Office XP Professional

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

Office XP enables you to experience working more effectively with others by revolutionizing the document editing and review process; brings your communication tools like MSN Hotmail and MSN Messenger Service together in one place with your calendar and contact information; and allows you to efficiently manage team projects and activities with a pre-built Web site called SharePoint Team Services.

Continuously extend the value of the Office XP experience. Use Office XP as your information hub to harness information from multiple locations. Office XP links you to relevant resources when you need them, helping you find information more easily through advanced search capabilities, and offering integrated Web services to add more value to Office.

Reasons to upgrade to Office XP Professional
Reason 1. Smart Tags
Get information when and where you need it. As you're working, smart tags alert you to important actions such as selecting formatting for pasted information, correcting errors in formulas, or AutoCorrect options for bulleted lists, capitalization, fractions, and more. Whether it's on your PC, company intranet, or the Web, context-sensitive smart tags provide relevant options that help you access the information you need quickly and easily.
Reason 2. Task Panes
Accomplish more with the new Task Pane. The new Task Pane puts relevant features just a click away - making it simpler to use even more of the tools in Office. Find files more quickly, format content more easily, and work more efficiently - the power of Office is within easy reach.
Reason 3. Access and analyze information easily from business knowledgesources and the Web
Get the data you need for decisions. Now it's even easier to get refreshable data from the Web into Excel for viewing and analysis. Use the new browser-like interface to visually select tables on Web pages for import into Excel, or copy data from a Web page and create a refreshable query. Also Microsoft Access introduces PivotTable and PivotChart views to tables, queries, views, stored procedures, functions, and forms. You can now perform data analysis and build rich PivotTable and PivotChart view solutions more quickly than ever before
Reason 4. Creative expression of your ideas
Express your ideas in powerful and compelling ways. Create professional looking documents with enhanced formatting, editing and input features. Superior integration between the Office programs makes it easy to bring a variety of information together, organize it, and create effective documents to capture and convey your ideas. Even use speech recognition to select menu, toolbar, dialog box, and task pane items with your voice.
Reason 5. Work with tools you can rely on
Spend time creating, not re-creating. With Document Recovery, you now have the option to automatically save your current document, spreadsheet or presentation, at the time an application stops responding - so you don't lose a moment's work. You can further protect your work by using the AutoRecover feature in Word, PowerPoint and Excel to automatically save the document you're working on at specified intervals.
Reason 6. Send for Review (Document Collaboration)
Compare and merge changes easily. As the author of a document, use Send for Review to collect and automatically combine revisions such as insertions, deletions, formatting changes, and comments from multiple reviewers into a single document. (Word, Excel, PowerPoint).
Reason 7. Integrated Messaging
Manage your messages in one place. Now with Microsoft Outlook you can access, send, and receive e-mails from multiple accounts, including work, personal, or Web-based e-mail such as MSN Hotmail within a single view as well as send and receive instant messages with MSN Messenger.
Reason 8. SharePoint Team Services
Work together-no matter where you are. Integration with SharePoint Team Services allows you to seamlessly share information between Office XP applications and your team Web site. Both you and your team members can contribute content to the Web site, upload documents to document libraries, and participate in discussions and surveys.
Reason 9. Improved Calendaring, Scheduling, and Reminders
Coordinate schedules and activities easily. Efficiently manage all of your appointment or task reminders in a single, consolidated Reminders Window. And now, if you receive a meeting request and you're unavailable, you can quickly see all other invitees' schedules and suggest a new meeting time in your response. You can even, create Group Schedules for your team and the people you meet regularly view their calendars and set up meetings with ease.
Reason 10. Extensible smart tags
Microsoft and its partners such your favorite websites, other business applications you are using inside your company and many other information sources make information come alive with context relevant custom smart tags displaying appropriate actions. Import data, link to real time data, find relevant or related information, even provide custom reports all directly within Office.
Reason 11. Improved Search and Find
Find the information you need. You can use the Search in Microsoft Office XP to find files wherever you work: on your computer hard drive, your local network, your Microsoft Outlook mailbox, and your network places. You can also find e-mail messages, meetings, and other information that are stored in your Outlook mailbox folders.
Reason 12. Enhance your work with the Web
Access the Web for more Office tools. Get your work done faster by starting from a professionally authored template, or enhance your documents, with one of the thousands of images, sounds, photos, and animations and extend your Office with services from Microsoft Office Tools on the Web.