Pros: The world leading office software products in one bundle.
Cons: The world's most expensive software in one expensive bundle.
The Bottom Line: Save your money. Get in on OpenOffice for free. Hurry before Bill Gates gets to Scott MacNealy and makes him 'an offer he can't refuse'.
howdad's Full Review: Microsoft Office XP Professional Full Version for ...
HOW WELL DO I KNOW MICROSOFT OFFICE?
Well, let me be honest: I'm a complete Office stud. I am a total Excel hog (read my Excel review); my company has posted my Excel spreadsheets on the internal intranet for all employees to use and learn from. I mastered Word in version 1.0; you wanna talk about Word mail merge, tables, or special symbols? Bring it on! Need a PowerPoint presentation with animation, sound, imported graphics or custom three dimensional rendered graphics? I'm your man. It's not my real job, but because people know I'm the Office Stud, I spend a lot of time every day just explaining these things to other professionals in my company.
All right, I'm sure now you think you've heard enough about me. I agree. I'm sounding like a know-it-all gasbag, but my point is to establish myself as a knowledgeable person to build your trust, so when I say NO, you know you are dealing with someone that seriously knows what he's talking about. OK, good, now I can revert to my normal, humble self.
IT'S ALL INSIDE
Microsoft has developed a complete suite of products to assist you in your calculating, word processing, presenting, and e-mailing needs. It seems everyone in the world is using Microsoft Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Outlook. Is it time for you to go out and get these popular and undeniably good products for yourself? Well, let's consider what you need to do and match it up with what Office can do for you.
Mathematical analysis. For everything but the highest order functions, Excel provides enough horsepower for statisticians, financial managers, scientists, engineers and, of course, home budgeteers. Microsoft has even provided templates to get you started with a plain vanilla version of your chosen spreadsheet type. Most home users could easily get by with fewer features, but sorry, there is no Excel Lite (with commensurately lighter price tag).
Word Processing. About 5 years ago, Microsoft Word eclipsed WordPerfect as the number one word processing software. They blew them away with WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) displays and have never looked back. Anyone who remembers having to view tables in a separate WordPerfect window understands why Microsoft leapt ahead. Today, Word keeps adding more and more features like on-the-fly spell checking, autoformating, and self-acting invoked helper routines which materialize to assist you. To be fair, the competition has fully caught up in the feature department and if all you need is to write a snail mail or print out a grocery list, Word is gross overkill. Sure, everybody loves autosave, but for students and business professionals, these other things matter:
•HTML editor
•Footnote, table of contents, index and bibliography tools
•Integrated e-mail send capability
•Review and mark up tool
•Table creation and formatting
•Web connectivity
•Drag and drop graphics
Presentations. Especially if you have bad news to tell, a dazzling presentation improves your case. I have no use this at home because my spouse is too intelligent to be fooled by pretty pictures. However, on the job I am constantly generating slide show presentations for my bosses. Insipid messages are made powerful with zoom in, zoom out, and dissolve and make every junior executive wait with abated breath to see the bottom line. Which should be an dancing, animated bottom line for max effect. Sort of like the 3rd grade, the more colors you use, the better grade you get. Poor Harvard Graphics anticipated this crying need to appease executive attention deficient disorder, but PowerPoint has the market cornered today. They have every bell and whistle one could want. Import JPEG images, spreadsheets, or text tables for spiff factor; use canned sounds (like breaking glass, gunshots or car crashes) to wake up the audience; it's all in there.
E-mail. Outlook and Outlook Express are universal, used by people all over the globe. This has become both Microsoft’s blessing and their curse. Every hack cooking up the next virus targets Microsoft products because of their popularity, but none so much as Outlook. Why? Because the world's #1 e-mail product gives hackers access to the largest host community to infect. Consider Microsoft's historically weak performance on security, and you'll understand why virtually no viruses infect Netscape Messenger. Viruses aside, the next most important aspect of messaging software for me, lies in it's ability to maintain my addresses easily and reliably. Outlook has a checkered performance past here.
WHY SHOULD YOU BUY MICROSOFT OFFICE?
Do you believe in the free market economy? Do you think that the best developers and products are naturally selected by the consumers? If so, you've got to believe that Microsoft is the supreme software producer on the planet. Every one of the products they bundle into their Office package is the undisputed world leader. Each towers over the rest of the market with a 90% share. This is staggering, beyond thinking in any other field. Imagine a car manufacturer achieving this, even for a single product...
~~~~~wavy, hallucinatory, imagination lines~~~~~~~~~~
Minivan World Market Sales
Honda Odyssey 90% of the market
Dodge Caravan 1% of the market
Mercedes Vito 1% of the market
Ford Windstar 1% of the market
Nissan Quest 1% of the market
Chevrolet Astro 1% of the market
Mazda MPV 1% of the market
Volkswagen Eurovan 1% of the market
Kia Carnival 1% of the market
Toyota Sienna 1% of the market
Isuzu Oasis 1% of the market
~~~~~~~~~~~~ok, wake up, dream's over~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
...oh yeah, and don't Microsoft’s goods cost much more than the other guys'? Well, there's your proof, right? Microsoft stuff must be awesomely good or the other stuff horribly lame. (Answers: Oh YEAH they do and Heck NO they aren't)
WHY YOU SHOULDN'T BUY MICROSOFT OFFICE. Upgrade. Are you only thinking about an upgrade of your existing Office suite? Well, there isn't a big reason for most of us to upgrade. Every OS 'upgrade' spawns a matching Office version. (Or almost. Thank God there was no Office Bob.) Currently, Office XP rules the roost. The reasons Microsoft expounds to convince you to spend hundreds of dollars to upgrade from the previous Office version you have aren't very compelling: 'smart tags'; speech and handwriting recognition; picture compression; Office Assistant hidden by default*. Well, what if you could get upgraded Office performance for much less money? No, I'm not talking about the Academic version ('only' $150 list); see The Answer below.
*Since Office 97, an annoying 'Office Assistant' depicted as Einstein or paperclip or whatever would zoom out of nowhere to ask if they could meddle in our work. Microsoft claims a feature addition rather than a bug fix now that they've suppressed the invasion of these pests, relieving us from the headache of constantly clicking the go-away box.
New user. All right, you say, upgrading is a plot to nickel and dime me to death—or rather, $50 and $100 me to death—but I am starting from scratch. I need some or all of this functionality. Isn't this the cheapest way to get it? NO; see The Answer below.
Security. Microsoft is a huge company with gigantic resources. Aren't they my best bet to protect against bugs, hackers and viruses? No way. Their history is plagued with security breaches; partly because they are the big dog and everybody targets them, but also due to self inflicted injuries and oversights in the security area.
THE ANSWER (do you hear the angelic strains?)
Finally, the part where you get PAID for wading through all this drivel... I strongly recommend you save your money. There are cheaper Office products out there, by Corel for example, but I don't recommend you buy them either. My bottom line is: DON'T BUY ANYTHING.
Get a full (and I mean full) featured Office suite for free. Not from a tiny freeware company, not a bootleg, not a multi-level marketing scheme. Go to OpenOffice.org and download OpenOffice version 1.0. This is a complete set of software which includes spreadsheet, word processing, presentation manager, drawing program and e-mail program. It works across Windows, Linux and Unix platforms and works transparently with a variety of file formats, including those of Microsoft Office.
Who is behind this and why would they give software away? OpenOffice is backed by Sun Microsystems, an extremely reputable organization who pioneered the Open revolution in Unix hardware. Sun CEO, Scott MacNealy, has a legendary disdain for Microsoft. He is opposed to their business tactics and their mindset and has put his money where his mouth is. After acquiring StarDivision and their product, StarOffice, Sun has slightly scaled it down to make it an open source, cross platform solution for PCs, workstations and Macs. The Mac version is still in alpha code, but if you are very adventurous you can download an OS X version of OpenOffice now too. I'm waiting on my Mac side, but I've been using the Windows version and am very happy with it. You will be too.
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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