What's New in Office XP
In a world that moves at Internet speed, it's difficult to believe that Microsoft Office has been around, in one version or another, for more than a decade. With a user base that's measured in the tens of millions, it's also difficult to imagine that anyone is seeing Word, Excel, and the rest of Office for the first time. But absorbing the changes in a new version can be a daunting task.
If you work for a large corporation or just never found a particularly compelling reason to upgrade, you might have skipped over a version or two to get to Office XP. If you've previously used Office 97, you have a lot to absorb, because Microsoft has made dramatic changes to Office in the four years since that program was released.
For the sake of this book, we're going to assume you have at least a nodding familiarity with one version of Office or another. If you're upgrading from Office 97 or earlier, you'll see a completely new interface, with different toolbar buttons and redesigned dialog boxes that are immediately apparent. If you're upgrading from Office 2000, on the other hand, the differences aren't so obvious—at least not at first boot. Many of the basic Office interface elements—including toolbars, menus, and the individual applications that make up Office—should look refreshingly familiar. And with the exception of Access, the file formats in Office XP programs are identical to their Office 2000 counterparts; so you should be able to open, edit, and save all your documents, worksheets, and presentations without any hitches.
Note
As we explain later in this chapter, the XP label applies only to the Office package itself. Individual programs in the suite are identified with the 2002 label—Word 2002 and Excel 2002, for instance. And to make things even more confusing, the internal version number of each program is 10.0.
Still, it should only take a couple of clicks in Office XP to uncover some pleasant surprises as well as a few irritating flaws—sometimes on the same screen. So what's new? In general, the changes fall into three broad categories: improvements designed to make everyday features easier to use; changes that allow Office programs to recover from errors more gracefully; and new Office tools, including slick utilities that let you scan documents directly into Office programs.
Changes in the Office Interface
You'll probably notice dozens of small changes in Office XP programs, all designed to enhance usability. The common Save As and Open dialog boxes, for instance, include new options to customize the Places Bar on the left, which gives you one-click access to common locations where you're likely to store files you've worked with previously. Instead of being limited to 5 shortcuts, as in Office 2000, you can add your own shortcuts to this list and shrink the icons so you can see 10 at a time.
→ For details on how to use and customize the Places Bar, see "Customizing Toolbars".
Other usability-inspired interface improvements include reorganized dialog boxes and more helpful messages. But two interface innovations in Office XP stand above the rest.
Smart Tags are small indicators that appear in Word documents, Excel workbooks, and PowerPoint presentations when the program recognizes a certain type of data. Each time you paste text from the Clipboard, for instance, you see a Paste Options Smart Tag (see Figure 1.1), which lets you tweak the format of the pasted data. Excel uses Smart Tags to identify possible worksheet errors. PowerPoint tags AutoFit and AutoLayout decisions.
Figure 1.1. Smart Tags save you time by allowing you to adjust pasted data instead of manually reformatting it.
The pop-up menus available from Smart Tags can save you a tremendous amount of time be eliminating the need to continually undo and redo actions to get the formatting you're looking for.
Task panes are the second huge usability improvement used in all Office programs. These small vertical panes, which usually appear at the right side of the program window, are used for opening new files, showing styles and formatting in a Word document, and working with the enhanced Office Clipboard (see Figure 1.2).
Figure 1.2. The task pane at the right of this program window adjusts to show different types of data, including items copied to the Clipboard.
→ For an in-depth discussion of the Office Clipboard, see "How Office Extends the Windows Clipboard".
Speech and Handwriting Recognition
Microsoft researchers have been working on alternate data-entry technologies for years, including the ability to recognize and respond to speech and handwriting. In Office XP, these new technologies are interesting, but frankly they're more of a parlor trick than a productivity booster. If you're unable to work with a keyboard or mouse, you might find the complex setup and training procedures worth the return. Most Office users, however, should wait until a future Office version.
→ For a quick overview of how to enter text with a microphone, see "Using Speech Recognition to Enter Text".
Reliability and Recovery Features
Anyone who's ever lost hours of work because of a program crash knows what pure, unadulterated frustration feels like. The bad news is that Office XP programs still crash. The good news is that your chances of recovering the file you were working with at the time of the crash are dramatically better in Office XP.
For starters, when any Office program hangs—that is, it refuses to respond to keystrokes, mouse clicks, swear words, or blunt objects—you can call on the Microsoft Office Application Recovery console (see Figure 1.3). This new utility provides a safe way to shut down a program and recover the document currently in memory. Although it's not completely foolproof, we've been amazed at the number of times this feature has come through in a crisis.
Figure 1.3. Is an application refusing to respond? Shut it down gracefully and recover your unsaved data using this utility.
Recovered documents appear in a pane to the left of the main application window (see Figure 1.4). You can view each recovered file and decide whether to save it as a new version, replace an existing version, merge the recovered document into another document, or discard the recovered file.
Figure 1.4. After a crash, Office programs can often recover the files you were working with at the time of the crash.
Tip from 
If an Office program stops responding to input but Windows is still working, don't use Ctrl+Alt+Del to close it. Instead, open the Programs menu, choose Microsoft Office Tools, and click Microsoft Office Application Recovery. Choose the Recover Application option to attempt to save the current file and restart gracefully.