Thursday, May 3, 2001 - Vol. 4 No. 9

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** 02. Office XP: New and Improved (by Al Gordon)

Much more will be written on Office XP in this space in the
months ahead, but for now a brief overview of the released-to-
manufacturing ("gold") code: I like it a lot. But I have trouble
recommending that you rush out and buy it. Here is the problem in
a nutshell.

Office XP has by far the best interface that Office has ever had.
There are touches such as "Smart Tags"--basically embedded sub-
menus that appear in the text at appropriate points--that ease
use. For example, if you paste text into a document from another
source, a smart tag lets you control the incoming text's
formatting. This fixes something that has annoyed me for years,
but especially since Office 2000 went to HTML as the default
insert format, thereby insuring that pastes from a Web page
result in totally messed up formats.

The editing and reviewing system--again, something I use all the
time--is much stronger, with multiple views for checking changes.
There are lots of similar touches.

However, the upgrade price Office XP Professional Upgrade is
$300:
http://www.tnpcnewsletter.com/t/409/tr.cgi?al1

That is a lot of money for a nicer interface. Functionally, the
only major advances are the addition of speech and handwriting
recognition. If you don't want to dictate and don't have a tablet
PC, neither are going to be of much value.

The preliminary verdict: definitely insist that Office XP be on
any new PC you buy. If you are running Office 95, and maybe even
97, this upgrade will bring you into the modern Internet-based
document world. But if you have Office 2000... well, how is your
stock portfolio doing these days?

You can reach Al Gordon at:
mailto:al@tnpcnewsletter.com

(c) 2001-2004 Al 

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** 05. Al's Ongoing Office eXPerience (by Al Gordon)

Yes, there are a number of things in Office XP that are really
annoying but let's start off with a few pet peeves from previous
versions of Office that the upcoming XP version actually
eliminates:

-- Outlook 2002 no longer clogs your desktop with multiple dialog
boxes when you have more than one task reminder message. Instead
they are combined in one box.

-- Also, you can now edit a reminder and save the changes and
keep the existing reminder schedule (over the years, I have
gotten REALLY tired of those "your reminder time is in the
past..." messages).

-- The new Smart Tag (an embedded dialog) feature allows you to
get control of cutting and pasting. When you paste text into
Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, a Smart Tag allows you to choose the
formatting that will be applied. The lack of that has been
especially annoying in pasting material into documents that
you've copied from Web pages.

-- And, at last, you can actually open more than open document at
a time in Publisher.

You can reach Al Gordon at:
mailto:al@tnpcnewsletter.com

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** 05. Al's Ongoing Office eXPerience (by Al Gordon)

I last wrote about Office XP back in TNPC #4.09. At that time I
noted that Office 95 users would benefit the most from upgrading.
Several readers then wrote in to complain that Microsoft was not
extending upgrade pricing to Office 95 users.
http://www.tnpcnewsletter.com/t/413/tr.cgi?alz1

So I asked Microsoft's spokespeople for the straight scoop. The
official response, "Microsoft updates its qualifying upgrade list
with more recent product releases to reflect the versions of
Office that most of its customers are using. Given that most of
its customers have purchased Office 97 or 2000 licenses or
upgraded to those versions, they've updated the Office XP
qualifying upgrade list to include Office 97 and 2000 only."

OK, got that, Office 95 users? Had you been one of Redmond's
favorite customers you would have kicked in some bucks for Office
97 or 2000 and to thank you for keeping the cash flowing they'd
put you on the yellow brick upgrade path. But since you didn't,
they are going to get it from you now with interest. Sad to say,
this is going to happen more often in the future as the
incremental improvements in Office become more and more marginal,
and the company frantically moves to protect its Office cash cow.

I actually think Microsoft's plan to shift its sales model to
annual licensing (instead of version licenses) may be a good
idea--if, and I stress IF--it leads to continuous improvement and
bug-fixing in its software instead of silly attempts to go with a
"latest and greatest" new package every 18 months.

I, for one, am sick of this ongoing process in which the current
version of Office or Windows approaches decent reliability around
Service Pack 2 (Microsoft always seems to take three shots at
anything before they get it right), at which point a new version
comes out and the whole process starts over. NT4 went to SP6 and-
-not surprisingly--was darn near bulletproof. But, given the XP
upgrade situation, customers can be excused for having a really
bad feeling about how the transition to annual licensing may play
out.

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You can reach Al Gordon at:
mailto:al@tnpcnewsletter.com

c) 2004 Al Gordon.

In addition to his computer interests, Al Gordon is a principal
in the Boston-area strategic consulting firm, Mary Fifield
Associates, www.maryfifieldassociates.com