Peter Sinclair: Office XP opens up windows of chance

By PETER SINCLAIR

AS the world rushes to the web, Microsoft is leading the charge these days, and Office XP is an example of how the Redmond titan, coming late to the party, is annexing the territory.

Obviously, you don't really need an internet connection at all to derive a rewarding experience from the software, for this is some of the best Microsoft has released in years, but Office XP makes the web, especially for businesses and those whose work needs to be synchronised with that of others, such an easy and harmonious option that you'll find the web is the most logical way to go in many cases.

I've been using the suite since it was released three or four weeks ago and there's still plenty I've yet to learn about it, for there are improvements to the individual applications as well as global changes, but let's look at some of the highlights.

Across the board, there are two major enhancements: the use of "smart-tags" and the new role of the "task-panes."

Smart-tags are unobtrusive icons that appear within all office documents after certain operations - cut-and-paste is a typical example. When you move text, a tag appears beneath the inserted material with a menu of formatting options. You can change the insertion to match its new environment with a single click if you need to, otherwise just ignore the tag and it will vanish.

I really like the task-panes. These are panels which slide open right-of-screen to provide quick access to features you use all the time but which hitherto may have been buried in various sub-menus in separate areas of the applications.

They contain stuff such as the last documents you opened - just like the most recent documents you find at the foot of the file menu - and icons to allow you to create new documents or modify old ones, including templates. Useful? I find I'm using them more and more.

One of my favourite panes is for styles and formatting. In earlier iterations of Word, for example, changing some of these could be a major pain, something you tackled only in cases of dire emergency. Now it's a pleasure, a 5-star feature.

Equally useful is the clipboard-pane for the upgraded cut-and-paste feature - it retains the last couple of dozen items you saved in a selectable, history-like menu, unlike the measly half-dozen retained on the feature in Office 2000. This is another enhancement I find I'm using all the time.

And I'm crazy about the much improved and refined e-mail integration Word now includes, which is often easier than firing up Outlook. Create any sort of document with any sort of content and a single click sends it swiftly and surely on its way (provided the recipient has Word at the other end). In a business context, this powerful feature alone justifies an Office XP upgrade, in my opinion.

I like the handling of hyperlinks, too - Ctrl-click opens the webpage in your browser while a right-click lets you get rid of it, rather than Office 97's more complicated series of steps.

Autocorrect has had a major makeover in Word 2002, now also detecting things such as a name, address and phone number in a document which it can transfer automatically to Outlook if you want.

In keeping with the general evolutionary tenor of improvements in Office 2000, Outlook 2002's interface now includes more prominently a number of features that were always present in Outlook Express but haven't received much promotion before this, such as autocompletion of e-mail addresses, and the preview pane, which now shows active links.

Excel users can pull down an entire webpage and then select whichever tables on it they want to download. They'll also find a "formula evaluator" which will check out a complex calculation to see if, and where, they've done something dumb.

I'm not a PowerPoint user, but I did notice that in 2002 the new task-panes find a major role both as a thumbnail display-board for graphics you're working with and in providing a list of animation effects and an animation builder. This should, hopefully, lift the dramatic impact of presentations which too often can be teeth-grittingly banal.

PowerPoint shows up, too, in Front Page with a drawing tool for adding graphics to pages and lets you connect to outside sources such as MSNBC to pull data into your own site. But apart from this, Front Page shows fewer changes than the rest of the suite except for some interface tweaks.

Office XP also comes with integrated voice command, handwriting recognition and text dictation capabilities. Lacking the gear to try out these futuristic features, I leave them to my colleague Michael Foreman.

Many people gave Office 2000 a miss for various reasons, the single document interface being one and the suite's file-format changes another. But in the case of Office XP, there is absolutely no excuse for not upgrading as soon as may be to a software suite that decisively outstrips its predecessors.

BOOKMARKS

MOST INSPIRED: trAce

A real-world writing academy which claims users in more than 100 countries, trAce has just opened the virtual doors of the trAce Online Writing School.

Every sort of wordsmithing is catered for, from scriptwriting ("with attention to tri-dimensional characters within the three-act structure") to, yes, poetry - Nicole Pekarske Hunt will take you through multiple rewrites of your oeuvre ("typical of the publishing poet"). I don't know what Shelley used to get, but these days you will probably need a fair few sonnets to recoup your investment.

Advisory: "I'm sorry, Percy, but I really think 'bird thou never wert' needs reworking ... "

MOST DEDICATED: planshed

About a year ago, Gregory Connor had the idea of making construction plans downloadable to suppliers and subcontractors. Here's the result, and it's catching on. There are significant savings for developers who use digital plan-distribution in time and reproduction cost, for a large plan can cost up to $400 to print. Photocopyists have been organised to provide hard copy to the computerless, if any remain, and downloading is free.

Advisory: a nuts 'n' bolts, can-do sort of site.

* pete@ihug.co.nz

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