James first started this website when learning Visual Basic back in 1999 whilst studying his GCSEs. The site grew steadily over the years while being run as a hobby - to a regular monthly audience of over half a million unique developers. In July '08 James left his job as Head of Development at a digital agency in London to focus his energies on developerFusion full-time.
Office XP is the latest in the line of Office suites from Microsoft. Office XP (XP standing for 'experience'...) boasts a range of new features, including Smart Tags, Task Panes and improved reliability.
Installation was simple - the installation program uninstalled Office 2000, installed Office XP and restored all the settings for me. If the setup does fail, it restores Office 2000 once again... (as it was forced to do in my case due to a problem reading the CD-ROM).
The most striking difference is the new interface, with flat toolbars and menus (even flatter than before), which is now common through Office XP, Visual Studio.NET and Windows XP. Some would argue that it was change for changes sake, however, the new interface does grow on you.
The new 'super-flat' UI
The next major difference with this release comes before you even get to use the applications - Microsoft's controversial (and extremely unpopular) Product Activation feature. This gives you 50 uses of the office suite before the application forces you to register with Microsoft, either via the internet or phone.
Thankfully, the Office assistant is now disabled by default; however, it had been hoped that it would have been killed off altogether with this release. Quick access to help is now provided by a combo box in the top right hand corner of every Office XP application.
Office XP also comes with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology, and speech recognition technology. However, it appears only partially complete, and you would probably be better off buying a separate package. On the other hand, its inclusion adds even more value to the Office XP package.
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