Microsoft Office XP: Обзор и особенности

Version of Microsoft Office suite

Microsoft Office XP (codenamed Office 10) 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 5, 2001, and was later made available to retail on May 31, 2001, less than five months prior to the release of Windows XP. Office XP also introduces separate Document Imaging, The Office Assistant (commonly known as "Clippy"), 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 incompatible with Windows 95 and earlier versions of Windows. Office XP is compatible with Windows NT 4.0 SP6 or later, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2. It is the last version of Microsoft Office to support Windows NT 4.0 SP6 or later, Windows 2000 before SP3, Windows 98, and Windows Me as the following version, Microsoft Office 2003 only supports Windows 2000 SP3 or later. 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.

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. 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 on January 1, 2002.

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 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. The compatibility pack requires Windows 2000 SP4, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP SP1, or later versions of Windows. The update also enables compatibility with documents created in Office 2010, Office 2013, and Office 2016.

Office XP introduces handwriting recognition in all Office programs, allowing users to write with a mouse or stylus instead of entering text by typing on a keyboard. Users can insert handwritten notes into Excel, add handwritten comments to PowerPoint presentations, send handwritten e mail messages with Outlook, or write directly into Word documents. Notes written with a handheld PC or a Pocket PC can be converted into Word documents, and handwritten content in Word documents can be converted to text. The downloadable Tablet Pack for Office XP provided an extension for Windows Journal to reuse notes as Outlook 2002 items and to import meeting information from Outlook 2002 into notes.

Speech recognition based on Microsoft Research technology is available for all Office XP programs, allowing users to dictate text into active documents, to change document formatting, and to navigate the interface by voice. The speech recognition feature encompasses two different modes: Dictation, which transcribes spoken words into text; and Voice Command, which invokes interface features. Speech recognition can be installed during Office XP setup or by clicking the Speech option in the Tools menu in Word 2002. When installed, it is available as a Microphone command on the Language toolbar that appears in the upper right corner of the screen (lower right corner in East Asian versions of Office XP). When launched for the first time, speech recognition offers a tutorial to improve recognition accuracy, which begins by providing instructions to adjust the microphone for optimal performance. Speech recognition uses a speech profile to store information about a user's voice. Users can configure speech recognition settings, including pronunciation sensitivity in voice command mode, accuracy and recognition response time in dictation mode, and microphone settings through the Speech control panel applet. The Regional and Language Options applet provides Language toolbar and additional settings.

Microsoft Office XP received mixed to positive reviews after its release. CNET praised the new collaboration and data recovery features and stated that Office XP offered a "host of incremental improvements" over its predecessor, Office 2000, but ultimately concluded that "most enhancements and additions are better suited for groups than individuals." Criticism was also directed at the productivity suite's strict hard disk space requirement and its incompatibility with Windows 95. Nevertheless, CNET awarded Office XP a 4 star editors' rating. The New York Times stated that Office XP "isn't so much a list of new features as it is an improved arrangement of old ones," but offered praise for the new collaboration features, which were regarded as a "huge leap" from previous versions. Paul Thurrott regarded Office XP as "a must have upgrade for writers such as myself," though he also stated that, without the new smart tags feature, it "has the feel of a minor upgrade with numerous useful, but small, changes." However, in a later assessment, PC Magazine stated that the "speech recognition is reasonably accurate, but there are very few commands for editing and correcting text" and recommended Dragon NaturallySpeaking, IBM ViaVoice, or Voice Xpress for dictation. The New York Times speculated that Microsoft had little to no confidence in the feature, as it is not installed by default and no microphone is included with Office XP; however, it concluded that it was "not bad for a freebie, especially if you would rather get the first draft down quickly and clean up the recognition errors later." Paul Thurrott stated that "the voice recognition is so bad it's almost not even worth discussing," concluding that it "is sort of a joke" when compared with mature products such as Dragon NaturallySpeaking.