Microsoft Office XP Professional Special Edition Upgrade [Old Version]

by Microsoft

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 1 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: B00005B443
• Date first available at Amazon.com: March 19, 2001
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #17,129 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #49 in Software > Business & Office > Spreadsheet
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

Microsoft Office XP Professional Special Edition Upgrade includes the 2002 versions of Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, andFrontPage.

New context-sensitive smart tags pop up with options you need--right whenyou need them. No digging through menus. Tasks that once required multiplesteps are just one click away with the new task pane. New and improved tools in Access allow you to build and manage lists and databases, or analyzeinformation from databases such as Microsoft SQL Server.

The new version of Outlook in Office XP Professional condenses all your personal and professional e-mail into one central location, even your Web-based e-mail accounts like Hotmail. With AutoRecover, your work is saved at regular intervals while you work. PowerPoint includes animation effects and custom slide transitions. An editable print preview assures that your printed slides anddocuments come out right the first time.

Microsoft Publisher 2002 provides professional page layout and text toolsto help you create compelling marketing materials for your business.FrontPage 2002 lets you create exactly the Web site you want withgraphics-rich, hyperlinked, sound-enabled Web pages. New tools andfeatures like automatic Web content, PowerPoint-like drawing capabilities,a streamlined user interface, and optional HTML and XML reformatting makethis a complete Web site creation and management tool.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

91 of 108 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 Special Edition 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.

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great upgrade, June 2, 2001

By 

"allie1983" (Minneapolis, MN) - See all my reviews

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

I have been using the Office XP Beta for several months. The icons highlight better, the task panes are very helpful, especially in PowerPoint, and the applications run snappier, although a speedy PC always helps.

The most interesting feature with the largest potential is Smart Tags. Many are built into the applications, and they allow the user access to many commands right at the point of need as opposed to having to use the menus. As more people develop Smart Tags, they will be available for downloads and installation on any PC. With the capability of Smart Tags, almost any feature or function whether local or over the Internet can be implemented. Many previously custom developed applications can now be implemented with small amounts of Visual Basic code implemented as Smart Tags. Smart Tags can even be implemented in Internet Explorer with Microsoft free Web Components.

The two negative features. One is on-line registration which will limit flexibility in where Office XP is installed. The second is the fact the Outlook 2002 will not allow emails containing exe, vbs, or 11 other extensions to be read. These attachments are held by Outlook and not available to the receiving user to stop the spread of viruses. There should be a way to override this, but the release version allows no override.

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Office 2000 is better, May 31, 2001

By A Customer

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

Microsoft is still successfully putting out their fabulous Office suite. Office 2000 was the perfect piece of software. In my experience, it was reasonably stable, had great options, and ran efficiently. I couldn't imagine anything else that needed to be added. Unfortunately, Office XP is a lot slower and just doesn't have such a polished feel to it like 2000 does. It feels overly bogged down with unnecessary graphics (especially on the menus) and is a lot slower than 2000.

Sure, its still a good product and I only give it 2 stars by comparison to 2000. There is absolutely no reason to upgrade! Don't get tricked by Microsoft. If you are buying Office for the first time, see if you can find a copy of 2000 somewhere.