This is the first of several articles describing my experiences with Office XP. I am a long time user of several of the Office components, but not an expert on any of them. In months to come, I will be following-up with a series of articles, one on each of the applications in OfficeXP.

Introduction -- Office XP Professional is not a trivial little program. If taken as a single unit, it is maybe one of most complex software packages that you will ever play with. It comprises Word, a very powerful but often frustrating word-processor (which I am using to write this evaluation); Excel, probably the premier spreadsheet in the business; Access, a respectable database management system; PowerPoint, a very smooth presentation graphics program; and lastly Outlook, (the big brother to Outlook Express) which includes not just mail functions but a pretty passable personal information manager (calendar, contact list, etc). Office is not for everyone -- many folks will be content with Works, which is designed for the home computer. But if you want the deluxe platter, Office XP is certainly a popular choice, except for the obstacle of the price (around $275 for an upgrade, full versions near $400, $125 for "student" version). Rather than outright purchase, a more palatable solution is to get Office XP as an option on your next computer -- maybe get a discount, maybe hide some of the pain in the price of the computer. Also if you need all the applications, watch out for the "Small Business Edition" which does not include the database or the presentation graphics software.

Installation parameters -- I installed on a 600MHz Pentium III laptop, with 384MB of RAM, and about 4GBytes of free disk space. Before the install I had several earlier versions of Office applications.

	Word Processor	Spreadsheet	PIM	Presentation	Database
Before Install	Word 2000	Excel 97	Outlook 98	None	None
After Install	Word 2002	Excel 2002	Outlook 2002	PowerPoint 2002	Access 2002

The license agreement says I can install this software on an additional stationary computer, in addition to the laptop, as long as I am the primary user of both machines. But I will delay that until I have a chance to use the older version for comparison.

Install configuration and options -- The install allows many, many configuration choices, or you can choose minimum or a typical install. I installed a fairly hefty configuration, including the voice recognition and commanding tools which took about 300MB away from the free space on my drive -- This even though I told it to write over my old application files.

Ease of Install -- I did a custom install because I wanted to see what the choices were. It was a little tedious, but not really hard, (had to check the "help" button on the install wizard to figure out what the new symbols meant). I did not see any "Back-out" choice which would save the old files that were from previous versions, but it did allow keeping the old versions active, except for Outlook, which can only have one version on the computer at a time. While it took me about half an hour to go through the detailed install options to the extent that I felt semi-comfortable with what I was installing, I expect that a "typical" install (i.e. where the defaults are chosen) would satisfy most needs, and it would have been a 2 second task. After setting the options, it took approximately 15 minutes of computer time to complete the install.

Install results -- As I directed, the install did replace all my older MS Office applications with the new versions. It did not keep my toolbar customizations from the previous version of Word, but it did keep the toolbar button which my scanner installed a few months back, to allow scanning from within Word. Oh, wait correction! It did keep most (all) of my Word toolbars, they were just re-arranged to the extent that they were pushed off the screen. I just dragged them back into place, and everything was fine. Also the Excel preferences were preserved. As I was using Outlook for my previous Email program, my mail boxes, and contact list and calendar were preserved. Most everything works well. Over all, this was a very pleasant installation experience. Installation to replace Outlook Express with Outlook would possibly require more manual migration of such items as the email folders. (And I still recommend a serious data (mail, contacts, documents…) backup before an installation of this magnitude.)

On first use -- I ran Word first, and immediately got an "Activation Wizard" which reminded me that I could only run Office applications 50 times before they would shut down and require Activation. The Activation wizard connects to Microsoft over the Internet, to make sure you are not a software pirate, and wants things like name, address, phone etc, but if you just put county-of-use in, it will take that. A pretty painless process, although it might be tougher if you are a software pirate.

First Impressions in Applications -- In coming months I will be writing about the apps in more detail, but a few things are common to several apps, or are notable upgrades. First of all, there is a strange new flat appearance in the menus of all the applications-it looks very old-fashioned. Outlook now has macros which were not available in the Outlook98 version. I don't have anything in mind for the macros, except for perhaps some spam handling experiments. One change across the entire Office XP suite is the little "ask your question here" window in the upper right corner. This provides the helpful functionality of the Office Assistant without the nauseating cuteness-not only is it conveniently placed, but it remembers what your recent questions were, so you can take another look if you close the Help window and then need it again. Another thing that will probably be useful, is the multi-object clipboard. You can cut, copy, and cut some more, then go to another place in the document, or another document, and paste, paste, paste. As you paste, a smart tag, shown here, allows you to choose how you want it pasted.

Security -- Since this package includes a version of Outlook that is over a year old, and Outlook has a very poor security reputation, one of the first things I did, was to download the Office XP service packs SP1 and SP2 (a 32MB download!) from Microsoft. The MS Product updates webpage should perform a system analysis, and decide which updates you need, but I got an error on this page. Instead, I just downloaded the service packs that looked proper, and installed them manually. The service packs were pretty self-explanatory. You do not want to be running an even slightly out of date version of Outlook, as it is a very juicy target for vandals, and its weaknesses are quickly spread through their community.

So Far -- I have completed the installation, and obviously used Word a little (to write this article). Very little to complain about, except for minor things. Smooth installation. From my perspective as a long-time Wordperfect user, a long-time-ago Lotus 1-2-3 and Quattro user, and a current user of Outlook Express, the corresponding Office XP applications are very impressive. I am looking forward to using and learning more about them. - Mick (mick@iconusersgroup.org)