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Thursday, May 17, 2001 By David Radin
Microsoft is hoping to change your office -- from Office 2000 to Office XP, the enhanced version of the business suite that is being introduced this month. Taking a look at advanced copies of the product shows that Microsoft has made some great strides in usability of the product -- and the company makes support easier, too.
I was impressed by the new error messages. One of the biggest flaws in most Microsoft products is the fact that error messages are cryptic and generally useful. However, this new version of Office provides error messages that you can actually forward to Microsoft via the Internet. Once the error message pops up, click on a button that reports the problem and, if it is a known problem, either tells you how to work around it next time or links you to a page from which you can download a fix. This is the way the Internet should enhance our computing experiences.
Support options in Office XP show the direction that Microsoft is going. And more enhancements will be coming your way when the company introduces Windows 2000 this year. For instance, imagine being able to click the help button to find a method with which you can share your screen with somebody else over the Internet -- allowing him to walk you through solutions to your problem.
In Office XP, Microsoft has improved collaboration tools, too. Many companies share documents between individuals within and outside their organizations. While older versions of Office allow fairly easy tracking of changes as different people edit portions of the document, the edits mess up the formatting, making the document more difficult to read. Office XP makes the changes much easier to read by putting them in the margins as call-outs. So your document maintains its original look and feel instead of having all sorts of paragraph strikeouts, extra text or superfluous underlined phrases.
One of the coolest enhancements is a new feature called Smart Tags, which show up on your documents as purple underlines, much the way Microsoft spell checkers and grammar checkers underline words in red and green. When you see a purple squiggly line, click on the word or phrase to get a special look-up. Depending on what's underlined, you might be able to translate a word into French, change a dollar amount to a yen or pound, or spell out a company name from its stock symbol. If a date shows up with the squiggle, you can even have it automatically put an appointment in your Outlook calendar.
Have a question for David Radin? Contact him at his Web site
We have posted some screen captures of new Office XP features and an advanced look at Windows XP at www.InsiderRadio.com. We'll cover Microsoft's new pricing policies in an upcoming column.
Q: There are times when my Internet Service Provider or a Web site says that it has to override my security settings. If I choose not to let it override, it will not allow me to continue. Why?
A: Most of the time, the problem is that you are disallowing cookies, which are needed by many Web sites to operate properly. CBS, for instance, uses a cookie to determine the city in which you live to give you the proper local TV listings; Microsoft uses cookies in its support pages to remember what your recent problems had been; and many Web sites, including MSN, give you a personalized home page, made possible by storing the personalization information on your disk in a cookie. To eliminate the problem, you can change your security settings permanently, or override them selectively when you encounter a request to override.
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