Microsoft Office XP Standard for Students and Teachers

Rating:
Summary: It just gets worse and worse
Review: I've been using Office since the DOS versions, and I have to say, I have never liked it. Using it professionally in a publishing environment, I have to say that this is probably its worst incarnation yet. The office assistant is gone, but in his place are a variety of pop-ups and warnings which cannot be turned off. Outlook has not become any more secure, it is simply more paranoid, forcing you to save any attachment to disc, regardless. Word remains unstable, ugly, and functionally gruesome. It is one of the few software applications which can routinely crash my Windows XP system.

If we hadn't standardised upon a number of VBA macros we had devloped in house, some years ago, we would almost certainly ditch this product and use something else. We should never have standardised upon this software: it was one of the worst business decisions we, as a company, ever made.

Rating:
Summary: Not a good deal
Review: If everyone were still churning out stock options in their sleep and making money every time they went to the coffee machine, it wouldn't be so much of an issue. And if the licensing were less draconian, it wouldn't be so much of an issue.
But since we actually need to work to make a profit these days, it's not really smart to spew all this money at software that you're not even using, most of the time, to create your product.

Have your office sysadmin or techwriter or something try out StarOffice or OpenOffice.org for a couple weeks, then train the rest of the company on how to switch. Using the same software all your professional life isn't in the bill of rights and the smart decision is to switch to something that works, that you can actually afford.

If your employees or co-workers are smart enough to make whatever they're making, they're smart enough to switch to a different spreadsheet.

Rating:
Summary: Why buy the cow?
Review: [website] is a complete MS-compatible suite absolutely free. [website] is... freeware. At that price, it makes no sense to pay bloated MS fees.

Rating:
Summary: No reason not to
Review: I've been a fan of the "Office Philosophy" as long as I've known of it. It's almost like software communism. One set of application to satisfy any and all of your needs, for both personal and professional environments. Everybody's got it, which, instead of meaning that it's "trendy," it means that it's nothing less than practical.

It bridges the idea of operating system platforms. You know what I mean: sending files to a friend or co-worker, only to get a response of "I can't open that. Send it in ---- format." First, chances are, the recipient will have Office. Second, if you receive a non-Office file, your Office software will be able to read it, provided it wasn't created on some software from Mars.

OK, enough argumentum ad populum. Besides being a great idea on a global scheme, it's also a great idea for a stand-alone system and/or stand-alone user. Office integrates your system. For example, consider running WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, dBase, and Netscape for your word-processing, spreadsheet, database, and communication needs, respectively. While individually, each application is perfectly adequate for its own job, a vast majority of the time one might want to integrate some amount of work done in one program into work done in another program. Good luck, buddy. These programs hate each other; each one believes that it can do the job of all these by itself, and rationality be darned.

Office lets you do it all. Integration runs smoothly and you truly don't have to worry about losing functionality if you decide to switch over from your old program. In addition, the suite is extremely stable, and intelligent: it'll figure out how you - as an individual - like to manage your system, as well as fix any problems that won't come along. For example: try deleting msword.exe. Then go and double-click the Word icon on your desktop. Office will figure out the problem and reinstall the missing file. REMEMBER: you'll need your Office installation disks for any of the auto-fix features in Office.

(My advice: when installing, provided that you have sufficient system resources, select "Run all from my computer" to avoid missing any features you might want to use further down the road.)

As far as ease of use, YOU CAN'T beat Office. The applications not only work well, they also look good. The Help files actually do provide logical, coherent, and practical help for common questions or tie-ups. Office runs smoothly and doesn't use up an extraordinary amount of system resources (although Microsoft's "Minimum Requirements" tend to be a bit under-estimated, or is it over estimated...? Anyway, you need more than they say).

I'm running 256mb RAM with a 1.4 Ghz Pentium 4, and I have no problems. Also, I am running Office XP Professional and Windows XP Home Edition. As far as I know, Windows XP is not a necessary upgrade from 2000 when moving from Office 2000 to XP. There are some licensing restrictions with XP that I'm sure most are aware. So here's my solution: DON'T BREAK THE LAW. You won't have problems then.

Pricing is a bit steep, so save your pennies.

Rating:
Summary: Stop complaining.. Sheesh!
Review: I've been an office user ever since version 5.1; using this office suite at work and at home. I can't understand where all the complaining is coming from...Microsoft Excel Works better than Lotus 123, Microsoft Word works better than WordPerfect ever did and Microsoft Access is the best personal database system available. Plus it comes with a bunch of other tools that are very useful. I've never had trouble installing and maintaining this program suite and you can always turn off the office assistant.

This is the easiest program suite to use. I do have to agree with some critics about the pricing and registration scheme for this product. Hopefully Microsoft will change their minds and find a better way to stop piracy. Bottom line: it's ... but it works and it's easy to use.

Rating:
Summary: Explodes for no adequately explored reason; still overpriced
Review: Not only do we continue to buy this overpriced software, but it continues to explode for no adequately explored reason, as well.

As long as there was no actual choice, if one had to create Word files, then at least it kind of made sense to continue spending the money.

However, now there is no reason to continue with the money flushing. StarOffice is a great deal cheaper even than the student discount, works the same way, reads and creates Word Excel and PowerPoint files i.e. MS Office formats, and is all in all an entirely serviceable product.

And yes, StarOffice runs on Windows too.

Rating:
Summary: About that activation...
Review: Firstly, I am a heavy computer user and go through quite a bit freeware and retail software; I bought the Student/Teacher version several months ago because it was much cheaper than normal retail, and overall I'm very used to Microsoft Office products. Big mistake...

The Office XP software, is rather crippled. I would not recommend this to anyone who ever wants to or *foresees any reason they might need to* reinstall the software, including buying a replacement computer, upgrade hardware, or a hard drive restore from an image.

For instance, if you are like me and keep a drive image to occasionally restore the entire OS/hard drive to wash off old Microsoft junk, you will not be able to activate the software again even though it's your computer, your software, your product key. This applies also to hardware upgrades on your computer, and a number of other legitimate situations; I should have heeded those warnings on just how evil this is. You will, instead, have to call Microsoft and somehow convince them that you're not using a bootleg copy.

Essentially, the only way I can use this software is to always make a phone call every time I want to reinstall it for whatever reason on my tower (I restore my disk image at least once a year); I don't know if this applies to installing Office XP and subsequently making a drive image, but I somehow doubt that would work either. ...

Rating:
Summary: So glad I didn't have to pay for it
Review: I got this for work; we all went through a day of fiddling about and installing and looking at the features, and pretty soon everyone was gopher holing up out of their cubes saying sarcastically, "Well, thank goodness *** paid for it!" Yeah, there's cool stuff and it's pretty, but not for this price. I'm surprised MS is still selling their products at this price, in this economy, since sooner or later (or right now) employers are going to be just trying to stay afloat, and not bothering with excessive software costs.

Our friendly neighborhood geek down the hall mocked us for having it, and said he'd been on OpenOffice.org for months and it had the same features for FREE. So he made us come down and see it. And it didn't have *all* the same features, but pretty close, and when he opened up our Word user's guides in it, it looked just like it did in Word. So, geeklike, he mocked us again, and then told us where to download it for our home machines because we sure as heck weren't going to pay for the upgrade ourselves.

So, long story short. If it's your money, don't get it. And OpenOffice.org is working on my home Windows 2000 machine just fine.

Rating:
Summary: microsoft Office XP Standard for students and teachers
Review: I am happy with the product. I am not happy with the fact that I did not recieve the ... rebate/ special offer coupon with my purchase as stated in you add. ...

Rating:
Summary: -
Review: Well well well...i bought Office XP Professional for a tenner ...and i was well chuffed at first. installed it, and everything worked really fine. i didn't activate it, but i just turned off my computer till the next night. THEN, when i tried to load XP, it just automatically restarted. Wouldn't load XP! So i formatted my HDD, and then (with very shaky fingers) re-installed it, and activated it, then it worked proper. the point is, don't install this software if you have an unknown problem, or conflicting devices on your conputer.

Down to the software.. It has Frontpage, Word, Excel, Access, Powerpoint and Outlook. The last office i had was 97 small business edition and that was completely ..., i definately needed it. all the programs work really well. they've got Speech Recognition (which i hate because it slows my computer by 60% :(. I think the progs are just office2000 tweaked, and you can't install it on two computers. if u cant ...

Overall, a really useful bunch of programs, and definately worth [the money]!(not sure of the market price)