Microsoft Office XP Review

An extensive upgrade to the Microsoft Office family

First, I would like to take this opportunity to say "Thank You" to Microsoft Corporation for providing this product for evaluation. Microsoft has always been a generous contributor to user groups through their MindShare program and TCCUG has gained much from their support.   A second "Thank You" is deserved for the development of their Office Suite of products. Microsoft Office has been a flagship product that has gotten better with each successive upgrade.

The Office XP standard edition, upon which this review is based consists of the application Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Microsoft is touting Office XP as a major release with advancements to simplify the way people work, introduce customers to .NET services, implement new anti-piracy measures, and provide benefits to individuals and teams, as well as organizations of all sizes. My impression of Office XP is that not a great deal of new valuable features have been added, but speed and reliability issues have been addressed.

I can't claim that I have tested the product extensively, but so far it appears rock solid on my machine ( AMD processor running Windows 2000 Pro server). Because Office XP is a massive collection of applications, and the individual applications have a huge number of features, it is nearly impossible to write a complete review about the product, without spending some serious time with it. Having said that, here is what I have observed.

Installation

I installed Office XP using Windows 2000 Server. According to Microsoft, Office XP requires Windows 98, 98 SE, Me, NT 4.0 (SP6a), Windows 2000, or Windows XP. Windows 3.x, 95 and NT 3.x are not supported. Microsoft also recommends a minimum of a Pentium 90 with 32MB of RAM, but if you were to install Office XP on a similar system you wouldn't be able to get much done. I would recommend at least 128MB of RAM, and a Pentium II processor (or equivalent). Office XP also includes speech functions; these require a minimum of a 400MHz Pentium II CPU.

If you have a previous version of Office installed on your computer, setup will ask you if you want to Upgrade, or do a new installation. If you choose to do a new installation, you will be asked if you want to keep your existing Office applications. You also have the choice of removing individual applications. I installed clean, so I can't tell you how well-behaved the installer is, should you choose to keep a previous version of an Office application. The install procedure is fast and clean. The "typical" install option installed to your drive only the required programs for each major application and marks addon options to be installed "on first use". Thus, if you never use a feature, it doesn't get loaded to your hard drive or installed in memory. This feature isn't new, but very nice non the less. The installation itself took around 10 minutes, and did not require a reboot.

As you might have heard, this new version of Office requires you to "activate" the product. You can activate from the Microsoft Office Tools folder on the Programs menu, but the Activation Wizard will also start automatically each time you start a new application. There has been much controversy over this item, but the technology has been used by other manufactures over the years and although it represents an opportunity for abuse by Microsoft, the process is completely painless.

I am not going to try to describe all the new features of each application. Each application has been cleaned up and improved and it is hard for me to see how one could ask for more features of better performance. I had no plans initially to upgrade to Office XP, but now I'm not so sure. If you are a casual Office user, you might find that Office XP doesn't offer you all that much, but I would still urge every Office user to take a serious look at Office XP.

Check out the Microsoft Office XP Web site to download an evaluation copy, if you want hands on eXPerience.
Check out Pricewatch.com for pricing.