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.
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