News 

Microsoft has announced that the latest version of its Office suite has now been released to manufacturing, with its testing efforts completed. Full availability will follow within a few months.

The company hails this version as the most significant version of Office ever released. Of course, it would say that, but first glimpses of Office XP suggest a significant development on the previous release.

Two major design changes are the use of SmartTags (employing the use of COM and XML) and Task panes. As mentioned before in our preview of Office 10, as it then was known, SmartTags are simply context-sensitive buttons, living on documents, that provide a slightly more direct route for carrying out likely actions. As for Task panes, the design principle is "providing the right tools at the right time" - rather than be interrupted by assistant-like promptings, the contents of Task panes will switch according to the context of actions.