Rating: 
Summary: Thank goodness I get a university discount
Review: When I saw the cost of this, my jaw dropped. I didn't think it would cost so much for Word, PowerPoint, FrontPage and Excel.I went to the university bookstore at my school to see if I could get any kind of discount on it. Thank goodness Indiana University has a contract with Microsoft! About the program now that I've complained about the cost enough... WORD
This is the program I use the most because for being a word processing program, it is very versatile. I can write term papers and what not with it, but I can also credit news letters complete with graphics. I have also used it to create invoices with neat graphics. FRONTPAGE
I know HTML (one of the languages webpage makers write webpages in), so I pretty much only use this program when I'm trying out something new, like frams. I have also used it to figure out HTML codes for colors, frames, and tables. I had a college instructor who used it to do her entire webpage and it looked pretty good. EXCEL
I used Excel to keep track of the money I was spending on gas for 6 months, how many miles I was traveling, where I was traveling, and the cost of gas. I know it sounds like of nerdy, but it really helped me save some money on gas, knowing exactly where to stop when I was on a trip. I also has how many miles I was putting on my car in that 6 months (10,000+ miles), which explained the wear and tear. POWERPOINT
I am just beginning to learn this. I didn't realize what a valuable program PowerPoint was until people in some of my college classes gave presentations with it. Man, my poster board presentation was nothing compared to theirs. It is actually a pretty easy program to learn, but the 'little extras' like the animation and extra graphics can take a bit of time. OUTLOOK
I use this program to check my school e-mail because I have AOL at home. I like not having to go to the university's website, navigating my way to the mail page, signing it, and going through at least one more link, just to get to my e-mail. This program goes straight to my mailbox with no links, no navigating. ACCESS
When I tried to use access to create a database of my CDs, I had a lot of problems. It is probably the only program in this software suite that I think is a total waste of disc space. I have had to use it before, but for me, I can just use Excel to make lists, it is much easier to use. I am really glad that I have Microsoft Office. It has made school a lot easier. I can e-mail documents to my school account, download them, and know they will work with the school software. That saves me from having to reformat the assignment whenever I want to work on it at school.
Rating: 
Summary: what it is
Review: Office XP itself was a fine upgrade - endlessly configurable (you don't like the clip? Kill the clip! Hate spell-on-the-fly? Turn it off), well-suited to file- and data-sharing, more stable, quicker internet data connections, still more refinements and improvements (like programmable smart tags) to Excel and Word, a much-improved set of add-ons in Project, Publisher, and Visio. And the upgrade process was easy. If you had trouble you either had some horribly complex project to switch or you waded in without paying attention to instructions. It was a very smooth transition. The Developer version added (still adds, since you can buy it now) added developer editions of SQL Server and Exchange, plus Source Safe, Code Librarian, and various other useful and sometimes well-buried stuff. I'm not sure why Office Developer isn't just folded into a slightly downpriced MSDN Professional, but then Microsoft still hasn't matured on the level of licensing and packaging. The Office suite is, however, a mature product that has been improving enormously since the 2000 release. If only Redmond would lose their fascination with Byzantine licensing and Rubik's Cube bundling (cool! We can sell it this way, and THIS way, and THAT way, and for these people we can probably get them to pay for THIS THAT way ...), people might stop complaining and realize the products are much-improved. 2003 continues the march onward in quality. If you're considering XP Developer, you're likely better off looking at an MSDN package to get the same tools.
Rating: 
Summary: One Word: [BAD]
Review: Our office made it mandatory for us to upgrade to Office XP....I have had nothing but problems since. Thankfully, I only have to deal with this piece of garbage at work. I definetely will NOT be buying ANY XP branded product for my home computer. First of all if you thought Word was slow, wait until you try Word XP. It takes nearly 5 minutes for a large document to load in Word XP while Word brought it up in a few seconds. And when word finally does load your document, it has stupid comments all over your document (which is probally why it took so long to load). The first time I tried printing a document with Word XP, it took nearly 90 minutes for it to even get to the printer! When the document FINALLY printed out, I found that it printed out ALL the comments which DOUBLED the size of my document. I figured out how to turn the comments off, but have not figured out how to turn it off permantly. So everytime I load a document, I have to turn the comments off and hope that the drop downs that do this actually work! Also when I first loaded word, outlook or excel there was this annoying "pop up" at the top corner of your screen that had something to do with hands free typing. I permantly killed this window too because I DON'T NEED THIS [stuff] MICROSOFT!! Also another feature I don't like is when you copy more that one item in word, it brings up another annoying clipboard window that Microsoft assumes you want. This window displays EVERYTHING you have copied and covers up part of the window you are working in. I never have and never will use this clipboard so there is no reason why it should keep popping up. Apparantly Microsft "forgot" to add a way to permantely turn this off from office. I ended up having to go into the Windows registry to do it. Finally there are bugs galore. The buttons and drop downs sometimes stop working for no apparant reason. Sometimes when trying to open certain documents from other office programs you get error messages, and when trying to open Help, you occasionally get messages saying "Error opening help"! Go figure. Top these errors off with the ever annoying autoformatting "feature" in Word, Excel and Office and you have a complete waste of money. Bottom line, Don't waste your money on this. You are MUCH better off with what you have now. I have discovered, that Microsoft tries to FORCE you to do things the way they ASSUME you like to do things. They just keep adding more "features" that intefere more than assist you. You will spend a lot of time undoing what they force you to do. You will also spend a lot of time trying to turn off their useless and annoying "features" just to type ONE document. Heck you may be better off with a typewritter since you have the freedom to do what YOU want instead of wasting time undoing what Microsoft automatically does for you.
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