Office XP is step rather than a leap forward. Task panes and Smart Tags increase the usability of the whole Office suite considerably. This release has proved far more reliable than before, although Outlook still occasionally crashed when the Preview Pane was enabled. If a program does crash, you now get the option of reporting the error to Microsoft, and you will be notified if the bug has already been fixed with a patch. Corrupted documents can now be repaired, and recovery of unsaved documents has also been improved. All in all, another excellent release from Microsoft, with some great new features, especially for those upgrading from Office 95/97.

Supplier	Microsoft Ltd. (0870 601 0100) Amazon.com (US) Amazon.co.uk (UK)
Pricing	Office XP Standard - £429 (£196) - Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint Office XP Professional - £520 (£269) - Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access Office XP Professional Special Edition Upgrade - (£317) - Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access, FrontPage, SharePointT Office XP Developer Edition - £713 (£449) - Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access + Developer Tools (inc MS SQL Server and MS Exchange, Developer Edition) Upgrade prices in italics
Availability	Now
Requirements	Pentium/133 or higher (Pentium II/400 for speech), 24MB plus 8MB for each app in use under Windows 98 (32MB plus 8MB under Window ME/NT 4, 64MB plus 8MB under Windows 2000 Professional, 256MB plus 8MB under Windows 2000 Server/Advanced Server). 210-500MB of hard disk space depending on OS and features installed, Internet Explorer 5.01 or above, Windows 98, ME, 2000 or NT 4 with SP6. (Note that Office XP will not run on Windows 95 or earlier)