Office XP Professional

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Editorial reviews

Amazon.co.uk Review
After the most painless installation yet from a Microsoft product, Office XP Professional immediately starts to make an impression. The code has obviously been tightened with programs starting and closing noticeably faster. As well as several key changes from Office 2000 to improve productivity and collaboration, many smaller welcome tweaks have been introduced to improve functionality across the board.

The focus in this release is on making Office smarter, providing better collaboration tools and self-customising to individual users (with a bit of help). The "Smart Tags" are a clever way of automatically matching data in documents to tasks such as inserting an address when you're writing a letter in Word or copying and pasting data in Excel. This is extremely welcome as is the ability to customise auto-correct (don't correct these types of errors but do correct these). Also new are "Task panes". Imagine a cross between a Wizard and the Help section which, by means of some drop-down menus makes relevant commands easily available, thus achieving results faster.

As well as the cross-product improvements, each suite has had an overhaul. Outlook has seen many tweaks that improve usability and productivity notably auto-correct during typing and improved ease of setting up mail accounts plus support for Hotmail. PowerPoint contains a plethora of enjoyable new effects that can be combined in multiple ways leading to the swishiest presentations and some useful new applications most notably the organisation chart creator. Word and Excel benefit the most from "Smart Tags" and "Task Panes". Some new useful features include a merge function in Word for incorporating other users' changes, a "Word Count" display for those late-night essays, a drop-down menu in Excel with commonly used functions and an extremely easy-to-use set of diagram creators.

Office XP will improve productivity and results across the entire application suite. The improved functionality especially with "Smart Tags" and "Task Panes" once learnt will save users considerable time in creating quality documents. --Colin Neal

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Customer reviews

review by: Cooldude45 date: 2007-02-20 rating:
Don't Listen to the previous reviews
Well, first of all i would like to congratulate all the other reviewers on being so ridiculously stupid. The only way the installation takes several hours is because they were using Windows 95, if you are running Windows xp the installation takes 10 minutes max. The software is also better that that in Office 2007 for vista, it looks better it runs faster and it never crashes. FIVE STARS FOR THIS PRODUCT.

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review by: tom_bamford date: 2003-09-24 rating:
Much better things to spend your money on
How Microsoft can justify nearly £400 for a software package is beyond me. Granted, you get several applications in the box, but most of these use the same components. My experience with Office XP has been far from good. After crashing unexpectedly when I was trying to add the finishing touches to my document, Word did recover my document for me... 3 days later, by which time I had retyped it in time for my deadline. I shouldn't need to reach for CTRL-S after every sentence. Excel tries desperately to be a DBMS, and fails. All I want it to do is let me create spreadsheets, which it does, but I'm not paying such a ridiculous price for something I can get for free in OpenOffice. PowerPoint is and has always been useless and tacky, and there's not much at all going for Access, which can't keep a large database in check to save its life (which doesn't last very long). And has anyone ever tried to create a decent website using FrontPage? Well if you're planning to, you'll need to upgrade your web hosting package to one with lots more space. My modest FrontPage creation guzzled over 15MB in disk space including images, and did less than my PHP alternative, which took up less than 4MB including images. Needless to say, FrontPage's HTML coding leaves much to be desired. I wonder if any of its designers are literate? Outlook cannot be nailed too harshly into its coffin. It functions reasonably well as an e-mail client and contact manager, but in case nobody has noticed, it's free counterpart does the former just as well, because it uses the same engine!

Last but not least, should you choose an alternative, bear in mind that documents created by MS Office users will look less than great in your application. Not because your choice is inferior, but because the only way your software can understand an Office document is because its developers have had to break its structure bit by bit as Microsoft won't release the details of its documents' formatting. Anti-competitive? It's up to you.

There are much better cheaper alternatives available, and some free ones. OpenOffice, MySQL, PostgreSQL to name very few. You could find much better things to spend your money on. I can only imagine the costs of licensing multiple computers.

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review by: weebob2003 date: 2003-07-07 rating:
Get OpenOffice and a Flat Panel Monitor instead
I am so happy at the moment, I was going to get this then decided to try OpenOffice instead. OpenOffice is great. Does everything I need and more. So I bought a Flat Panel Monitor instead. A couple of my friends did too. I'm really glad that I tried OpenOffice because it is free to download, and the new version that is coming up is free too.
I'm nearly lost for words I'm smiling so much

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review by: jgb591 date: 2003-04-24 rating:
You get what you pay for...
Having used MS Office for years and needing to upgrade a number of PCs I thought I would explore the Office Suite options and chose to test Office XP and StarOffice in our small business.

I bought StarOffice having read all the reviews and on the face of it StarOffice seems good value for money, but NOT when you get down to really using it. This is really important in my view as staff costs add up to a great deal more than software even in the smallest business.

In short, Office XP was far superior to StarOffice in every area but most people know that. The main areas not highlighted by other reviewers are all the things that are not obvious...

For instance, what business can really function without a strong email package and contact manager missing from StarOffice? And the compatibility between office docs is not good enough, it's only 80% in my view, it loses formatting and any kind of customisation which is useless when sharing docs with others.

Then there are the little things we take for granted when using an Microsoft Office Suite such as the smart tags, macros, the ease of use, drag and drop, intuitive interface and ability to easily share docs with clients, suppliers and colleagues - the list goes on.

So my take on Office XP is you get what you pay for, if you want something that works, everyone else can use and has all the functions any business might need then this alone is worth the price. Why get lots of bits of software and try to get them to work and then train all the staff up? Also, why take the risk on buying a cheap package which might not be around in the future?


review by: ste_ste date: 2003-04-10 rating:
Office? XPlease
If you’ve got Windows XP you need Office XP, surely it’s true. Don’t you want all your programs to have that slightly rounded, cartoon look about them? Don’t you want fancy menus that just waste your PCs resources? Of course you do. Only kidding, Office XP makes office what it should have been. FrontPage is still inferior to Dreamweaver, I’ve never touched Access and I prefer Outlook Express to Outlook. But Word, Excel and PowerPoint are top. Almost as good as they can be, but not as good as Mac Office V.X

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Similar categories

Software . Categories . Business & Office . Office Applications
Software . Categories . Business & Office . Office Suites
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Office Professional 2003 Upgrade (Excel, Outlook, Word, Powerpoint, Publisher, Access)
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Acrobat 6.0 Professional Upgrade Win

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