Customer Reviews

Microsoft Office XP Professional [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(17)

 

 

I gave Office XP a fair trial, and I have to say that this program *looks* good. The interface was slick, the program responsive (even with a Pentium III 450) and the crash recovery a godsend. It should be noted that the program did not play nice with programs by Adobe, however. .pdf creation macros caused Microsoft Word to crash each and every time I exited the program. Adobe DTP programs such as PageMaker and InDesign could not easily import files saved in Office XP, even though they are not substantially different from Office 2000 files.

These were the only problems, however. Removing the faulty macros solved the crash problem, and saving XP files as rtf files allowed me to import without losing any of the formatting. So, on the whole, very good.

However, is it worth the amount of money required to upgrade, let alone buy the full version? The answer is no. I saw no reason whatsoever to upgrade from Office 2000 SR-1a. XP's Product Activation was also a nuisance. Microsoft clearly did not price this upgrade for me, and so I can't purchase, nor really recommend this version.

If you want a good Office suite, and want a better deal, download StarOffice 5.2 from [...]. The program is free, and it's fully compatible with Office 2000.

Best, James

Glorified tweaks here and there will only deceive those that they will. Unless your Office Suite is 97 or earlier, don't lend ears to all the hypes you hear. Most of the "improvements" attributed to Office XP are just over-advertised tweaks that only make the software a bit more user-friendly AND NOT more powerful.
Compared to Office 2000, Microsoft has put up fewer applications for more money: Office 2000 Professional has every application Office XP Professional has PLUS the Publisher and the Small Business Customer Manager. Also, there is this restrictive activation tinge in XP, which implies that if you have a desktop at home, and a laptop for your on-the-move runs, you may have to pay allover again in order to have identical software on your two machines. Fighting piracy is a good deed, but Microsoft must not compel millions of honest customers to pay for her anti-piracy pursuits.
All users of Windows 95 (or earlier versions) beware! Office XP will only run on Windows 98 (or later versions).

I have Microsoft Office 2000 and was in the process of buying/upgrading to Microsoft Office XP, until I noticed that I would have to buy 4 different programs for my family's 4 separate computers.

My wife has her own computer, my daughter has her own computer I have mine, and we have a laptop we all use collectively when we travel.

So with Microsoft's new licensing policy it would cost me a small fortune to keep those in my family using the XP version.

On top of that... we tend to stay on the cutting edge of the latest hardware available, (I build and upgrade my own systems), so I would be susceptible to going to Microsoft with my hat in hand explaining why I need clearance to reinstall THEIR program again on my computer.

I know the runaround this involves, plus I don't like the idea of having to play this game with a product I have paid for!
It is demeaning to say the least.

Microsoft can keep their programs (I was going to purchase Microsoft Front Page and found similar restrictions), and I will be sure to keep their "Big Brother" mentality in mind when I purchase software in the future.

This new licensing policy is sure to hurt their sales and is sure to open up opportunities for other software companies not so anal about licensing.

Microsoft can stick this (and their other programs) up their hard drive, because it's not going on mine!

First, count me among the people pleased with the fact that Microsoft Office - and, in particular, Word - has become the de facto standard for document creation. Does anyone remember what life was like before...when we all wasted copius amounts of time sending and re-sending each other incompatible documents? Why anyone would yearn for those days is beyond me.

Feature-wise, I agree that the programs that comprise Office suffer by trying to be all things to all people. In the excellent book 'Microsoft Secrets,' I recall reading that extensive user testing revealed that the typical user of Word only made use of around 10% of its capabilities. So, in general, you're paying for a lot of bloat that you'll never access and never care about.

The problem with being Microsoft, of course, is that you've got to appeal to a *very* broad audience. That's because the 10% I use may be completely different than someone else's 10%. So, with that in mind, let me tell you about two great things in XP version of Word that I make use of on a continuous basis that you ought to know about.

First, there's the 'Track Changes' capabilities. Yes, this has always been present to some degree, but it got a major overhaul in XP. Now, when you turn the 'Track Changes' mechanisms on, Word shrinks the size of the entire text of the document (temporarily) and reflects all add, change and delete activity in an extensive right-hand margin. What this does for you is that you get all your tracking, while maintaining the flow and readability of the proposed new version of the overall document. You really have to see this in action to appreciate just how much this improves the process.

The other feature to point out is the sheer power and scope of Word XP's multi-language capabilities. I write many documents in Spanish and I am frankly blown-away by my ability to set the 'Language' spellcheck option to any a number of regional Spanish settings (e.g., Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, to name just a few of the many options). Then, as I'm writing, Word catches every little nuance for me - it checks all the many verb forms, even when attaching direct and/or indirect pronouns. Every skipped or misplaced accent is flagged for my attention. In short, using Word XP can dramatically improve your secondary language skills.

I'll talk about PowerPoint briefly - over the years, Microsoft has made it easier to manipulate and put together compelling presentations. In earlier versions, I always felt like I was locked into not much more than bulletized lists. Now, working in combination with Microsoft's built-in Design Gallery Live (and aided immeasurably by Google's Image search), you can piece together compelling visual scenarios *exactly* as you envision them, with no encumbrance from PowerPoint.

One final point is that you should always pair any Office product with a copy of Adobe Acrobat (the PDF *writer*, not just the reader). With Acrobat, you can remove any hint of incompatibility with anyone in the world, regardless of desktop platform, version, etc. Just convert any of your Word, PowerPoint or Excel files into a PDF and you've guaranteed yourself unfettered readability throughout the planet.

OK, how many of you out there find yourselves having to keep you machines up to date by buying new ones periodically. And when you buy your new PC, you want to move your software over to the new machine rather than having to buy the same or new software over again. Get ready for a surprise! With Microsoft's new Product Activation in Office XP, once you have installed it on a PC and Activated it, you will not be able to move the software over to a new machine. Microsoft knows when you try to activate your software on a different PC, that is has already been activated on the old one and will not allow you to activate the software.

Now I am all for software anti-piracy measures and always remove the software from the older PCs before disposing of them (usually through charitable foundations); however, Microsoft should have included a way to DEACTIVATE Office XP (and any thing else) so that you could reactivate it on another PC. I beleive we ARE ENTITLED to do this. Shame on Microsoft.

Office XP is a decent product, I just think Microsoft hasn't thought out the anti-piracy scheme very well!

MS Word's biggest weakness has been style management. In XP, it became even weaker. Word 2000 allowed a user to modify a style after opening a series of dialog boxes. In Word XP, you must first open a side panel that takes almost one third of your screen. Then if you know where to click, you can eventually find the same series of dialog boxes that were in Word 2000.

If you created a document in Word 2000, don't expect it to look the same in Word XP. In Microsoft's infinite wisdom, the fonts that are provided with XP are different than Word 2000. XP has some new fonts, but deleted some of the old fonts. It can become frustrating.

Unfortunately, MS Office has become the defacto standard with no challengers in sight. So, stick with MS Office 2000. As a general rule, avoid MS products that have revisions as letters, such as "ME" or "XP." Stick to updates that are named after the numbered year (e.g. 98 or 2000) ;)

MS Office has certainly become the sort of standard for office suite software, but, it is just too darn expensive! Almost [$$] for the pro edition? No wonder why Microsoft had to start the required key registrations (requires contacting MS with a specific key generated during install and then they provide you with another key to "unlock" their software) - barely any home user can afford it anymore. But we need it because our workplaces use Office. I don't like the way they are sticking it to us. I'm switching to Sun's StarOffice [less$$] which is supposed to be compatible with Word, Excel, and Powerpoint and just as good.

I purchased Office XP when I received my new computer with Windows XP. It was a terrible mistake. I've got nothing going on about MS and their registration demands. They have a right to keep people from stealing their stuff -- but when they sell expensive software that is full of bugs on the software platform it was designed for?!?! I was so less-than-impressed I got my money back. And that took work.

I installed the software on a laptop, window 98. I got a new computer with window xp. I cannot deactivate the registration so that I can reinstall it on the new computer. Once you register the software, you will have a hard time moving it to another machine.

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.