Rating: 
Summary: But Where Is The Difference
Review: Yes, Office XP performs all the tricks so that any document, presentation and/or spread sheet looks like a million dollars but how many times is Microsoft going to slap a label on a product and declare it to be a major improvement?The features found in Office XP are almost a clone to the previous Office suite's. Yes, you can now hold 24 items in your clipboard and that is indeed something but isn't that a nifty trick that could have been added as a download? The task panes, etc. look nice but nobody in the work world is going to use them. Also, you need a full screen when you are seriously working and some of Office XP's innovations reduce the work area. If you are happy with the Office suite you are currently using, keep it and ignore this upgrade. There are no improvements big or small that justify the cost. Yes, it has the best programs going but it is difficult to install and after you finally get it on your system you are left with - a clone of the Office Suite you were previously using.
Rating:
Summary: The need for a new office, not a new look.
Review: This upgrade is particulary useless if you have an Office 2000 product. The design has been updated and 'smoothed' over. The only draw-back to this product is the fact that Word still auto-formats like usual, without the writers consent. If you are in the market for an upgrade over a pre-2000 office product this is for you. Would a 2000 Office owner get his/her's money worth in buying this, no.
Rating: 
Summary: Waste of Money
Review: Man, did I waste my money! I used Office97 before, and have switched back to it. Office continues it's steady march toward doing this FOR you, instead of offering useful tools. There is nothing useful in this package that O97 doesn't have, but it DOES have stuff like Activation, lousy table support, crazy 'automatic' font size changing (I set it to 11pt, and it changed to 10pt). Pass on this one unless you, like me, have money to burn!
Rating: 
Summary: Increase your productivity... Get Office XP
Review: Office XP is a great improvement over version of Office prior to 2000. Smart tags help to bring key features out that once were hidden from view, making it much easier to be productive in Office. Great improvements have been made in Access 2002 which is now much easier to use than its predecessor was, even easy enough that a novice user could figure out how to setup a basic database with little problem. PowerPoint 2002 also features some nice new transitions and other "bells and whistles" to help make your presentation look more professional. For those of you who may have created Binder files, in previous versions of Office, this feature is no longer available, however an unbind feature comes with Office XP. The downside that I have heard much about is the dreaded Product Activation. If you work within your license to use Office, you should never have any problems. My computer gets worked pretty hard, and I often have to reinstall Windows. Needless to say, Office has to be reactivated. Never once has MS staff refused to activate my product. This "torment" is really more dreaded than most users will ever find it to actually be. Be more productive with a copy of Office XP today!
Rating: 
Summary: I think the upgrade is worth it
Review: Yes, I was upgrading from Office 2000 which wasn't by any means, outdated - however I am glad I made the switch as I feel the new additional options and features available just in Word 2K2 were worth it! I will admit that I feel, like many Microsoft products, that it is slightly overpriced for an upgrade so that's where my downgrade is. Otherwise - I think the upgrade is worth it.
Rating:
Summary: ((((B-L-O-A-T-E-D))))
Review: I've been using this software for about three months now and have installed it on seven or eight different machines that I maintain, and honestly, the best I can say is that the actual upgrade process is very smooth--this Office suite comes on one CD instead of two, it scans for previous versions, offers full installation options, and explains very clearly what it is doing. When I upgraded to Office 2000, the software took upwards of an hour; with XP, the upgrades took from ten to forty minutes, depending on the speed of the machine I was upgrading to.
You will first notice how nice everything looks and the new "Smart Pane," which is supposed to be a window with what Office thinks you will want to do. The contents of this pane include your most recently used documents and options to create new documents.
The menus look a lot like the DHTML effects common on many web sites--menu options are "highlighted" when you mouse over them. A few other things have changed, but the changes are mostly cosmetic.
The Smart Pane, which is really more of a "pain" than a "pane," is obtrusive to me--I am what is called a "power user," i.e., I use MS Office for about four hours a day, rely on it, and am very familiar with it. When I open an application, I want wide, open space. I often close the Smart Pane without using its features, instead opening documents the way I have for years-either by opening them from the Work menu I added or by clicking to them. This Smart Pane is supposed to close when you open something, but sometimes it doesn't, meaning I have to click to close it.
Worse, the Smart Pane automatically opens when you want to do something it thinks requires many options. For example, if I want to modify a style in Word, the Smart Pane appears and offers me myriad options for editing my styles. This whole process of opening the Smart Pane slows everything down (I'm running a Pentium III 933 mHz with 128 mb RAM and a 7200 rpm ultra ATA hard drive with relatively few applications installed; got to keep it clean!!).
Editing styles provides a good example of how bloated the software is. You may recall from Office 2000 that all the styles were either built in or created by the user. Now, however, XP creates new styles based on what it finds in your document. For example, if you have a italicized one of your Heading 1s, XP will show the regular Heading 1 style and the Heading 1 style with italics. Imagine how many such styles you might have in your document; with these new additions, XP has easily doubled or tripled the number of styles I must wade through to get the one I want.
XP slows down every machine it's loaded on. My oldest machine, a Dell Pentium 75 running Win 98, was still chugging along quite nicely, even with Office 2000 installed. Now, however, after I've installed XP on it, it moves so slowly that it's almost laughable-clicked buttons bubble up comically. The worst part is that the computer is much, much slower, even if I'm not using any of the XP applications. I guess there's too much XP stuff now running in the background.
I have a few gripes with Word, many related to printing problems, but one is particularly laughable, typical of Microsoft. Now, when Word crashes, it politely tells you that it has done so and offers to send a report of the problem to Bill. It swears that it won't send any personal data. The first few times I saw this, I thought, sure, why not, send it, maybe it'll help. Hah! Each time, without fail, my computer froze! So, instead of having just one program crash, I ended up with a frozen machine. Remember, I'm primarily using a new, major name machine with little other software installed. Learned not to do that real quick!
There is one change I do like in Word. Since I do a lot of editing for a living, I find the new style of showing comments much better than the previous method. In Office 2000, comments were shown as "sticky notes" that appeared when you moused over them. Now, however, the comments appear as neat rounded squares in the margin. They look good on the screen and they print out well for others to read.
Another major reason I upgraded was because of a fatal flaw in FrontPage 2000. I have detailed more of this problem in my review of FP2002, but essentially, FP2000 could not publish my web site because it was too large. I was hoping that the bundled FP2002 would have fixed that bug. It did, but it has other compatibility issues that MS hasn't been able to resolve with most web hosts.
My relatively low rating is for the upgrade, not for the overall quality of the product. The product, which crashes at least as frequently as Office 2000, seems to be no more functional than its predecessor, meaning that the upgrade is necessary only for those who want to have the latest thing. The best news is that I've learned how to take advantage of MS's support discussion groups. The answers and workarounds I found in those groups were a thousand times more helpful than MS's pitiful Help or canned tech support messages. Again: Don't pay for support-go to their support groups for help first.
In short, this is something of a "non-upgrade," and will most likely cause more problems than it will fix.
Rating:
Summary: Even XP beta worked great for me
Review: I like the integrated firewall. I don't have Office on this machine, and had no problems using Outlook Express. I am not so sure I like the indexing service but, heck, you don't have to use it. I have been running TheSims on it and it works just great for that game. I have also used the web browser extensively. I hardly ever log in to AOL, but it is compatible with XP. Weatherbug works. If you buy a machine with Me on it, try to get the XP upgrade for (price). Updating XP has run slick as a whistle. I think it is a smooth transition from the old Dos-based opsys to the new kernel. Since I haven't used it with Windows I can't speak to problems integrating it there. I like
the Weatherbug on my desktop, and it is also compatible with XP.
So my experience has been very good.
Rating:
Summary: Buyer Beware!
Review: XP is the beginning of the end as far as system privacy is concercned and a slew of other problems. Here are several reasons why you shouldn't use XP. 1: General Exclusivity Manufacturers are requested to submit your drivers directly to Microsoft for approval before you try to peddle them to consumers. 2: Media Player 8 MP8 might lock out other codecs like MP3 and not allow them to make copies of their own music that they can play from their own hard drives. It is not so much about what MP8 can do, it is about what it can prevent us from doing with music and video that we already paid for. 3: Missing Features Are we going to have a backup program like we did in the old days? Are we going to get dual monitor support in the home version like Windows 98 SE has? Are we going to get back the basic fax functionality we used to have? In order to get those features, we will have to buy a "Plus Pack" of some kind for another 50 dollars. They stripped those features from the home version and are forcing us to pay an extra 100 or 200 dollars to get the professional version. 4: Bundling Restrictions And Excessive Integration Many of us feel uncomfortable that we are forced to use IE instead of Opera or Netscape browsers. We don't want all of that internet bloat-ware bundled into the basic operating system. We want to be able to uninstall IE and Outlook Express whenever we feel the urge. Not that we will necessarily, because both of those products are actually pretty good in their 6.x versions, but we want the option. What it boils down to is that we just want control over our Internet experience and our own applications. Is that too much to ask? 5: Security We all know how insecure Outlook and IIS have been, but there are now concerns about changes in the XP Home Edition (and possibly other versions) that will provide support for unrestricted, full raw sockets. This is VERY scary. 6: Product Activation This is a system designed primarily to prevent casual piracy. You know how you had to go buy a full copy of Windows 98 SE at the store because all your new computer came with was some stupid restore disk? You know how you went ahead and installed that copy of Windows 98 SE on your original machine as well as on the new one you just bought? Well, this technology will stop you from doing that. Why all the fuss? Because in part, people do pirate operating systems on a casual basis. They hate that they are forced to pay upgrade fees for what they consider to be bug fixes anyway. They hate that they have to put up with those bloated, OEM installs from Dell, Gateway and others who put everything from AOL to Walmart advertisements in the Start menu. They want to be able to do a clean install of the basic OS without all of that junk getting in the way, so they take a copy that they bought or got from a friend and use that single copy to install it on all of their machines. After all, almost every single computer you can buy comes with Windows on it, so why can't you just install the version you want the way you want and be done with it? Because according to the licensing terms, that is totally illegal, that's why. I am not Anti-Microsoft just anti XP. Buyer beware.
Rating:
Summary: Great product!
Review: Microsoft Office XP is a large improvement over Office 2000. Not only is the [slightly] new interface more refined, but the smarttags and more features are great. The difference between Office 2000 and XP is very similar to that of Office 97 and 2000; there are suttle changes that you do not notice until you actually need them. And when you need them, they are great to have! If you are upgrading to Office XP, then you should definately get the Special Edition (I have no idea why it is called that; it should just be called premium). I use Publisher and FrontPage almost everyday, as well as the normal Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Access (basically, I utilize every part of Office XP). I highly prefer this product over Corel WordPerfect Office 2002, or any other competitors. I am aware, there has been some concern over the Product Activiation Wizard; frankly, I do not have a problem with it. As long as it does not disclose personal information (which it does not), I don't think it's a big deal. I think that it is a good way for Microsoft to keep people from installing multiple copies of their software. Don't get me wrong; I do not like Product Activation at all, but I think that people are overreacting about the privacy concerns of it. Another thing people might be concerned about is compatibility. As far as I know, the only products whose files cannot be opened in previous versions of the same product is Publisher; a new format for saving the file was introduced in Office XP and therefore it is not compatiable with Publisher 2000 or earlier. Other than that, I definately think that Office XP is the best office suite I have used!
Rating: 
Summary: It is What They Left Out.
Review: Office XP has a few new features but some of the things you have grown to rely on are gone. For example, in File\Open, you used to be able to type in a word and every file with that word in the title would pop up. No more. Now you have to type in *word* to find your file. If you are drafting documents in both Outlook and Word, the machine will still hang up. I could go on. I have the newest and most powerful hardware and have all the MS-Office products. I have used them for years. I am not a Microsoft basher. I am just very disappointed in this product. As a publisher, author of 28 Books, 109 revised editions, six translations and over 500 magazine articles as well as a consultant to the book publishing industry, I spend a lot of time using my computer. I need the best tools. Office XP is an expensive disappointment. Dan Poynter, Para Publishing.
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