Office XP Standard

The focus in this release is on making Office smarter, providing better collaboration tools and self-customising to individual users (with a bit of help). The "Smart Tags" are a clever way of automatically matching data in documents to tasks such as inserting an address when you're writing a letter in Word or copying and pasting data in Excel. This is extremely welcome as is the ability to customise auto-correct (don't correct these types of errors but do correct these). Also new are "Task panes". Imagine a cross between a Wizard and the Help section which, by means of some drop-down menus makes relevant commands easily available, thus achieving results faster.

As well as the cross-product improvements, each suite has had an overhaul. Outlook has seen many tweaks that improve usability and productivity notably auto-correct during typing and improved ease of setting up mail accounts plus support for Hotmail. PowerPoint contains a plethora of enjoyable new effects that can be combined in multiple ways leading to the swishiest presentations and some useful new applications most notably the organisation chart creator. Word and Excel benefit the most from "Smart Tags" and "Task Panes". Some new useful features include a merge function in Word for incorporating other users' changes, a "Word Count" display for those late-night essays, a drop-down menu in Excel with commonly used functions and an extremely easy-to-use set of diagram creators.

Office XP will improve productivity and results across the entire application suite. The improved functionality especially with "Smart Tags" and "Task Panes" once learnt will save users considerable time in creating quality documents. --Colin Neal

http://www.openoffice.org/

It is a completely free alternative to MS Office. It is FULLY compatable with all MS Office documents and has equivilents to Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. You can also export documents into .pdf files.

We use it in our office everyday and have saved a small fortune on MS Office licences.

Save your money!


Not much different...   February 4, 2004
4 out of 14 found this review helpful

If anything the newer versions have gone more rubish. Im a college student and having this Drawing Canvas in Microsoft word is a pain, one of the worse things they ever added into office. I got Office 2003 edition now its still the same, I dont like how they done the clip art as well its all gone, you have to have the internet now to get most of the clip art from the microsoft gallery that is another rubbish feature of it, we have paid for that clip art why dont we get it on the disk. Even when ive installed everything it still doesnt work for the clip art. Office 2000 fully installed works perfect. Not many changes. Waste of money i get it for free so its ok.


xp standard office edition   October 11, 2003
4 out of 20 found this review helpful

this is something i want despertly but it is so expensive for a disk you put inside your cd rom drive bill gates must be a right geneous thinking of that price range i dont think so and i really do wish that the price of this kit would drop down in price. because some people just dont have 334 quid in their back pocket except those who drive around in a 105 grand range rover. so if bill gates ever reads this he should think on about other people and not himself.