I have been using the various Office products for many years and have written numerous reviews of them in this newsletter. What more is there to say? They are great products. They will do things that the average user will never even dream of. And they get more expensive and complicated with each new version. Although Microsoft has made an effort to make XP more user friendly—think Smart Tags.

First, note that you will not be able to buy one copy of Office XP and install it on all the computers in your office or home (unless you avail yourself of one of the cracks to the activation process that are supposedly out there on the Internet.) With Microsoft’s new activation process you will be stopped if you try to install it on more than one desktop computer and one laptop computer. The activation process collects information about the computer and sends it to Microsoft. Subsequent installations will trigger a denial if the new installation is on a computer that differs substantially from the first one on which it was installed. A phone call to Microsoft and their OK is the only way that this subsequent installation will work. If this bothers you, don’t buy Office XP. There is always WordPerfect.

Of course, if you are happy with Office 97 or Office 2000, then there is probably no need to upgrade anyway. Just as our computers have gotten to the point that they do everything we need, so has our software. I have been using XP Professional for about two months and haven’t found anything that has made my life easier, although I have only used it in a casual way and not done a proper investigation as would be necessary if this were to be a real review of the product.

Office XP installed in less than 10 minutes over my previous installation of Office 97. So I now have Office XP on the Compaq computer I use most. I have Office 97 on my laptop and my old Gateway that I still use a bit. My daughter’s newer Gateway has Office 2000, for which we have misplaced the CD and need to see about getting a copy of it from Microsoft. I even have Office 95 on an old laptop. So I am no stranger to Microsoft Office.

After the installation, on opening Word for the first time I received an error message: "Microsoft Word has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience." Now that is real nice.

Not a good start, but here is where the new technology came into play. I was offered the opportunity to submit an error report to Microsoft. Which I did and immediately received the following response: "Microsoft thanks you for taking the time to send us information about the program error that you just experienced. After investigating error reports provided by users like you, our engineers devised a workaround for this problem. This article contains information that may help you avoid encountering this problem again in the future."

The article described how the problem was caused by an incompatibility with the PDFMaker.dot add-in that is included with Adobe Acrobat 5.0. Most people don’t have the full version of Acrobat, so they would never get such a message. The article went on to tell how to work around the problem and that Adobe was working on a permanent solution. Pretty impressive, I think. I have never had feedback like that before.

A new feature I am less impressed with is Microsoft Document Scanning, listed under Microsoft Office Tools. It will scan a page of text for you, perform OCR on it and put it in your Word document. But I find that TextBridge Pro does a considerably more accurate job with the OCR. There is also the feature to insert a picture into a document via the scanner without leaving Word. This might be useful to some. I didn’t install the speech recognition feature, so I can’t comment on it.

Another neat feature—but how much do you really need it—is the ability to translate single words into another language (if you have installed that language module). If you want to translate more than one word, you need to sign up with one of the two online translation services that work with Microsoft. It is free to have a computer do the translation. If you want a person to do it, you will have to pay. I chose the computer version of the Mendez translation service for the following example.

Here is the English sentence to be translated: This is a test of the online Mendez translation service for Microsoft Word 2002. It will translate a body of text--not just one word as Word's built in translation does.

The French translation: C'est une épreuve du service de traduction Mendez en ligne pour Microsoft Word 2002. Il traduira un corps de texte--pas seulement un mot comme Mot a construit dans traduction fait.

The Spanish translation: Ésta es una prueba del Méndez en línea el servicio de traducción para Microsoft Word 2002. Traducirá un cuerpo de texto--no sólo una palabra como la Palabra ha construido en la traducción hace.

As I said, the service is free. You just have to download a small plug-in, and you will need a Microsoft Passport (which is also free).

One of the more written-about new features of Office 2002 (another name for XP) is the smart tag. To test it I typed the following sentence into Word: The Tampa PC Users Group meets at 3910 S Manhattan Ave., Tampa, FL .

After typing this into Word, when I move my cursor over the address, a little square box with an "i" inside a circle appears. If I click on it, I am given a selection of smart tag actions, two of which are "Display Map" and "Display Driving Directions". If I click on "Display Map", my browser is opened to the Microsoft Expedia site where an interactive map, displayed below, is displayed showing the location of our meeting site. Of course, you need to have a live Internet connection for this to work.

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 10 (filtered)">
<title>This is a test of a simple HTML page created from this very short Word document</title>
<style>|
<!--
/* Style Definitions */
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{margin:0in;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";}
@page Section1
{size:8.5in 11.0in;
margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in;}
div.Section1
{page:Section1;}
-->
</style>
</head>
<body lang=EN-US>
<div class=Section1>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'>This is a test of a simple HTML page created from this very short Word document</span></font></p>
</div>
</body>
</html>

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<META NAME="Generator" CONTENT="Microsoft Word 97">
<TITLE>This is a test of a simple HTML page created from this very short Word document</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<P>This is a test of a simple HTML page created from this very short Word document.</P>
<FONT SIZE=2></FONT></BODY>
</HTML>

The 2002 HTML is very hard to edit. For example, without wholesale removal of the extra coding you can’t even change the font size or color. Office 2000 has a utility for stripping out this extra code called Office 2000 HTML Filter, I think, but no such utility yet exists for Office 2002.

Well, I am almost out of space, and I haven’t even gotten to Excel and Access. In what space remains let’s talk about Web Queries in Excel. With a Web Query I can link any tabular data on the web to an area of cells in an Excel worksheet—for example, the stock information for Microsoft’s own stock at MSN’s Money Central. I could do this for any stock. Using the Web Query, I thus can set up worksheets in Excel containing the tabular data and have it refreshed as often as I like, say every 15 minutes. But stocks are not the only web data that you can import. How about the weather information for New York City’s Central Park at http://www.weather.com. Or the AP headline news. The possibilities are boundless.

In closing, the only thing I noticed different in Access—other than that it had a different file format from previous versions— had to do with Visual Basic for Applications programming. It is of no interest to the average user, but if you are going to use a construct like

then you will need a reference to the Microsoft DAO 3.6 Object Library. Something that was not required in Office 97. It took me a little while to figure that one out.