Office XP The latest Microsoft upgrade

by David Orenstein freelance writer

With every new version of Microsoft Office, it becomes more difficult to justify an upgrade. The basic needs of word processing and spreadsheet users were met long ago. But if you’re still looking for something more, there is a lot to like about Office XP.

In Office XP, Microsoft has added some features, such as speech recognition, and has refined many other features that were more annoying than helpful in previous versions. It is much easier now to control the features that Word does automatically, such as formatting and automatic corrections. As a result, Office XP made me feel more capable and more in control.

The speech recognition works acceptably, at least for a feature that comes at no extra charge. In my limited test, it even had flashes of brilliance. After only one 10-minute training session, the software sometimes recognized difficult medical words, such as “pharmacologic” and “nutraceutical.” I read the first paragraph of a February DMJ article into the computer four times. Here is the best result of the bunch, with the words that Word missed in brackets:

The problem [Herbal] medications are planned [plant] or plant parts used for medicinal purposes, which also were [are] called nutraceuticals. Plants have outlook logic [pharmacologic] effects and many modern medicines are to relatives [derivatives] of plant products.

The software missed 5 out of 29 words. This 83 percent accuracy probably would improve with more training. I was encouraged that Word missed only one word in all four readings (“derivatives”). Speech, by the way, is not the only new form of input in Office XP. It also will extract the text from scanned documents and convert handwritten notes from a handheld computer to text.

What is more exciting about XP, however, are changes that enhance the user’s peace of mind. In previous versions of Word, for example, the software eagerly “corrected” grammar and spelling, regardless of whether it was right. It still does that, but it is easier to tame the software’s zeal. A new feature called “smart tags” allows you to move your mouse over a word that was autocorrected, click an unimposing little icon, and alter the autocorrection rule it used. You can insist, for instance, that it stop incorrectly capitalizing lowercase letters after the period in an abbreviation.

The real value of the smart tags is that they pull useful features such as “autocorrection options” out of the pulldown menu catacombs. Now those features can be accessed from within the document right at the point they are useful.

Other new features also will reduce the stress of using software. Now when Office crashes—sadly, it still does—you still can save your document, even after the crash. A new utility called “Application Recovery” allows you to save your file even when Office itself is telling you it must shut down. This can be a lifesaver. I used this utility to save a new document for the first time after a crash. Without this feature I would have had to start from scratch.

Office XP has a lot of other nice features: It now can translate between English and French or Spanish; you get a lot more control over the Office Assistant (that cartoon paper clip); and the software will recognize names of Outlook contacts as you type them and let you access their information from within Word or Excel. Office XP also has security improvements, such as the ability to digitally sign documents to guarantee their authenticity. In all, it is a good product that reflects a better understanding of a software user’s needs.

David Orenstein is a technology and business writer in Silicon Valley. If you are interested in learning more about a technology topic in Computing Care, e-mail him at davealli@earthlink.net.