Product Reviews

The press releases have finished flying and the drums have stopped rolling. The curtain has risen and, standing centre stage is Office XP! I don't think we've seen a fanfare like this since the launch of Windows 95 -but then, Microsoft's Office is the lifeblood of office workers the world over.

This is billed as a major update, and Microsoft claims that many of the improvements made to Office XP are based on feedback from customers. The company also commissioned discussion groups, and made extensive studies of how users work with Office 2000. The resulting Office eXPerience, to give the product its full name, should be far easier to use than previous versions. It should also be more reliable.

Task panes are one major new addition that appears in many different programs. They reserve the right hand of the screen and let you create and style documents quickly and without flicking through menus. The panes change depending on your activity, be it formatting, copying, pasting, searching or proofing.

Microsoft has also succumbed to popular demand and taken the Office Assistant off active duty. Clippy stays hidden unless you explicitly select Help, Show the Office Assistant. See http://www.microsoft.com/office/clippy/ for Clippy's side of the story.

For networked teams of office workers, the new software also concentrates on enhancing document collaboration, and support for multi-author documents.

So let's look at the individual applications that make up Office XP, starting with Word 2002, the word processor.

Word 2002

Many features dating back to previous versions of Word have been made easier to find and use in a design shake-up.

Smart tags - small buttons with drop down lists of available options - are the most obvious new feature. They pop up when you copy, paste and so on. They're innovative, but at the same time somewhat intrusive.

There's a new word count toolbar that's a definite asset if you need to keep track of your work in progress. Word also keeps track of changes made by different authors, with a 'mark-up' feature that simulates individual hand-editing. It's also good to see that Word now supports multiple selections, so you can format several separate areas of text at once.

If you dislike Office 2000's standard interface, in which each document has its own window and button on the taskbar, it's now optional to revert to the earlier multiple document interface (MDI), where a single application window contains the whole set of 'child' windows for documents. For example, if you have two Word documents on the go as well as two Excel spreadsheets, rather than having four buttons on the Task Bar at the bottom of the screen, only Excel and Word appear. Maximise either application, and you'll see the open documents at the bottom of the application window.

Excel 2002

Excel 2002 is the Office XP spreadsheet. The first handy new feature is the Watch window, which shows how changes to a single cell affect overall calculations. It ensures the result you're interested in stays in a small, always on top window, so you don't have to search through workbooks to find the effect of your changes.

To help avoid mistakes, you can now have a computer voice read out a cell entry or a whole range of cells. Another new tool aimed at helping you work more efficiently is a border drawing pencil. Now you can quickly outline important information.

The main emphasis of the new features is actually on integration with the Internet. The Web Query interface allows you to capture data from Web tables, paste it into your spreadsheet, and link it to the originating site so that it gets updated automatically when the Web site data changes. You can also Auto Republish Excel data to a Web page, so it's automatically updated whenever you save the Excel file.

More on the gimmicky side, there's a Smart Tag that recognises stock symbols typed in Excel and retrieves information such as prices or company news from the Web.

Outlook 2002

Outlook 2002, the personal organiser and e-mail manager, offers improved handling of multiple e-mail accounts and web mail accounts such as Hotmail - useful if you use several IDs. Some changes are minor tweaks - you can initiate MSN Messenger chat sessions, and you can clean up older

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messages from your mailbox. The new Outlook also protects against malicious e-mail viruses like Melissa, by monitoring your mailbox and refusing to open executable attachments such as Visual Basic scripts. It's worth noting that you can already download those changes for Outlook 2000 from Microsoft's Web site.

Outlook invokes Word to edit e-mails, which seems excessive for simple text messages. What's more, even if you switch to plain text, the program assumes you want word wrapping, and applies capitalisation when you don't expect it. All very annoying.

Outlook's workgroup collaboration facilities have shown a marked improvement. You can save multiple group calendars within Outlook. This makes it easy to book meetings at mutually acceptable times. What's more, the free/busy sharing feature uses an online service from Microsoft, so people who aren't on your network can also be included in the appointment-booking process.

PowerPoint 2002

Office XP's presentation creator utilises the generic Office XP enhancements to good effect. The task pane concept gives you easy access to design tools such as templates and colour schemes, previews your selections, and guides you through the process of creating text or image elements. You can send the resulting presentation by e-mail to a colleague for editing. When it returns, the correct reviewing tools will be automatically activated and shown in the task pane. Again, the benefits are mostly for teams and group working.

Access 2002

Access 2002 is XP's database. Many won't use it, because the database and query facilities offered in Excel and Word are pretty good, and may save you the effort of learning a whole new application - and a load of theory about relational databases. However, for those who are willing to make the effort, learning Access is time well spent.

In particular, Access 2002 continues to deliver the goods for clued-up database developers. The powerful data analysis tools called PivotTables and PivotCharts have now been made easier to find and use. And if you're developing a database and are worried about making an error, you can try out changes and reverse them using the new multiple Undo feature. There's also support for Net standards such as XML, XSL, and dynamic Web pages.

FrontPage 2002

Office XP's tool for designing and publishing Web sites is a full-blown application in itself. FrontPage 2002 adds new features such as automatic table filling and foreign language formatting. There's also a photo gallery maker.

You really don't have to be a specialist to create quite impressive sites. When you publish your Web site on the Internet you can even get reports of site visitors, usage summaries and page hit counts. However, if you want all the natty features to work, you must sign up with an ISP whose server supports the Microsoft SharePoint Team Services extensions.

Publisher 2002

Publisher's classy templates mark it out as a DTP package aimed at creating genuinely professional-looking documents. It integrates well with Office XP, creating documents from existing Word files, using the Word thesaurus and taking advantage of the improved mail merge facilities included in Word 2002. There are improvements in the interface too: Publisher can now open several documents at once, so you can copy and paste between publications. Extras

Among the collection of software called Office XP Tools, you'll find document-scanning and imaging programs. Though they're still a real bonus, these programs are weak when compared to something like Scansoft's Omnipage.

The Save My Settings wizard is ideal if you work in an office and need to switch from one PC to another. XP also has Application and Document Recovery Tools, which will help you find your work if your PC crashes.

Web-based extras include Microsoft Design Gallery Live, with thousands of images, sounds, and animations, some of which may be very useful. Others certainly won't.

And, of course, a splendid Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer optical mouse comes with the Special Edition of Office XP.

Conclusions

The new version of Office is certainly a better package than its predecessor. Additions to the general look and feel of the suite, such as work panes and Smart Tags, are excellent features. Indeed, the whole package feels like it has been designed so that its individual components work well together. During my testing, I found the data recovery tools particularly useful, as the software did crash occasionally.

If you don't have an office work package then Microsoft Office XP offers the best individual tools money can buy. The office packages from leading rivals Lotus and Corel have some catching up to do. But beware before splashing out, as Office XP comes in many different versions. Each contains different combinations of the above programs we've looked at.