBay
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