MS Office XP 

Microsoft Office is no doubt one of the most widely used office suites, if not application, in the world. Every new version of this suite has had phenomenal success, issues with bugs and viruses not- withstanding. It also has a tradition of introducing new features in every release that make you wonder how you ever managed without them in the first place.

MS Office XP is the latest incarnation of this behemoth of an application. And surprisingly it is the first one in a long series of MS Office releases that doesn’t boast of a huge number of enhancements. Don’t get me wrong. The enhancements are there, and they are just as ‘unlivable without’ as features introduced in other versions, except that there are not that many of them. 

I’ll dissect the significant new features here while mentioning other small but significant changes in the main applications. I’ll ignore other specialized applications like Visio and Access for the purpose of this article.

Installation

The installation is the first place where you see the change. Office XP’s install routine is much more simple. In fact, unless you’re one of those persons who want to know exactly what is installed on your machine, you’ll never need to enter the Custom selection. Office XP recognizes whether an older version is installed or not and configures the setup routine to match the existing installation. The installation takes around 20 minutes. Another deviation from the past trend is that this time the icons for all the applications are not changed from its previous version, Office 2000. MS had in the past introduced cooler looking icons for applications in each version.

The new look

This minor ‘disappointment’ is overcome as soon as you start up one of the applications. All applications have a new cleaner and flatter look. Toolbar icons and menu items do not jump out at you when you mouse over them. They simply get colored in a pleasing shade of blue with a hint of a shadow behind them. Although it looks great, it did offset the look of the other applications on my Win2000 machine. I expect this look to be a standard one in the upcoming Windows XP version.

The Task Pane

The first new ‘feature’ that you’ll see is the Task Pane. This is something similar to the ‘Explorer Bars’ in Internet Explorer 4 and above. This lets you perform various actions without leaving sight of your current document. Appearing on the right side of the screen, it replaces many of the dialog-box based actions you would perform in previous versions. The Task Pane in Word XP is the most comprehensive with other applications having a subset of the features. 

When any application is started up without loading a document, the Task Pane appears with a list of previously opened documents and templates for new documents. Clicking on any of these opens the document or template for use in the main window. The Task Pane also has a small drop-arrow at the top, which

allows you to choose other Tasks for the pane. 

The Task Pane allows you to search for text in different files, Outlook folders, images that match a certain description, look at the 24 items in the clipboard to select and paste any, translate selected text to other languages (if their dictionaries are installed) and perform a mail merge. However, the most useful feature in the Task Pane is to control the formatting of the document. The first, ‘Reveal Formatting’ allows you to quickly see the document settings like the margins, layout, and alignment and change them with a single click. The other, Styles and Formatting, lets you see the styles in use in the document, in the template or all styles available. You can select a portion of text to see the style applied to it and change it by simply selecting the style you want. You can also modify the style itself throughout the document. For example, I modified the ‘Heading 2’ style used in this document to ‘Verdana, 12pt, Italics’ by simply selecting Modify. I could also have selected all the ‘Heading 2’ text and applied a completely different style to it if I wished.

The Task Pane is one of the most significant additions to this release. And having used this for some time now, it would be extremely painful for me to go back to an earlier version without it.

Smart Tags

This is another across-the-board feature that enhances the interaction and intuitiveness of applications. Smart Tags work as extensions of the AutoCorrect feature found in earlier versions. This time however they are more customizable and interactive. For example, when you type in a date like April 8, 2001, a line of small red dots underlines it. Moving your mouse over it reveals a small icon, which on clicking provides a menu to customize the selection. You can do this for umpteen things, from people’s names, to e-mail and URL addresses, dates, spelling and auto corrections. Each smart tag also has a different context menu. For example, a context menu on a date would be to schedule a meeting or show your calendar (in Outlook) for that day. For a person’s name like ‘Vinod Unny’, it would be to send him an e-mail, add to contact list, etc. Smart Tags can also be created by other vendors and installed by you for additional features. 

Reviewing

The collaborative features in Word have always been pretty useful. This version makes tracking much more intuitive and useful. In this, all changes are marked not only by different colors but also by ‘callouts’–jut like you’d do it on paper. Very useful when taking printouts of edited text and making changes.

Security

Macro viruses have been the bane of MS Office users around the world thanks to Melissa and the I Love You viruses. This version of Office is much more security conscious. To ensure security, the default settings in all applications prevent digitally unsigned macros from executing. You can however change this to a low setting where all macros are executed–a very dangerous setting–or a medium one where you are prompted before any macro is run. 

Outlook XP also ensures security by prompting you whenever an external application tries to access its address book. Melissa and I Love You worked by mailing themselves to all the people in your address book. To prevent this, you are given an option to disallow access or to give access for a specific number of minutes. I wish there was an option that allowed us to enable certain programs to always be able to use Outlook’s Address Book. This is so that programs like Documents To Go for my Palm can synchronize without interruptions with it like before. Anyway, this small inconvenience is much better than the possibility of a virus attack. Outlook will also not execute attachments of various types–EXE, BAT, CMD, JS, VBS, HTM–automatically to prevent virus propagation. You will need to save these to the hard disk so that you can scan them before execution. Microsoft does seem committed to end the terror caused by these malicious programs.

HTML formatting

Office 2000 introduced the ability of all applications to be saved in HTML format. However critics soon lambasted the HTML that Office applications produced to be extremely heavy and full of proprietary extensions. This was especially true of Word and Excel, which added a lot of weight to the pages produced and also came up with different versions for different browsers. For example, a drawing in Word would be rendered as VML (Vector Markup Language) for IE 5 and above and as a PNG image for others. MS released a small add-on tool called HTML Filter that reduced the complexity of the HTML produced. 

In Office XP, you can save HTML in both filtered and non-filtered formats. FrontPage XP, of course, saves HTML without too many embellishments. 

Other changes

There are a lot of small changes all around. Here are some of the more significant ones.

You can now turn off the Multiple Document Interface view of Office 2000, where each document in Word or Excel would get its own button on the task bar. By turning off this option, all open documents remain under one application taskbar button.

The over-enthusiastic animated help characters are now much more subdued and can be got rid off completely. A small question entry area on the menu bar allows you to type in questions and gets answers immediately. 

A long overdue feature, multiple selections, now allows selection of text in different parts of the document

simul- taneously. 

Pasting information into any of the Office XP applications shows a small icon below that lets you immediately apply formatting to the pasted information based on the original source, current document or keep the text without any formatting. 

So do you need to install the latest Office suite? Well, there are currently only two reasons you need to do that. One, that you’re a computer freak like me, who can’t live without the latest and the greatest. And two, you’d like better security against viruses and stuff. Office XP’s new features are no doubt extremely useful. However, if you are fine with your current version of Office 2000, there is no compelling reason to upgrade. Unless of course you are captivated by the idea of that new look, the Task Pane, the Smart Tags…

Vinod Unny 



is a technology consultant at iSquare Technologies