Average Rating: 
Rating: - A good program, but not worth the money.
I gave Office XP a fair trial, and I have to say that this program *looks* good. The interface was slick, the program responsive (even with a Pentium III 450) and the crash recovery a godsend. It should be noted that the program did not play nice with programs by Adobe, however. .pdf creation macros caused Microsoft Word to crash each and every time I exited the program. Adobe DTP programs such as PageMaker and InDesign could not easily import files saved in Office XP, even though they are not substantially different from Office 2000 files. These were the only problems, however. Removing the faulty macros solved the crash problem, and saving XP files as rtf files allowed me to import without losing any of the formatting. So, on the whole, very good. However, is it worth the amount of money required to upgrade, let alone buy the full version? The answer is no. I saw no reason whatsoever to upgrade from Office 2000 SR-1a. XP's Product Activation was also a nuisance. Microsoft clearly did not price this upgrade for me, and so I can't purchase, nor really recommend this version. If you want a good Office suite, and want a better deal, download StarOffice 5.2 from [...]. The program is free, and it's fully compatible with Office 2000. Best, James
Rating:  - Word is worse....
MS Word's biggest weakness has been style management. In XP, it became even weaker. Word 2000 allowed a user to modify a style after opening a series of dialog boxes. In Word XP, you must first open a side panel that takes almost one third of your screen. Then if you know where to click, you can eventually find the same series of dialog boxes that were in Word 2000. If you created a document in Word 2000, don't expect it to look the same in Word XP. In Microsoft's infinite wisdom, the fonts that are provided with XP are different than Word 2000. XP has some new fonts, but deleted some of the old fonts. It can become frustrating. Unfortunately, MS Office has become the defacto standard with no challengers in sight. So, stick with MS Office 2000. As a general rule, avoid MS products that have revisions as letters, such as "ME" or "XP." Stick to updates that are named after the numbered year (e.g. 98 or 2000) ;)
Rating: - Don't pay too much for office productivity
MS Office is great, but it's way too much money.I'm currently migrating to OpenOffice.org 1.0. I've been using the Writer word processing program for several weeks now, and it works fine. I use it to write papers and other documents. I even used OpenOffice.org Writer to write up a summary of our reading for a class study group, converted it to Word, and sent it to about 20 people. No one wrote back to complain. When it comes to office productivity, the best, most affordable choice is OpenOffice.org 1.0. It has the same functionality as StarOffice and has all the core features of Microsoft Office, plus you can covert documents back and forth from Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. It's a fraction of the cost to boot! You can even buy it on CD from Amazon.com through zShops or get this: download it from the Internet if you have the time and understand how to work with zip files. Search for OpenOffice.org on the main Amazon.com site.
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