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Thursday, May 24, 2001 By David Radin
Microsoft wants you to upgrade your software more often. So the company is changing the way it prices its software for business customers. You'll end up with greater financial incentive to pay more money to Microsoft -- and will undoubtedly be provoked to upgrade to Office XP by the third quarter of this year.
Say you use Office 2000, Microsoft's official "current version" of its popular office application suite. Next Thursday, when Office XP is publicly released, your Office 2000 will continue to work just as well as it always has. But it won't be the current version, according to Microsoft. Office XP will gain that moniker. It may not seem to matter much to you. But that small change in status changes your future pricing dramatically.
Microsoft is introducing a new corporate service called Software Assurance. Software assurance is a subscription-based product for business customers that entitles subscribers to upgrades as they are released. Instead of paying for each upgrade, you'll get the latest software version as part of the subscription. That's great for frequent upgraders. However, if you don't upgrade every version, it will increase your costs to upgrade when you do.
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To participate in Software Assurance (which becomes available Oct. 1), you will need to upgrade your software to the "current" version by that October 1 date. If you don't, you'll have to pay full purchase price for the product as if you never licensed it. So your first cost will be the Office XP upgrade price, before you ever go on subscription.
If you currently have Office 95, the cost is fairly steep because there is no special upgrade price to go from Office 95 to Office XP. Office 97 and 2000 users will get special upgrade pricing to go to XP. If you are already using a subscription pricing service, your service will be replaced by Software Assurance.
The bottom line: If you upgrade often, you'll want to upgrade to XP by the end of September and take advantage of ongoing upgrade offers. If you upgrade only every four or five years, you may want to purchase each version as stand-alone, paying full price instead (because it may still cost you less). Either way, you'll be paying more money to Microsoft.
BTW, expect the same type of policy to be put in place for Windows after Windows XP arrives in the fall, where Windows XP or Windows 2000 users will enjoy significant upgrade pricing advantages over users who have older versions.
Q: Every time I type an Internet address in a document, it changes into an underlined link. Then, when I try to click within the text to edit it, instead of letting me change it, it launches into the page. How do I get around this problem?
A: Your word processor gives you this link on purpose as an advance feature that gives better access to the Internet. However, in Word 2000, it's implemented in a way that causes this same problem for many people. The easiest way to fix it is to right-click on the link to pop up a menu. Select [Hyperlink>], then [Remove Hyperlink]. Now you can edit the text normally. If you want to keep the link, but still edit it, instead of selecting [Remove Hyperlink], select [Edit Hyperlink]. This will pop up a dialog box allowing you to change the link text. If you have not yet saved the document, you'll be asked to save it before you remove or edit the link.
In Office XP, you'll be able to turn off the automatic hyperlink feature altogether.
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