Amazon.co.uk Review
After the most painless installation yet from a Microsoft product,
Office XP Standard 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
Product Description
Microsoft OfficeXP Software Standard
• Includes Microsoft Word 2002, Excel 2002, Outlook 2002 and PowerPoint 2002• Minimum system requirements include:• Microsoft Windows 98, 98 Second Edition, ME, NT4.0 with Service Pack 6 or greater, or Windows 2000 or greater• On systems running Windows NT4.0 the version of Internet Explorer must be upgraded to at least 4.01 with Service Pack 1• RAM requirements depend on the operating system used plus 8MB of RAM for each office application running simultaneously: for Windows 98 and 98 Second Edition, 24MB of RAM for the operating system; for Windows ME, NT Workstation or Server 4.0, 32MB of RAM; for Windows 2000 Professional, 64MB of RAM• 210MB of available hard disk space is required for the default configuration of Office XP Standard with 115MB on the hard disk where the operating system is installed, customers without Windows 2000, ME or Office 2000 SR1 will require an extra 50MB of hard disk space• CD-ROM drive• Super VGA (800x600) or higher resolution monitor with 256 colours• Microsoft Mouse, Microsoft IntelliMouse or compatible pointing device• Pentium 133 MHz or higher processor• The recommended system is Windows 2000 Professional on a computer with a Pentium III Processor and 128MB of RAM
