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Microsoft Office XP August 31, 2001 URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/reviews/software/productivity/soa/Microsoft-Office-XP/0,139023447,120217186,00.htm
IN THIS ROUNDUP:
Office XP Suite.
Overview
As the name explains, this AU$1,679 (AU$1,180 upgrade) is designed for developers who build custom Office solutions for corporations. It includes the entire family of Office XP applications (Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access, FrontPage, and Publisher) plus the Office Developer Tools.
Microsoft Office XP Developer
Overview
In addition to the core productivity applications (Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint), the AU$1,288 (AU$749 upgrade) Professional edition adds Access 2002, the desktop database program. This version is designed for Office power-users.
Microsoft Office XP Professional
Overview
Replacing the Small Business Edition, this version of Office XP is available to existing Office customers for a limited time, as an incentive to upgrade early. It includes all of the applications in Office XP Professional as well as Publisher 2002, a simple desktop publishing program designed for home and small-office users. It even includes the Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer. Available at almost the same price (AU$1,029) as the Standard edition, the Special Edition is a great value for existing Office users. Microsoft Office XP Professional Special Edition
Overview
The edition of Microsoft Office that contains just the essentials, the AU$1,072 (AU$534 upgrade) Office XP Standard includes Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint. This version is suitable for all types of users and both home and business. Microsoft Office XP Standard
Overview
Access 2002 still can't make coffee, but with improved Data Access pages, XML support, and better SQL Server support, it can tackle just about any database task. Improved Pivot Tables and Charts let you more easily analyse data and publish to the Web. We liked the new option to export reports, forms, and tables in XML format. Definitely worth the AU$728 price tag (or AU$233 upgrade). Specs & Features
Full Review: Microsoft Access 2002 By Jay Munro ZDNet Reviews Nearly a decade after Microsoft first introduced its desktop database program, Access has come a long way. Moving more toward the Internet and deeper into the enterprise, Access 2002 offers more ways to create data driven Web-based applications. With the improved Data Access Page designer, non-programmers can quickly create Web pages linked to both Access and SQL Server databases. Users can now export reports, forms, tables or queries in XML format with or without XSL style sheets for presentation. For better data analysis, Microsoft has made it easier to generate Pivot Tables and charts, and save them browser-friendly Data Access Pages. By default, Access 2002 files are backward-compatible with Access 2000, but you can also choose to use a new file format that offers better security.
Data Access Pages, first introduced with Access 2000, are HTML/XML versions of forms and reports, and they are central to many of the new features in this version. You can now save any form or report as a Data Access Page and instantly have a Web page, though only in Internet Explorer 5.0 and above. (Microsoft is targeting the corporate intranet, B2B or in-house applications with Access 2002's Web support. While Access pages can be deployed to an Internet site, it must have Remote Data Services configured.) We found the new Data Access Page Designer is a cool way to quickly build data-based pages. If you are using IE 5.5 as your browser, the Data Access Page Designer now supports selecting multiple controls to move and align. We also liked the unlimited undo feature in the Designer. Data Access pages have a toolbar to let the user filter on the fly by selecting a field and clicking filter by selection. The toolbar always shows the table name, record number, and total records in the current set. We like what the Access team internally calls "stable cursors" that kept a filter active when updating records on a Data Access Page. With Access 2000 if you updated a field, the filter was discarded. One of the goals for this version of Access was to make life easier for SQL Server users. If you are using SQL Server 2000, you can take advantage of Access's extended properties, like putting friendly captions on fields. Previously you would have to create field labels on every form that used a SQL table, but with extended properties, you only have set the caption once, and all forms or pages will have the new label. Linking tables to SQL Server 7.0 or SQL 2000 databases is easier with the improved Table Wizard. If you want to deploy to SQL Server directly, Access comes with the SQL Server 2000 desktop engine to make development of compatible databases easier. For developers using Access as their data store, the word is XML. Access 2002 now supports XML import and export. Two companies can exchange data through XML format as long as both have Access 2002, a boon for B2B applications. Access 2002 adds the option to save the XML schema as a separate or embedded file, as well as saving presentation information for use in either client- (HTML) or server-based (ASP) applications. You can also link Data Access Pages to XML files, enabling users to work with data without being connected to the server. This can help reduce database and network traffic when using more static data, such as pricing tables or monthly reports. A developer can create a complete application with Data Access Pages that can use XML data in read-only mode on a disconnected machine using IE 5's offline browsing capabilities. Developers can also configure an application to use a local MSDE (Microsoft Date Engine) with IE 5 and Data Access pages that can merge and replicate with SQL Server. A complete data entry application can be created on a client machine using just IE 5 and the MSDE. Creating Pivot tables to analyse and present data was a feature introduced with Access 2000, but it was too difficult for first-time users to find. With Access 2002, you can now view tables as PivotTables or PivotCharts as easily as design or datasheet views. To create the PivotChart or Table, just drag the fields you want to analyse to the designated areas. You can right click on data and set up grouping and filtering. Creating meaningful Pivot tables takes some practice, but we found it easy to experiment with the PivotTable and Chart view. Under the hood, Access 2002 has added a number of events that script and application developers will appreciate. Developers can now gain greater control over data handling with events such as before and after delete, update and insert user actions. Deploying Data Access pages with Access has been simplified with the ConnectionFile property that can specify a common connection for all pages (we weren't able to test this feature). Over the years, each new Access version brought a new file format, and Access 2002 is no different, except by default it still uses the Access 2000 .MDB file format. The newer format, which is optional, lets developers save as MDE or ADE files, which compiles any Visual Basic code, and removes source code in either an Access database file (.MDB) or Access Project file (.ADP) for better security. This also means an end user can't load a proprietary data file in Access and create their own reports and applications. Overall Access 2002 provides a good collection of new features that will please both novice and professional users. We especially like the ease of connecting to a SQL data source and creating PivotTables and Charts. Add to this more developer friendly features, such as the new file format, new events, better SQL and XML support, and Access 2002 provides a powerful back end for almost any workgroup or enterprise application. Microsoft Excel 2002Overview
Excel 2002 adds a few new tricks and genuinely improves upon some old ones, making this one of the few Office XP apps worth the AU$233 upgrade. Specs & Features
Full Review: Microsoft Excel 2002 By Lori Grunin ZDNet Reviews Though there's not a lot to write home about in the latest update of Excel, unlike with the rest of the Office XP suite we did find a few new features and enhancements that could make this a must-have upgrade for power users.
The improved Find and Replace easily takes the place at the top of our list. You can finally search across worksheets within a workbook, and Excel can optionally return all the results in a single window--a timesaving feature we've been waiting for. In addition, it will search on formatting elements as well; in a nice touch, Excel lets you pick up the format of an existing cell to quickly set the parameters of your search. For those of us who lack consistency in our data entry, or who paste in a lot of data from Web pages, Excel will now catch you if you try to sort columns which combine numbers formatted as numbers and numbers formatted as text. It pops up a dialog that gives you the option to sort all as numbers. Furthermore, Sort no longer lets you accidentally sort only a single column in a sheet used as a list. And AutoSum, now misleadingly named, adds the Average, Count, Max, and Min functions to its repertoire. On the next go-round, we'd like to see Median and Mode as well. Hard-core formula writers will appreciate another new feature, the Formula Evaluator. The next time a formula's results seem off, simply pop up the Evaluator window and step through the formula one operation at a time. You can also get Excel to displayed the results of all the evaluation steps in a single window rather than just one step at a time, but doing so is a bit more confusing than we'd like. Similarly, the Watch Window makes it easy to monitor how one or more cells update as you make changes elsewhere in the sheet--now you can keep an eye on the bottom line, no matter where it is on the sheet, as you update your budget numbers. Excel also boosts the capabilities--and, more important, the ease of use--for some of its Web integration tools. For instance, it's now incredibly simple to create dynamic Web queries: Just find the Web page which has the info you need to track and paste it into Excel, and make a few choices. Conversely, if you frequently need to keep a Web page updated with your spreadsheet info, the new Auto Republish option will do so every time you save your workbook. Some feature enhancements left us less thrilled. We welcome the ability to add a variety of data labels to charts--series name, category name, value, percentage, and bubble size--but you can't define the default place for them relative to the data points. (You can still move them all manually, however). You can also email only selected cells from a worksheet without all the cutting and pasting, but we're still waiting for the ability to do it with discontiguous selections. And the Data Connection Wizard just leaves us bewildered. It's no easier, faster, or comprehensible than the old ODBC Control Panel for creating and maintaining data sources. The suite-wide crash recovery tools came in most handy with Excel, which we managed to crash at least once a week; under Windows 98 it happened because of system resource constraints, but we're not sure why it crashed occasionally under Windows 2000. And as with Word, Excel now provides XML export. A gratuitous feature or welcome addition? You decide. Anyone who uses large, multisheet workbooks will probably consider the multi-sheet Find enhancement alone worth the AU$233 upgrade. Overall, among al the Office XP applications Excel 2002 offers perhaps the best argument for making the upgrade. Microsoft FrontPage 2002Overview
FrontPage 2002 adds Web services to its bag of tricks. This version (AU$362 full, AU$186 upgrade) is the tool for the creation and editing of SharePoint sites for team collaboration. With its new Web components, improved interface, and enhanced wizards, FrontPage 2002 offers the quickest route to a professional-looking Web site for the rest of us; although the software now preserves HTML code, programmers will still steer clear of it. Specs & Features
Full Review: FrontPage 2002 By Jay Munro ZDNet Reviews FrontPage: You either love it or hate it. Like the rest of Office XP, the latest version of Microsoft's WYSIWYG Web-authoring tool, FrontPage 2002, is more tightly integrated with Web-based services, particularly SharePoint Team sites, and includes new Web components. But there are other notable new features as well, including PowerPoint-style drawing tools, a tabbed interface for multipage editing, new reporting tools, a publishing wizard that lets you drag and drop to upload files in tandem with FTP clients such as WSFTP or CuteFTP, and a database wizard. FrontPage is still not the right choice for code editing, but at least it now leaves HTML and ASP code unscathed.
With the addition of the SharePoint Team Services to the Office XP family, FrontPage is the preferred tool for in-house Webmasters, who will use it to customise and brand SharePoint Team sites. The marriage of SharePoint and FrontPage 2002 makes it easy to create discussion boards, online surveys, and browser-editable lists for both Internet and intranet Web sites. With FrontPage 2002, Web designers can open a SharePoint Web (with the proper permissions) and modify page templates easily. (This was possible with FrontPage 2000 as well.) FrontPage has always worked best when you commit to the whole Microsoft regimen, so your Web host will need to upgrade to the new SharePoint extensions. New Web components (bots) include custom link bars, an instant photo gallery, and automated content from MSN, MSNBC, Expedia, and Microsoft bCentral. News headlines, maps, or stock quotes can be added to your pages. We liked having headlines and maps, but we thought the implementation of the MSN and MSNBC Web components made it too easy for visitors to click through to those sites quickly without looking at the ones we created. We were able to use the new Inline Frames feature, though, to keep users at our site. If you have a group of images you'd like to publish, the Photo Gallery wizard will let you create a page with thumbnails that your users can click on to bring up the large versions. FrontPage will automatically create the thumbnail images, and you can choose among four different layouts. Since the wizard only creates a single page, your photo gallery is limited to small groups of images, or page performance will suffer. We would have liked to see a way to create multiple pages for large numbers of pictures. If you aspire to build the next killer e-commerce site, you can add features such as product catalogues, a shopping cart, and credit card services by paying an additional (Price: AU$TBA) per month for a subscription to Microsoft bCentral. You can host on any ISP and still use bCentral's services. We were unable to test the e-commerce wizard as the site was not up at press time, but if it does what Microsoft claims, it may make online store creation easy. The FrontPage editing environment has undergone a face-lift, with tab-based multiple page views that let you work on several pages at once. Other editors such as Allaire HomeSite and Namo WebEditor have had this feature for years, so it's good to see FrontPage catch up. FrontPage supports Office XP's Smart Tags, but the only one used in the application is the marginally useful tag that brings up options to retain or discard formatting when you paste a document or text into a page. The new PowerPoint-style drawing tools can give you drop shadows, arrows, shapes (such as speech balloons), and word art without leaving FrontPage. The program converts such graphics into a combination of VML, XML, and images. Though they look great, your users will need to be running a version 5 or later browser in order to view them. Web authors can take advantage of better Web-site management through integrated usage reporting. You can follow the traffic your site is getting with FrontPage's daily, weekly, and monthly reports, which track hits, referring domains and URLs, and search strings. You can view the reports directly in FrontPage. FrontPage's tracking features can also provide Web content, via seven top-10 lists that can be inserted on pages. Enhancements to the publishing wizard let you see both the source and destination folders for your site. We liked the new interface that let us publish all our files or just drag one file to be uploaded. Unlike earlier versions of the program, if your hosting service doesn't have the FrontPage Server Extensions or SharePoint, FrontPage 2002 can still publish via the FTP protocol. Developing a data-based Web site by hand can be tedious and out of reach for beginning Web authors. The new Database Interface Wizard simplifies creating a new database and a site built around it. We liked the option to add a database editor to the site to simplify maintenance. Unfortunately, there isn't much flexibility in using the data, as results are returned as a noneditable bot. FrontPage has always been WYSIWYG, and this version is no exception. Though you can edit HTML code, there is little that helps you write code manually. FrontPage colour-codes tags, but there's no IntelliSense help or tag matching. For serious code editing, look to Microsoft Visual Interdev or Allaire HomeSite. On the bright side, FrontPage now displays HTML and ASP code correctly without reformatting. FrontPage 2002 lets you enforce XML formatting rules, which make sure tags are closed. But we were perplexed by Microsoft's implementation. Unlike HomeSite 4.5, which automatically inserts a matched tag as you enter the first one, the XML-formatting option in FrontPage only works on existing code, not as you write new code. It's a great way to clean up code, but we wondered why the technology wasn't fully utilised. FrontPage has always tried to offer a lot of functionality in a package that's easy to use. If you're looking for a code-intensive Web-authoring tool, keep looking. But if you want a simple tool with lots of built-in components for building content quickly, FrontPage 2002 is a good choice. Microsoft Outlook 2002Overview
It feels like Outlook drew the short straw in the Office XP development cycle. Even so, there are enough subtle usability enhancements to merit an upgrade, although not so many changes that IT departments need to worry about retraining. Users who were hoping for some improvements in working with forms, macros, and other advanced features are out of luck, however. Specs & Features
Full Review: Outlook 2002 By Lori Grunin ZDNet Reviews In its 2002 incarnation, Microsoft Outlook remains one of the most powerful and productive--as well as frustrating, complex, and inconsistent--personal information managers on the market. Although Microsoft has put less into it than we had hoped, the company has paid a lot of attention to how Outlook fits in with the rest of the suite (as opposed to how the rest of the suite fits in with Outlook) and has begun to remedy existing problems.
There isn't one feature we can latch on to and say, "This is really the key upgrade the company has made to the product." There are, however, a lot of small things that make the program work more smoothly on a day-to-day basis. AutoComplete addressing for email takes some of the tedium out of those endless email days. You can now choose which email account to send from on a message-by-message basis. Outlook now supports DAV-compliant HTTP-based email, and Microsoft has finally done away with the annoying installation modes (corporate workgroup or Internet mail only); it's all one big happy application now. And there's a nifty Group by Sender view in email. We also have to admit that the new single-dialog reminder pop-up has made remote operation much easier: No longer are we faced with a screen full of reminder pop-ups every time we launch Outlook. Although Microsoft claims it's made performance improvements for working over WAN and dial-up connections, it's the new reminders and the ability to track the progress of and cancel remote synchronisation that contribute most obviously to the perception of better performance. Corporate users on Exchange will be able to take advantage of the Group Scheduling function, which lets you create your own groups rather than rely on IT to create them for you. Individuals can share free/busy information with anyone via the Web--as long as you sign up for a Microsoft Passport account. Microsoft has also brought some of the more useful features to the surface. For instance, you can now select folders to search across in the basic Find (as well as Advanced Find). Furthermore, when using Word as your email editor--now the default--you have access to a lot of the time- and labor-saving new features in Word. The way Microsoft has implemented some of Outlook's features drives us nuts, however. Take the new colour-coding rules in the calendar. This would be a useful little feature if it didn't take a doctorate to grasp how it works or if the program provided better documentation. At first, we thought that the coding rules just weren't replicating across machines. We finally figured out that the rules were associated with specific views rather than universally applied. That's fine--it's more powerful that way. But there's no way to copy rules from one view to another; you must either recreate them from scratch or recreate your existing views from scratch by basing them on views with existing rules. This seems a bit much just to get colour coding. Another little piece of insanity is the search engine. You still can't search across different message stores, such as an Exchange-based mailbox and an offline mailbox, from within Outlook. You can, however, do so (using the new Search Pane) from within any of the other Office applications. In fact, with the exception of Document and Application Recovery, which we never had any reason to use in Outlook (though we certainly did use it in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), there are very few of the new Office XP-wide features here. If we seem to be nit-picking, it's because Microsoft only gave us nits to pick. There's a lot we were hoping to see: an approach to forms that's more friendly to end users, more control over printing parameters, recordable macros, improved import and export, the ability to display items flagged for follow-up on the calendar or task pad, an email polling log (to indicate the last time each email account was checked), customisable rules for default reminders, and so on. Although it lacks any new marquee features, the latest version of Outlook has many small enhancements that make a good product even better. Unfortunately, many of the little things that frustrate us are still there, too. Microsoft PowerPoint 2002Overview
As solid a presentation program as it ever was, PowerPoint 2002 (AU$728 full, AU$233 upgrade) makes do with updates to a few key features--though they're features probably only a small segment of PowerPoint users will notice. Specs & Features
Full Review: Microsoft PowerPoint 2002 By Lori Grunin ZDNet Reviews Of all the apps in Office XP, PowerPoint 2002 most leaves us with mixed feelings. On one hand, it incorporate several significant new features and enhancements, such as support for multiple master layouts, antialiased text, and a presenter-specific view; on the other, these are all capabilities that existed in PowerPoint's competitors before Microsoft took over the presentation graphics market.
It may seem a small thing, but antialiasing of text on-screen makes a real difference giving presentations a professional look. And the ability to store multiple masters within a presentation template or document is a big plus for people who need to create slightly varied versions of presentations or corporate users who tend to integrate multiple presentation sources together. If you give presentations to large groups--and have a two-monitor A/V setup--you'll like the new Presenter Tools, which provide the presenter with a different view of the presentation than the audience. As with many of the other Office XP apps, PowerPoint has surfaced various tool sets--animation, colour, design, and layout--in the new Task Pane. This metaphor seems to work best for PowerPoint, where so much of the work you do is design-based, and the Task Panes provide a convenient modeless working environment. Microsoft has also boosted PowerPoint's animation power by adding support for multiple-object animation and path animation. Overall, we like the way the Custom Animation Pane works, though its odd timeline implementation takes some getting used to. The Auto correct options Smart Tag comes probably comes most handy in PowerPoint as well, because adding elements to a slide can change accidentally change the entire slide layout; now you can easily undo unwanted corrections. Some new capabilities are long overdue. It's almost embarrassing that PowerPoint has until now lacked Print Preview, multiple object selection, image rotation, and a design grid. PowerPoint also benefits from the revised collaboration tools and crash recovery tools throughout Office XP, though you still won't find any error messages that tell you why a particular template keeps crashing the app. And PowerPoint users are most likely to benefit from the new diagram object type introduced with Office XP (described in our review of Excel 2002.) Most users won't even notice many of these changes in PowerPoint 2002. But by adding antialiasing and plugging some obvious holes in the program's features, Microsoft has made the top presentation graphics program even better. Microsoft Publisher 2002Overview
Microsoft Publisher 2002 (AU$276 street, AU$165 upgrade) provides better integration with other Microsoft Office applications and more intelligent automated design tools. This is the desktop publishing program of choice for small business users and corporate workgroup members who want a publishing tool with practically no learning curve. Specs & Features
Full Review: Microsoft Publisher 2002 By Luisa Simone ZDNet Reviews With a robust toolset, highly automated design functions, and a low price tag, it is easy to see why Microsoft Publisher owns the low-end, Windows desktop publishing market. With this release, Publisher 2002 concentrates on providing more intelligent automation, sophisticated output for print and Web, and tighter integration with the other Office applications--specifically Word.
Like the other Office XP programs, Publisher now sports a Task Pane. Publisher's Task Pane provides access to many of the same functions found in Word, such as Search, Insert Clipart, and Mail Merge. The new Office Clipboard is especially useful for designers. The Clipboard, which temporarily stores up to 24 items, can function as a scratchboard for frequently used design elements. Publisher also takes advantage of the Task Pane to centralise many of its longstanding design functions. For example, the Wizards that automatically build complex documents (like newsletters or Web sites) are now found in the Task Pane. A few intelligently thought out categories--for design, colour schemes, and page layout options-- let you quickly modify any Wizard-based publication. And in each case, thumbnails (really schematic previews) provide an instantly-understandable explanation of the available choices. Publisher's Task Pane contains a new and impressive design tool--Font Schemes. In the same way that a Colour Scheme provides a set of matched hues, a Font Scheme provides a set of typefaces that work well together. Font Schemes are intelligently mapped to both the predefined and custom text styles in a document. So when you switch to a different Font Scheme, all of the copy in your publication is updated for a consistent look. Many of Publisher's new features are part and parcel of its tighter integration with Word. With Publisher you can now preview a print job on screen before committing it to paper, create custom toolbars, and access a Thesaurus. Longtime Publisher users who were frustrated by the out-dated internal drawing tools will be happy to hear that Publisher now includes all of the Office Art features, including the WordArt module, the Picture Toolbar, and AutoShapes. Though these features can't compete with a dedicated drawing program, they provide a down-and-dirty way to enhance your designs. For example, you can warp and extrude a headline or adjust the brightness and contrast of an imported image. In our testing we found that one of the new crossover features--Smart Tags--works differently in Word and Publisher. In Publisher the AutoCorrect Smart Tag works on character-level formats, but not paragraph-level formats as it does in Word. So while you can correct an improperly capitalized word, you can't use the Smart Tag to reverse an auto-numbering scheme. Likewise, both Word and Publisher allow you to use the Paste Options smart tag to choose source or destination formatting for copied text. But only Word's Smart Tag provides access to the Styles and Formatting Task Pane. We also wish that Publisher had acquired Word's ability to define character-level (as well as paragraph-level) text styles. Publisher 2002 offers two new picture functions. You can now export any selected object or group in a standard picture file format, such as WMF, JPEG, GIF or TIF. While this feature makes it easy to generate reusable art from Publisher, there are no export options to control the resolution or compression levels of the resulting file. Much less snazzy, but infinitely more useful is that fact that Publisher now maintains native file formats (like TIF and JPEG) upon import. This means that you can take advantage of the built-in compression capabilities of those formats to keep your publication file size small. If you want a way to immediately improve the look of your documents, look no further than the 15 new Master Design Sets for Publisher's Wizards. These professionally designed motifs can bring a more sophisticated sensibility to a wide variety of publication types (including newsletters, brochures, and business cards). And a new Wizard lets you import a Word document into a Publisher template, while still preserving the original text styles, paragraph formats, and headers or footers. Publisher 2002 even handles inline graphics so that the pictures you have inserted into a Word document will be correctly positioned in the text flow. This last feature may prove to be a mixed blessing. While it guarantees that Word documents will be imported intact, it contradicts previous versions of Publisher that limited the content of text frames to text. These days no graphics program can afford to ignore the Web, and Publisher 2002 adds a number of Internet-oriented features. If you have created a Web page with Publisher, you can directly open the HTML file for subsequent editing. This is a huge convenience that will make Publisher much more attractive to inexperienced Web authors. However, in order to maintain the HTML document in an editable form, Publisher--like Word--bloats the file with XML code. The resulting HTML file is huge (our sample Web page was 448K) and will download slowly over a dial-up connection. We did, however, like Publisher's ability to send a single-page document as an HTML email message (rather than as an attachment). Because the message uses the "universal" HTML format, recipients don't need to have Publisher installed to view the document (though they will need an HTML-capable email program). While Publisher is not intended to compete with high-end publishing programs (like QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign), it is increasingly used to generate film for commercial offset printing. This version lets you generate documents that can mix process and spot colours. In addition, the old hard-wired limit of "black plus two spot colours" is gone. A Publisher document can now contain up to 12 different spot colours. Your service bureau must support native Publisher files, because the program still has not adopted a PostScript or PDF workflow. But in general, we were impressed with the spot colour implementation. For example, Publisher correctly identified the spot colours in an imported EPS file. Despite the high degree of integration with Office, Publisher 2002 will only be bundled with Microsoft Office XP for a limited time as part of a promotional release called Office XP Professional Special Edition (AU$1,029). After that, Publisher 2002 will only be available as a standalone product (AU$276). We must point out that Publisher 2002 has a few key features--most notably HTML output and Save As Picture--that sacrifice efficient output in favor of user convenience. But on the whole this upgrade to Publisher promises to improve the workflow of its intended small business audience. Publisher 2002 does an excellent job of combining easy-to-use design tools with Office-inspired productivity functions in one streamlined interface. Microsoft Microsoft Word 2002Overview
Power users will appreciate some of the enhancements to Microsoft Word 2002, especially the exceptional control over document formatting and collaboration features. There's nothing new in this AU$728 package that you probably can't live without, but the backwards and cross-platform file compatibility ensure a smooth transition if you do choose to upgrade (AU$175). Specs & Features
Full Review: Microsoft Word 2002 By Lori Grunin ZDNet Reviews It shows just how hard Microsoft has to strain to come up with new features for Office that the reviewer materials for Word 2002 list the Word Count toolbar as a major new feature. Better yet, Word's new Smart Tag engine thinks that "Word Count toolbar" is a person, which tidily exemplifies both the strengths and weaknesses of the truly new features Word offers.
On one hand, we think the Smart Tags have a lot of potential--in Word and PowerPoint 2002 more than any of the other apps simply because those two apps create documents which hold the most varied types of information. For example, if you hover over a name, you can drop down a Smart Tag which offers you the option to send email, schedule a meeting, open the contact, add to contacts, or insert the address. But how frequently do you want to perform these tasks within a Word document? They're more useful in WordMail, but even then they only work as long as you compose in HTML. True, that's the default, but some companies will change it to plain text for security and message size reasons. There are several new features which we're glad too see--we just wonder why it took so long to get them into the product. These include table and list styles, watermarks (text and picture), and the ability to select discontiguous blocks of text. You've also got more flexibility in the way you edit list layouts, such as the ability to drag entries to change indents. All these new style and format options have become somewhat cumbersome to track, however. The Reveal Formatting Task pane gives you a quick snapshot of the formats and styles applied to a selection, but it's still a bit onerous to keep track of what comes from the font style, what's from the paragraph style, what's from the table style, and so on. We especially like the way the Styles and Formatting pane allows you to select all the instances in which a particular style appears--whether it's a defined style or an implied style, such as bolded text. Similarly, you can now compare the formatting of two selections to each other, a step forward in maintaining intra-document consistency. None of this makes using styles much easier, but users well-versed in styles will appreciate the extra power. If you use a lot of drawings in your documents, you'll also appreciate the new Drawing Canvas, which allows for absolute positioning of graphic objects within a document. And electronic collaborators should like the new Markup view, which slides all tracked changes into callouts on the right-hand side of the screen so that they don't interfere with line breaks. Word now supports ODMA (Open Document Management API)--just in time to integrate with Microsoft's new SharePoint Portal Server document management system. Thankfully, it achieves this without jeopardizing cross-version compatibility: Word 2002 documents slid seamlessly into our workflow, which includes users on all Word versions from Word 95 up, as well as documents created using Mac versions of Word. For all but a few users, there's no major new feature in Word 2002 that will send you clicking over to your favorite software shopping site to pre-order either it or Office XP. But when you do choose to make the upgrade, you'll be pleased with Word 2002's enhancements and file compatibility.
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