Average Rating: 
Rating:  - So What?
I upgraded from Office 2000 to Office XP about three months ago. I would not call myself a power user, but I give Outlook and Word a good workout every day. I also use Excel and Access a lot. My reaction to this "upgrade" is 'ummm...OK...well...so what?' I have noticed a *few* "improvements," but not enough to justify the price tag. It seems Microsoft only rearranged the furniture, painted the walls a different color and called it an upgrade. If you're an ordinary user like me and you already have Office 2000, you're happy with it and you don't really need the bug fixes office XP provides, then why bother upgrading?
Rating:  - Word +, Excel =, Outlook -
ABOUT ME...
MOST USED: Word, Outlook, Excel
SETUP: P4 / 1.3 Gig / 256 RAM~GENERAL~
SMART TAGS:
I cut and paste a lot between documents, and the "smart tag" approach to pasting is a cut (ba-dum-bum!) above previous Office implementations. No longer do I need to find the (non-macro-friendly) "Paste special" menu option; instead, a helpful icon that appears next to my text lets me choose among my options. This is a real time-saver for me (although it gets in the way in certain environments, e.g. the icon sometimes covers up cells in Excel). TASK PANE:
I found the new task pane much more convenient and a good use of screen real estate on larger monitors, particularly for Word. The multiple-object clipboard that sometimes occupies this space is nice in theory, but for some reason I never remember to use it, probably because my own brain holds a few objects at a time. BLOAT?
I have a fairly high-powered desktop running Office XP. I would never think to install Office XP on my P2 233 laptop, where Office 2K resides. ~ WORD ~
Unlike a previous reviewer, I like the new approach to Styles -- by keeping track of what styles are in use, I can hunt down the "rogue" styles that are, er, crimping my style. I also like that I can switch between "Available Formatting," "Formatting in Use," "Available Styles," and "All Styles" -- in Word 2K-, switching to Outline mode filled up your Styles pull-down menu with styles you will never use. I also prefer the new (XML-friendly) way of handling review notes, footnotes, corrections, etc. ~ OUTLOOK ~
I found Outlook XP disappointing. The Rules (filters, so important in the era of spam) remain clumsy as ever (see Eudora for a much more intuitive interface) and its poor handling of multiple folders (e.g. flagged items in sub-folders do not trigger alerts; address lookup never seems to find contacts in address sub-folders) has not been fixed. ~ OVERALL ~
Flame me all you want, but I generally like Microsoft products. Sure, the product's got security holes like Swiss cheese, but that I will leave to the geeks to debate (I gladly exchange security risks for the ability to create powerful macros in VB/VBA). I appreciate Office XP's UI and think it is a worthwhile upgrade from 2K.
Rating:  - Not a good deal
If everyone were still churning out stock options in their sleep and making money every time they went to the coffee machine, it wouldn't be so much of an issue. And if the licensing were less draconian, it wouldn't be so much of an issue.
But since we actually need to work to make a profit these days, it's not really smart to spew all this money at software that you're not even using, most of the time, to create your product.Have your office sysadmin or techwriter or something try out StarOffice or OpenOffice.org for a couple weeks, then train the rest of the company on how to switch. Using the same software all your professional life isn't in the bill of rights and the smart decision is to switch to something that works, that you can actually afford. If your employees or co-workers are smart enough to make whatever they're making, they're smart enough to switch to a different spreadsheet.
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