Microsoft Office XP Professional Upgrade [Old Version]

by Microsoft

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 11 x 9.4 x 2.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S. and to APO/FPO addresses. For APO/FPO shipments, please check with the manufacturer regarding warranty and support issues.
• ASIN: B00005AFI1
• Item model number: 269-04593
• Date first available at Amazon.com: February 19, 2001
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,284 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com Review

Microsoft Office XP's empowering document design tools, integration of voice recognition functionality, and impressive network- and Web-based sourcing capabilities should be enough to convince those interested in saving time and consolidating effort to take the leap.

In keeping with Microsoft's much-ballyhooed .NET strategy, Office XP introduces several features that utilize the vast infosphere inhabited by the 21st-century desk jockey. Smart tags beckon underneath recognized objects like misspellings or symbols, offering a stock quote here, a synonym there, or "Would anyone care to configure my auto-correction list?" The task pane looks similar to Microsoft Internet Explorer's Explorer Bar, and acts like an open tool chest pulled up alongside each application in the suite, providing readily configured searches for information or multimedia files. Putting up a team Web site that tracks projects and serves as an information hub requires only the use of one of the included templates, ready to be customized and uploaded to the server.

The Send for Review feature further streamlines the collaborative process by allowing the sender to view revisions made by multiple parties within the framework of the original document. Outlook now features a color-coded calendar and easier meeting management, along with instant messaging and variable e-mail account access. All user system errors can be tracked globally, and then network security settings modified remotely while anti-virus and debugging IT resources are diverted accordingly.

After firing up Microsoft Word, typing "Dear Somebody," and hitting the Enter key, we made a startling discovery. Up popped Clippy, Microsoft's publicly pink-slipped office assistant. Clippy might have aptly announced, "Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated," but instead predictably observed, "It looks like you're writing a letter." Once the groans of disbelief had subsided, we quickly right-clicked and banished Clippy to the silicon ether, presumably forever. --Dominic Johnson--This review refers to Office XP Standard Edition

Product Description

The most significant version of Office ever released, Microsoft Office XP Professional integrates productivity innovations throughout its programs to transform the traditional Office suite into a smarter overall work experience. By simplifying productivity, enabling collaboration for everyone, and extending Office beyond the desktop, Office XP Professional streamlines how people work with information and one another, making it easier for everyone to create, share, and analyze important data. In addition to the core Office XP programs - Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint - Office XP Professional includes Microsoft Access 2002, the Office XP database solution that helps users store, access, and analyze their data. Whether you're working on your PC, company intranet or the Web, new context-sensitive Smart Tags pop up with the options you need - right when you need them. No digging through menus! Now tasks that once required multiple steps are just one click away. The secret? The new Task Pane. The bottom line? You'll use more of the software features in Office XP, to get more done in less time. Relax. Your work is safe with Office XP because AutoRecover saves it at regular intervals while you work. Prone to sudden power outages? Relax again. Document Recovery is designed to save your PC's work-in-progress.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars But Where Is The Difference, December 20, 2001

By 

Joseph Albanese "The Joe Show" (New York, New York United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Microsoft Office XP Professional Upgrade [Old Version] (CD-ROM)

Yes, Office XP performs all the tricks so that any document, presentation and/or spread sheet looks like a million dollars but how many times is Microsoft going to slap a label on a product and declare it to be a major improvement?

The features found in Office XP are almost a clone to the previous Office suite's. Yes, you can now hold 24 items in your clipboard and that is indeed something but isn't that a nifty trick that could have been added as a download? The task panes, etc. look nice but nobody in the work world is going to use them. Also, you need a full screen when you are seriously working and some of Office XP's innovations reduce the work area.

If you are happy with the Office suite you are currently using, keep it and ignore this upgrade. There are no improvements big or small that justify the cost. Yes, it has the best programs going but it is difficult to install and after you finally get it on your system you are left with - a clone of the Office Suite you were previously using.

95 of 106 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars ((((B=L=O=A=T=E=D)))), September 11, 2001

By 

TestMagic Inc. (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Microsoft Office XP Professional Upgrade [Old Version] (CD-ROM)

I've been using this software for about three months now and have installed it on seven or eight different machines that I maintain, and honestly, the best I can say is that the actual upgrade process is very smooth--this Office suite comes on one CD instead of two, it scans for previous versions, offers full installation options, and explains very clearly what it is doing. When I upgraded to Office 2000, the software took upwards of an hour; with XP, the upgrades took from ten to forty minutes, depending on the speed of the machine I was upgrading to.
You will first notice how nice everything looks and the new "Smart Pane," which is supposed to be a window with what Office thinks you will want to do. The contents of this pane include your most recently used documents and options to create new documents.
The menus look a lot like the DHTML effects common on many web sites--menu options are "highlighted" when you mouse over them. A few other things have changed, but the changes are mostly cosmetic.
The Smart Pane, which is really more of a "pain" than a "pane," is obtrusive to me--I am what is called a "power user," i.e., I use MS Office for about four hours a day, rely on it, and am very familiar with it. When I open an application, I want wide, open space. I often close the Smart Pane without using its features, instead opening documents the way I have for years-either by opening them from the Work menu I added or by clicking to them. This Smart Pane is supposed to close when you open something, but sometimes it doesn't, meaning I have to click to close it.
Worse, the Smart Pane automatically opens when you want to do something it thinks requires many options. For example, if I want to modify a style in Word, the Smart Pane appears and offers me myriad options for editing my styles. This whole process of opening the Smart Pane slows everything down (I'm running a Pentium III 933 mHz with 128 mb RAM and a 7200 rpm ultra ATA hard drive with relatively few applications installed; got to keep it clean!!).
Editing styles provides a good example of how bloated the software is. You may recall from Office 2000 that all the styles were either built in or created by the user. Now, however, XP creates new styles based on what it finds in your document. For example, if you have a italicized one of your Heading 1s, XP will show the regular Heading 1 style and the Heading 1 style with italics. Imagine how many such styles you might have in your document; with these new additions, XP has easily doubled or tripled the number of styles I must wade through to get the one I want.
XP slows down every machine it's loaded on. My oldest machine, a Dell Pentium 75 running Win 98, was still chugging along quite nicely, even with Office 2000 installed. Now, however, after I've installed XP on it, it moves so slowly that it's almost laughable-clicked buttons bubble up comically. The worst part is that the computer is much, much slower, even if I'm not using any of the XP applications. I guess there's too much XP stuff now running in the background.
I have a few gripes with Word, many related to printing problems, but one is particularly laughable, typical of Microsoft. Now, when Word crashes, it politely tells you that it has done so and offers to send a report of the problem to Bill. It swears that it won't send any personal data. The first few times I saw this, I thought, sure, why not, send it, maybe it'll help. Hah! Each time, without fail, my computer froze! So, instead of having just one program crash, I ended up with a frozen machine. Remember, I'm primarily using a new, major name machine with little other software installed. Learned not to do that real quick!
There is one change I do like in Word. Since I do a lot of editing for a living, I find the new style of showing comments much better than the previous method. In Office 2000, comments were shown as "sticky notes" that appeared when you moused over them. Now, however, the comments appear as neat rounded squares in the margin. They look good on the screen and they print out well for others to read.
Another major reason I upgraded was because of a fatal flaw in FrontPage 2000. I have detailed more of this problem in my review of FP2002, but essentially, FP2000 could not publish my web site because it was too large. I was hoping that the bundled FP2002 would have fixed that bug. It did, but it has other compatibility issues that MS hasn't been able to resolve with most web hosts.
My relatively low rating is for the upgrade, not for the overall quality of the product. The product, which crashes at least as frequently as Office 2000, seems to be no more functional than its predecessor, meaning that the upgrade is necessary only for those who want to have the latest thing. The best news is that I've learned how to take advantage of MS's support discussion groups. The answers and workarounds I found in those groups were a thousand times more helpful than MS's pitiful Help or canned tech support messages. Again: Don't pay for support-go to their support groups for help first.
In short, this is something of a "non-upgrade," and will most likely cause more problems than it will fix.

39 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Another Day, Another Release, December 16, 2002

By 

W. F. Spencer "Bill" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Microsoft Office XP Professional Upgrade [Old Version] (CD-ROM)

BOTTOM LINE:
If your Office is quite old (95, 97), you should upgrade.
If you are an Office expert, stretching your projects to use every ounce of capability, or your team makes big collaborative projects with Office, you should upgrade.
If you are in the other 95% of Office 2000 users, keep what you have, save your money, and enjoy.

DETAILS:
Office XP is fine, usually. Works OK, usually. Doesn't have major bugs, seems a little more solid, but still occasionally crashes or has other problems.

Office XP does all the same things as Office 2000, plus has the theoretical capability for voice & handwriting inputs. For most of us, with desktops PCs, that won't matter.

Smart Tags will be occasionally helpful, but will always block off the cell you're about to edit, with unnecessary options for the cell you've just changed.

A most confusing thing in Office XP is still its abuse of Microsoft's own Windows programming standards (published for others only?) in how it represents multiple open documents. Excel and Word act differently, both in violation of the rules, with multiple icons in your task bar for documents open in the same Word or Excel window. This confusion can hurt both inexperienced and power users alike: for example, when closing one document you may accidently close a second one with the same click.

Finally, as usual, most of the changes are not in user-helping functionality, but are "under the hood", partially re-tooling Office to support Bill Gates' future software architecture visions and, in the long run, helping Microsoft.