Customer Reviews

Microsoft Office XP Professional Upgrade [Old Version]

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Office XP, is a solid upgarde to Office 2000. But I must say, that most of the changes are cosmetic, which makes it a hard sell for paying $X to upgarde.

Here are the best of the new features in each application, in my opinion:

-- All applications - new "task pane" allows you to see related commands to your current position in the document.

-- there is a good feature in Word, to track changes with bubbles on the side of the document. It's much easier to read, and lawyers should love it.

-- Outlook is pretty much the same.

-- Excel - formulas manipulaitons are sort of easier and more intuitive.

I would say that if you are a features geek, that can't live without the latets UI, you should upgarde, othewise I would stick with Office 2k.

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?

This upgrade is particulary useless if you have an Office 2000 product. The design has been updated and 'smoothed' over. The only draw-back to this product is the fact that Word still auto-formats like usual, without the writers consent. If you are in the market for an upgrade over a pre-2000 office product this is for you. Would a 2000 Office owner get his/her's money worth in buying this, no.

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.

Installed Office XP over an existing Office 2000 installation and Windows 2000 on a PIII system. I will regret this upgrade forever. Installation appeared to go fine but on restart I had about 50 different .dll error messages. I just kept hitting the return key to continue over and over. After I had replied to all the error messages I couldn't open a single document and the computer appeared to run very, very slowly. Restart, reboot, restart, reboot - nothing helped, the symptoms were the same each time.

Uninstalled XP and reinstalled 2000. .DLL error messages are gone but MediaPlayer won't work.

However I did manage to install Office XP to my other computer running Windows NT 4 and it seems to work pretty well. There's no particularly great new features in this version of Office, though, so given what I know about it now I probably wouldn't have bought it in the first place.

Office 97 should be enough for just about anyone, and I still use it on my slightly aging laptop. A truly great product, I'm sorry it's no longer available for sale.

.... This has to be the most unnecessary software upgrade to date from Microsoft. There are virtually no significant enhancements over Office 2000. Those bells and whistles that are included in this product seem to do more to diminish performance than add functional value. And forget about trying to upgrade from any Office version older than Office 97 - they are not considered qualifying products and the upgrade WILL NOT INSTALL! Even Amazon's very competitive prices of [price] for the upgrade and [price] for the full version border on obscene. .... My recommendation is if you can live without it do so!

Honestly, I think you should wait a year or two before you upgrade most of the new features are not really relevant to consumers, but are aimed more at businesses. I don't know if they are shipping Office XP with Service release 1, but I think most users who would like to uprgade should at least wait until it is being shipped with the bug fixes. The applications look beautiful. They are easy to use of course, but if you are just typing documents, sending e-mail, adding numbers things like that stick with Office 2000. Because in these rough times you don't want to waste money on something you are actually getting over and over and over again. I'm not saying it's the same applications but for users who are doing simple things in Office it really does not make sense to buy something that is packed up with 90% of features you are not using. Just have a little patience and wait the year or two by that time Microsoft will be releasing Office XP 2005, and trust me they are, I read in an interview, where the Microsoft Office Team manager said the next version of Office XP will be based more on collaboration and services. I am making sure you don't make any regrets, buying this product.