Sree's Thoughts on Office XP
Thursday, June 21, 2001

You know when Microsoft is out with a new product. You see ads, reviews and Bill Gates everywhere. It's exactly the same with the launch of Office XP, the new work suite from the Redmond-based software giant.

It has a lot of new features that make your work easier. The question is, is it worth upgrading now? If you are like many of my friend, you use Office 97, not having bothered with Office 2000. If that's the case with you, Office XP might just be right.

Office XP is the latest of the bestselling Office software from Microsoft and should not be confused with Windows XP, the new operating system upgrade coming this fall. Office XP contains the wordprocessing program, Word; the spreadsheet program, Excel; the e-mail program, Outlook; and the presentation software, PowerPoint.

Considering Office XP?
* Features Less Hidden
Many of the everyday tasks in the older versions of Office were buried, but have been moved up front, thanks to the new Task Panes feature.

* Smart Tags
As you type words, little icons pop up, offering you choices like spelling correction or a Web link.

* Works Best on Newer Systems
Does not work on Windows 95, you need Windows 98 or 2000, 64 MB of memory and at least 200 MB of disk space to use it.

COST: It's $239 for those of you upgrading from previous versions and $479 for new users (the professional version, which also packs in the database program, Access, is about $100 more). If you are happy with your current version, that's a lot to pay.

If you aren't sure, what I would do is get the 30-day trial for $10 shipping and handling that you can get from the Microsoft site and test it out first to see if it's right for you.

RESOURCES:
The Official Office Site:
http://www.microsoft.com/office

Microsoft's 10 Trial Version
http://www.microsoft.com/office/trial

About.com's review of Office XP
http://businesssoft.about.com/compute/businesssoft/library/weekly/aa042301a.htm?rnk=r1&terms=office+xp

Send your feedback -- and ideas for coverage: techguru@sree.net

 

Sree's Site of The Week

FindSame
http://www.findsame.com

Watch out students, this is a plagiarism finder!

This site, run by California-based Digital Integrity, can help you find content similar to the kind you enter in its search box by scouring the Web.

Unlike other search engines which work on keywords, FindSame looks for duplications from entire documents.

So, if you typed in -- or uploaded a Microsoft Word file -- say, a poem, it will look through the Web and tell you if anything longer than a line of text is duplicated anywhere else among the sites it covers.

http://www.findsame.com

o o o o o

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