But what's behind all the hoopla?

Let's start with what's not in this newest version of Office. Microsoft's focused on the absence of the Office Assistant, now nicknamed Clippy, but that's not all that's missing. PhotoDraw is gone completely. With the exception of the Office Professional Special Edition, which will be available for a limited time only, Office XP doesn't include Publisher, but you can purchase the new Publisher 2002 separately, and it integrates nicely with the applications from the XP suite. And on the not-so-tragic side of the equation, Excel no longer includes Data Map.

While the suite is called Office XP (ex-paperclip) the individual products are numbered 2002. Office XP Professional includes the Big Five: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Access. Let's look at what's changed in each.

Access 2002
Of the five major applications, Access is the least changed. Perhaps the most important change in Access 2002 is the ability to create Access 2000 databases. In every version of Office, Microsoft has tried to provide tools to convert databases or, in the case of Access 2000, to save databases in the prior version. And in each version, the tools only worked for very simple databases. The Access 2000 databases we created in Access 2002 actually worked in both versions -- a noteworthy improvement.

Excel 2002
Excel, largely unchanged in Office 2000, was due for an overhaul. The changes in Excel range from the simple to the truly amazing. In the "so simple you'll forget to use it" category are colored sheet tabs and a drop-down list of summary functions (Average, Count, Min, and Max) and More Functions on the AutoSum button.

Smart tag technology, new in Office XP, is put to good use in Excel 2002. Smart tags with context-sensitive menus appear when a formula error is detected, after an AutoCorrect operation, or after you paste a range of cells. Our hands-down favorite? Being able to paste a selection as values simply by clicking a button and choosing an option, as shown in the following example:

The Web query interface has been completely redesigned, making it incredibly easy to select content from a Web site for use in Excel. Open the New Web Query dialog box, navigate to a Web page, and each importable area in the page is marked with an arrow. Click the arrows to select the areas you wish to import, click OK, and you've created a refreshable Web query.

The Web publishing end has some new features, too, including automatic republishing when a worksheet has been updated. Combine the Web query and publishing features with an intranet or extranet, and Excel is a powerful data publishing and reporting tool.

Outlook 2002
Outlook looks much the same, but the functionality is greatly improved. For example, all the reminders open in a single window rather than popping up one at a time. If you're not an Outlook user (or if you really deal with each reminder as it arrives) this seems minor. For those of us who procrastinate, the Reminders window is a real productivity enhancer. Another subtle new feature is AutoComplete for e-mail addresses. Despite those neat little To and Cc buttons, many of us still type e-mail addresses. After you've typed a few characters, Outlook offers a list of previous recipients to choose from.

There are major improvements to the Outlook Calendar. The Group Schedules feature partially addresses the largest deficiency of Outlook 2000. With group schedules, you don't need to add people and resources to an appointment to view their schedules in a single window. Add all the people in your department to a group schedule, and you can quickly see where they are at 2 p.m. next Friday. One problem remains: You can't print group schedules.

Another Calendar improvement seemed trivial at first, but is already becoming relentlessly useful: you can label appointments. The labels are color-coded, the colors are customizable, and the colors appear in the calendar. If you use the colors, within a short period of time you'll know what each color symbolizes. To get the most out of this feature, think about the kinds of information you usually open an appointment to find, and turn those kinds of information into labels. In our office, the labels include Training, Meeting, Drive, and Fly, which aren't included in the default label list.

The Outlook 2002 e-mail client has had a major overhaul. If you have more than one e-mail account, you can choose an account for each message. Outlook 2002 supports Hotmail and Instant Messaging, and uses Word as the default e-mail editor. There is a downside for the small office/home office: WinFax is not included with, nor can it be installed with, Outlook 2002. If you used Outlook 98 or 2000 with WinFax or Microsoft Fax, they are still supported, so if you're installing Office XP on a new computer and want fax support from Outlook, install a previous version and your fax software before upgrading to Office XP.

PowerPoint 2002
PowerPoint saw some significant changes in Office 2000, but they pale in comparison to the changes in PowerPoint 2002. PowerPoint uses task panes, new in Office XP, for a variety of features. The features are new or improved, and the task pane interface is new, which can easily be confusing (particularly for the experienced PowerPoint user). Hang in there: there is much to like in PowerPoint 2002.

Task panes appear at the right edge of the screen, and are another context sensitive application feature. When you choose Custom Animation or Animation Schemes from the menu, the appropriate task pane opens with list boxes and hyperlinks.

At the top of the list of radically revamped features is animation. Animation schemes can be applied to one or more slides, and previewed in normal view without starting the slide show. Schemes include effects for slide titles and text boxes, cutting down on the amount of custom animation required for a presentation. But you may find yourself doing even more custom animation. Each object can be animated in three different ways: on enter, on exit, and for emphasis; each object can also be assigned a motion path, so you can have an object Box Out as it arrives from the edge of the screen.

Word 2002
Word 2002 uses the task pane to make formatting easier. The Styles and Formatting task pane displays available styles, all styles, or styles used in the document complete with formatting. Choose a style, and you can select all the text in the document formatted with the style to apply a global change.

Smart tags see their heaviest use in Word 2002. Type a person's name, for example, and the smart tag options include inserting the person's address from their Outlook contact, scheduling a meeting, and sending an e-mail.

Word's AutoCorrect Options button, also built with smart tag technology, lets you instantly roll back AutoCorrect changes individually, or instruct Word to discontinue this type of AutoCorrection. AutoCorrect has also been redesigned so that it doesn't repeatedly reapply an AutoCorrection after you've manually reversed the correction.

Office XP: The Suite
So much for the applications. What's new in Office XP?

• New Ways to Enter Text -- Word, Excel and Outlook support Speech and Handwriting input. Office XP is not the first speech-enabled Office suite, but the speech recognition engine used in Office XP is far superior to the low-end product included with WordPerfect suite. Speech recognition handled fairly complex text with a high rate of recognition with only minimal training. One caveat: you must have a good sound card and microphone. We've been quite pleased with the Fuji and Creative sound cards on our systems, but have used others that did not perform as well. Microsoft does not yet have a list of recommended sound cards, but Lernout and Hauspie (http://www.lhsl.com), who developed the speech engine used in Office XP, have both sound card and microphone suggestions.
• New Ways to Collaborate -- Microsoft's new SharePoint Team Services was included in the beta versions of Office XP, but will only be packaged in the Developers Edition and the Professional Special Edition. SharePoint Team Services lets you create a collaboration site for a project team, group, or department complete with announcement lists, threaded discussions, and areas to collaborate on documents, all in about thirty minutes. If you have some responsibility for your organization's intranet, or would like to have, check out this exciting new software. The first place to visit is http://www.microsoft.com/frontpage/sharepoint/.
• New Ways to Recover -- Office XP includes powerful document recovery features. How powerful? We haven't lost a single document since we installed the second Office XP beta seven months ago, despite two wicked series of thunderstorms. Here's a scenario: you are editing a Word document and your computer locks up or powers down without notice. When you reboot and launch Word, you'll often find not one, but two versions of the document that you can examine then delete or retain: the last saved version, and the most recent version.

In the Balance
If you spend most of your time in Microsoft Access, there's no reason to move to Office XP. For the rest of us, however, Office XP has a lot to offer. The collaboration tools are outstanding, and the applications in general seem easier to use than the Office 2000 versions. Leave extra time for your first PowerPoint 2002 application, but the changes in the other three applications seem natural and easy to build in as you work with the application.
The disadvantages? Office XP requires more hardware: the hard drive requirements are about the same as Office 2000, but you'll want no less than 128 MB of memory, more if you want to use speech and handwriting. If you regularly run multiple applications, get at least 192 MB.
To preview Office XP before you purchase, order a 30-day demo for $9.95 at http://www.microsoft.com/office/evaluation/trial.htm.

What do you think: Will you be switching to Office XP? If you've already tried the new suite, what are your favorite new features? What do you miss? Post your comments below!