Microsoft Office XP
Microsoft Office XP is an office suite which was officially revealed in July 2000 by Microsoft for the Windows operating system. Office XP was released to manufacturing on March 2, 2001, a date the development team committed to hitting from the start of the project, although the official press release 3 days later misstated the RTM date as March 5, 2001 and was later made available to retail on May 31, 2001. A Mac OS X equivalent, Microsoft Office v. X was released on November 19, 2001.
New features in Office XP include smart tags, a selection-based search feature that recognizes different types of text in a document so that users can perform additional actions; a task pane interface that consolidates popular menu bar commands on the right side of the screen to facilitate quick access to them; new document collaboration capabilities, support for MSN Groups and SharePoint; and integrated handwriting recognition and speech recognition capabilities. With Office XP, Microsoft incorporated several features to address reliability issues observed in previous versions of Office. Office XP also introduces separate Document Imaging, Document Scanning, and Clip Organizer applications. The Office Assistant, which was introduced in Office 97 and widely reviled by users, is disabled by default in Office XP; this change was a key element of Microsoft's promotional campaign for Office XP.
Office XP is compatible with Windows NT 4.0 SP6 through Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. It is the last version of Microsoft Office to support Windows NT 4.0, Windows 98, Windows 2000 RTM–SP2 and Windows Me.
Office XP received mostly positive reviews upon its release, with critics praising its collaboration features, document protection and recovery functionality, and smart tags; however, the suite's handwriting recognition and speech recognition capabilities were criticized and were mostly viewed as inferior to similar offerings from competitors. As of May 2002, over 60 million Office XP licenses had been sold.
Microsoft released three service packs for Office XP during its lifetime. Support for Office XP ended on July 12, 2011.
History
At a meeting with financial analysts in July 2000, Microsoft demonstrated Office XP, then known by its codename, Office 10, which included a subset of features Microsoft designed in accordance with what at the time was known as the Microsoft.NET strategy, one by which it intended to provide extensive client access to various web services and features such as speech recognition. SharePoint Portal Server 2001, then codenamed Tahoe, was also in development at this time and was slated to improve collaboration for users of Office 2000 and Office 10. In August, Microsoft released Office 10 Beta 1 for product evaluation purposes. During this period Office 10 was characterized as an interim release between its predecessor, Office 2000 and a future version, and was planned to include new formatting options; integrated speech recognition; improved collaboration capabilities and enhanced support for web services; and a web portal complete with web parts.Before the release of Office 10 Beta 2, there was speculation that Microsoft intended to rebrand the new product as "Office 2001," "Office 2002," "Office.NET," or "Office XP." The latter was shorthand for eXPerience and was positioned as a brand that would emphasize the new experiences enabled by the product. At the time, Microsoft intended to name the latest version of Visual Studio as "Visual Studio.NET" but unnamed sources stated that the company did not desire to do the same with Office 10, as the product was only partially related to the company's.NET strategy. Microsoft ultimately decided on "Office XP" as the final name of the product. In spite of this, individual Office XP products such as Excel, PowerPoint, and Word would continue to use Microsoft's year-based naming conventions and were named after the year 2002.
Office XP Beta 2 was released to 10,000 technical testers in late 2000. Beta 2 introduced several improvements to setup tools. The Custom Maintenance Wizard, for example, now allowed setup components to be modified after their installation, and the setup process of Office XP itself used a new version of Windows Installer. After the release of Beta 2, Microsoft announced a Corporate Preview Kit Program for Office XP that would allow up to 500,000 corporate customers to evaluate a Corporate Preview Beta version of the product on a total of 10 machines per copy; individual copies cost $19.95 and expired on August 31, 2001.
Office XP was released to manufacturing on March 2, 2001, a date the team chose at the start of the project for its "3...2...1" appeal and made extraordinary efforts to hit without any slip. Three days later a press release misstated the RTM date as March 5, 2001. Office XP was later made available to retail on May 31, 2001.
Service packs
Microsoft released three service packs for Office XP throughout the product's lifecycle that introduce security enhancements, stability improvements, and software bug fixes; each service pack could be installed as a separate Client or Full File update version: Client updates are for Office XP CD-ROM installations, were obtainable from Microsoft Office Update or as standalone downloads, and require Office XP installation media—these updates cannot be uninstalled. Full File updates do not require access to installation media and are intended for network administrators to deploy updates to Office XP users who installed the product from a server location; users could also manually install Full File updates. Full File updates require Windows Installer 2.0; Office XP shipped with version 1.1. On September 25, 2001, Microsoft released Windows Installer 2.0 redistributables for Windows 9x, Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000.Service Pack 1 included performance and security improvements, as well as stability improvements based on error reports from users. SP1 also resolved an issue that prevented documents from being saved to MSN Groups.
Service Pack 2 included all previously available standalone updates; some of those previously released included cumulative security patches for Excel 2002 and Word 2002 to address potentially malicious code embedded in document macros. The Full File version of SP2 is cumulative—SP1 does not have to be installed—while the Client version requires SP1 to be installed. Only Full File updates released after SP2 can be applied directly to Client installations of Office XP. Earlier updates were designed to update only administrative images and fail when applied directly to clients.
Service Pack 3 included all previously released updates, as well as previously unreleased stability improvements based on feedback and error reports received from users. SP3 does not require any earlier service packs to be installed. However, if an Office XP client was updated from a patched administrative image, the Full File version of SP3 must be installed.
New features
User interface
Office XP has a streamlined, flatter appearance compared to previous versions of Office. According to Microsoft, this change involved "removing visually competing elements, visually prioritizing items on a page, increasing letter spacing and word spacing for better readability, and defining foreground and background color to bring the most important elements to the front."Smart tags
Excel 2002 and Word 2002 introduce smart tags, commands for specific types of text including addresses, calendar dates, personal names, telephone numbers, ticker symbols, or tracking numbers in documents. A smart tag is denoted by a dotted purple underline underneath actionable text in a document; hovering over this text with the mouse cursor displays an icon that presents a list of related commands when invoked with a mouse click or the ++ keyboard shortcut. A ticker symbol smart tag in Excel can present the latest stock information in a cell within a workbook, for example, while a contact name smart tag in a Word document can display options to send an e-mail message to—or schedule a meeting with—that contact. Excel and Word support extensible smart tags that allow developers and organizations to display custom commands related to specific information. The smart tags used by Word are also available in Outlook 2002 if the former is configured as the default e-mail editor.The AutoCorrect and Paste Options commands in previous versions of Office have been updated to include smart tags that are shared among all Office XP programs. The AutoCorrect smart tag provides individual options to revert an automatic correction or to prohibit an automatic correction from occurring in the future, and also provides access to the AutoCorrect Options dialog box. It is represented as a small, blue box when the mouse cursor is positioned over corrected text. The Paste Options smart tag provides options to retain original formatting of content, change the formatting based on the currently active program, or to provide contextually specific characteristics to content after users paste it from the clipboard.
After the release of Office XP, Microsoft provided a repository for downloadable smart tags on its website. Examples of third-party companies that produced smart tags after the release of Office XP include ESPN, Expedia, FedEx, and MSNBC. Microsoft released a Euro Currency Converter smart tag when new euro coins and notes were introduced.
Task panes
Office XP introduces a task pane interface that consolidates popular menu bar commands on the right side of the screen to facilitate quick access to them. Office XP includes Startup, Search, Clipboard, and Insert Clip Art task panes, as well as task panes that are exclusive to certain programs. Word 2002, for example, includes a task pane dedicated to style and formatting options. Users can switch between open task panes through the use of back and forward buttons; a drop-down list also presents specific task panes to which users can switch.The default Startup task pane is automatically available when users launch an Office XP program and presents individual commands to open an existing file, create a new blank file or one from a template, add a network location, or open Office Help. The Search task pane includes individual Basic and Advanced modes and allows users to query local or remote locations for files. The Basic mode allows users to perform full-text searches, while the Advanced mode provides additional file property query options. An index such as the Indexing Service can improve how quickly results are returned after a search is performed.
The Insert Clip Art task pane is available in Excel, FrontPage, PowerPoint, and Word and provides options to search for and insert online clip art into files. The Office Clipboard has been redesigned as the Clipboard task pane across all Office XP programs and can accommodate up to 24 clipboard items compared to 12 in Office 2000. Clipboard items provide a visual representation to help users distinguish different types of content. The Office Clipboard task pane opens when at least two items are copied.