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Microsoft is cracking the whip with Office XP Standard, which users of earlier versions can buy for $239 ($479 for new users and reformed thieves). As usual, it's packed with tempting treats. In Word, you can dictate text and let the software do the typing (with only the occasional dumb error). When your computer crashes, you can retrieve the file you were working on without losing your most recent changes. You can make PowerPoint presentations on prettier templates and flow text from one slide to the next. If you're really daring, you can copy financial data from...
What I like most about Office XP is that it gives you a chance of actually finding all these extras. When you fire up Word, Excel or PowerPoint, a window on the right-hand side of the screen gives you a list of things you may want to do, like open an existing document or use a premade template. There are similar windows for adding clip art, formatting a document and doing searches. In previous versions, these items were hidden under menus. Documents are still peppered with all sorts of new icons and old squiggly lines meant to help...
...Microsoft Office XP eliminated Clippy as a default feature because...
...both systems are built on computer code never before seen by home users. That's what makes them so stable. It also puts them in potential conflict with every program and peripheral device you own. In this respect, Windows XP is by far the worst offender. A few seconds after XP's installation, the tiny piece of software that controls my high-speed Internet connection went on strike. That meant no e-mail, no Web and lots of hyperventilation. I couldn't listen to music, since the PC no longer recognized the external hard drive where all my MP3s were...
...course, this is why pencils have erasers and operating systems have betas. Microsoft promises to make XP compatible with any device you can imagine by launch day. Then again, the brightest lights in Redmond couldn't fix my problems over two days of lengthy conference calls...