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	Monday 08 September 2008

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From TNPC issue #4.03... Office Guru Al Gordon

Office XP: New and Improved

by Al Gordon
May 3, 2001

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.TheNakedPC.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@TheNakedPC.com

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