Among analysts and IT workers, the predictable yearly updates to integrated productivity suites inspire more yawns than excitement.

Although Microsoft Office XP doesn't set the desktop world on fire, it impressed us by its added functionality and ease of use across the board. Microsoft's front five, Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, and FrontPage, received a balanced helping of new functions, some welcome network capabilities, and a fresh coat of GUI paint.

This isn't an upgrade to stand in line for. Windows won't see that kind of excitement until the Windows XP desktop OS ships. But if your organization is desperate for some basic, effortless collaboration and document management, this upgrade should be on your collective to-do list. In other words, Office XP isn't an overnight-shipping-priority, all-company-meeting, mandatory-server-push kind of upgrade but a leisurely, ground-shipped, weekend-test-drive-on-the-kitchen-table kind of upgrade. It is more worthwhile and more enjoyable than we expected an Office upgrade would be.

Each year, Office seems to get bigger and slower. Not this year. The English version of Office Professional has shrunk from four CDs to just one. Much of this reduction was realized by trimming seldom-used files and applications from the Office Professional package.

Microsoft Publisher has been excluded from the Office XP Pro bundle, as has PhotoDraw and much of the clip art. Although many of Publisher's features are now part of Word, some users will miss Publisher's simplicity and its many document templates. Publisher is available on its own and in other Office bundles. Microsoft could add the removed content back in for retail, but we hope Office stays skinny.

Economies of effort

Slimming Office XP makes its network distribution far less burdensome, enough so that Microsoft has added an "install from the Web" option. The complete CD installs quickly, too, and even with all of the optional packages selected, Office XP took up far fewer megabytes on disk than Office 2000.

Microsoft has made numerous small changes to Office XP's user interface. Some common functions, including New document and Search, have moved to a vertical Task Pane window that opens and closes off to the side as needed. This beats concealing your document with big pop-up dialog boxes. We'd like to see the Task Pane more widely used.

Microsoft has also introduced Smart Tags, small in-line icons that pop up whenever Office does something automatically for you, or thinks you might want it to. For example, if you're typing along and Word suddenly converts a lowercase letter to a capital, the Smart Tag will appear. Clicking on the tag brings up a tiny menu offering to explain the change, reverse it, or never do it again. The cutesy Office Assistant could do some of that, but at too high a cost. The whole Office XP interface feels geared to a more efficient use of screen space and the user's time.

More ways in, more ways out

The keyboard isn't pass

» posted by ITworld staff

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