Should I upgrade to Office XP?

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This question was answered on May 30, 2001. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.

Microsoft’s upcoming release of Office XP (May 31st) is the upgrade to Office 2000, which was released 2 years ago. The general system requirements are Windows 98 or higher, 133 MHz or higher processor, 245MB of disk space and 32MB of RAM or higher.

XP stands for “Experience” and is the beginning of Microsoft’s initiative to move the computing experience from the desktop to the Web.

One of the largest improvements to the suite is in collaboration tools; the ability to share and edit documents with others. In Word, for instance, up to 10 people can be working on a document on 10 different machines and the comments and changes can be merged at the end. It keeps track of who made what comments or changes by using a different color for each user.

Collaboration via the Web can be further enhanced with the new SharePoint technology that can be added to Windows 2000 web servers to work hand-in-hand with Office XP. (Get the details at <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sharepoint" target="_blank"><font color="#003399">www.microsoft.com/technet/sharepoint</font></a>)

Built in speech and handwriting recognition are also new to the suite. For the majority of users that have wanted to try voice command and dictation software, but didn’t want to pony up the $100-$200 dollars for a third party program, these are welcome features.

I was able to go through the training process in about 10-15 minutes and then tested it with the built-in microphone on a laptop. Surprisingly, I was dictating with fairly high accuracy right away. Having a quiet room and a good headset microphone will help to improve accuracy.

If you plan to use the Voice recognition feature, be sure to have at least a 400MHz processor and 128MB of RAM as it is a hardware intensive operation.

The Handwriting recognition feature is made to work with tablet PCs, CAD drawing devices or even your mouse. With the proper input device, you can literally write in real-time into many of the applications.

Another small “about time” feature is the “Save my settings” option. It allows you to save your personalized settings in Office XP and transfer it to another XP installation.

The addition of the Task Pane, expanding the clipboard to 24 items that can be viewed as thumbnails and context-sensitive “Smart Tags” all help to increase usability.

Anyone that has ever lost a document to a system crash will like the more conclusive file recovery tools. They can potentially recover a document as it was at the moment of the crash and not the last auto-save.

“Clippy”, the annoying “office assistant” that pops on your screen whenever it thinks that you need help, is no longer installed as a default feature. (Yeah!)

Two new processes that Microsoft has created for the Office XP launch are a CD (only) 30-day trial version that you can order for $10 at: <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/office/trial" target="_blank"><font color="#003399">www.microsoft.com/office/trial</font></a> and a new anti-piracy scheme that requires you to register your copy (by phone or on-line) and get a machine specific code in order to use it more than 50 times. You are also limited to two computers per copy with this new scheme.

Overall, Office XP does not have a single “killer” feature that makes it a compelling upgrade, but many smaller, very helpful features that make it well worth considering, especially for those operating in a corporate or collaborative environment.

If you are purchasing a new computer with an office suite pre-loaded, the Office XP option is a “no-brainer”.

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