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 Software : Microsoft Office XP Professional Upgrade [Old Version] |
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Rating:  - Best
This is the best Office yet. Best of all Clippy is gone. I am very happy because clippy was anoying. Now it has a better help section. It has Front Page, Word, Excel, Access, and Power Point. I highly recomend buying this even if you have Office 2000. It is a lot better. This is a must have for all PC users.
Rating:  - Improved usability and stability
Microsoft has made its Office applications a bit easier to use and significantly more stable in Office XP. I welcome these enhancements because I'm a heavy user of Word and Excel. Occasional and light users of Office products would probably not find these enhancements worth the upgrade.
I'm jazzed about Office's new Task Panes, which are (to me) the primary usability enhancement. I'm a heavy user of find-and-replace. In previous versions of Word, the Replace dialog box was always in the way, covering up text. In Word 2002, this feature appears instead in the task pane, which slides out from the right edge of the window. Instead of covering up the text, it shrinks the text area a little bit. Also, in previous versions of PowerPoint, if you wanted to see how different presentation designs looked on your presentation, you had to open a dialog box, choose a design, apply it, close the dialog box, open the dialog box, choose a design, apply it, close the dialog box, ad nauseam. In PowerPoint 2002, the presentation designs appear in the task pane, avoiding the pesky closing and reopening of a dialog box.
I'm encouraged that Office XP seems to crash less than previous versions. When it does crash, it seems to do a better job of recovering your work. Also, it politely tells you when it's going to crash, automatically restarts, and gives you a choice of versions of your document (including checkpoint saves) to open.
Rating:  - Where is PhotoDraw??
Having invested in Office 2000 Premium with PhotoDraw and numerous Microsoft and other reference materials, I find little reason to justify a purchase of Office XP without PhotoDraw and to start the repurchase of reference materials again.
Rating:  - Same stuff, with a new look
I tested the beta version of Office XP (Last candidate release) and the interface is cool but the functionality is almost the same. Only some XML stuff and many Windows crashes..
If you have previous Office versions, don't waste your money..
Rating:  - something missing
Did anyone notice that Office 2000 Professional used to include FrontPage, Publisher and PhotoDraw but the Office XP Professional Upgrade only includes the basic applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Access)? I have a problem with that. I like MS products in general, but I expect their product lines to be consistent. The Prefessional Upgrade should upgrade all the applications. If the other applications were discontinued, that would be one thing, but the "Special Edition" includes the full suite. Is there a "Special Edition" upgrade to fully upgrade the original Professional Suite?
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