Just like a chart-topping boy band, Microsoft Office suites don't stick around for long. Office 2000 may only be a couple of years old, but its replacement is ready to take centre stage.

Microsoft's naming conventions have always been a little unpredictable and this time round, we don't get Office 2002 but Office XP. We won't attempt to explain where the 'XP' comes from (it's a long story) but it will also feature in Windows XP which is due later in the year.

Confusingly, Office XP's constituent applications do have a '2002' epithet, though.

Office XP will be available in three versions - Standard, Professional and Developer. Aside from the price, each differs in the applications they provide.

The Standard version provides Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint; Professional adds Access to the list; and Developer throws in FrontPage and a few other tools.

Office XP Standard costs £420 or £199 as an upgrade from a previous version of the suite. Cheap it ain't.

According to Microsoft, you'll need at least a Pentium 133Mhz PC with 32Mb of memory and Windows 98 (or later) to use Office XP. This is rather like saying you need at least a Vauxhall Nova to compete in the Le Mans 24-hour race - you'll get the job done eventually but it won't be a pleasurable experience.

If you own such a lowly PC, you'd be far better off with a less demanding office suite (Ability Office being one such example), not least because you're unlikely to have the 300Mb or so of hard disk space required for Office XP in the first place.

The good news is that if you do install it, it's a painless, wizard-led process.

Pirate patrol

Office XP is the first Microsoft product to feature its new anti-piracy measure, known as Product Activation. Once installed, Office XP generates a unique 'key' based on its own serial number and the hardware it detects in your PC.

When you register the software, either by phone or over the internet, Microsoft makes a record of this key. Install the software on another PC, and when you register it, Microsoft will spot the fact that it's already been registered before and, at the very least, start asking questions.

There is some leeway to this process to take account of such situations as reinstalling software on a PC that's been upgraded (thus changing its hardware and voiding the key) but it remains to be seen how it all works in practice.

Oh, and if you think you can avoid all this by not registering the software in the first place, think again. If you don't register Office XP within 30 days of installing it, it stops working.

Up and running

With the suite installed and running, not much seems to have changed. Menus have been simplified to remove unnecessary clutter, and the features that are used most are positioned more prominently.

The basic functions of each application are much the same, though, so moving from a previous version of Office shouldn't cause many problems.

The biggest new feature of Office XP is under the surface and it's called Smart Tags. A Smart Tag is a small button that appears in a document under certain circumstances.

Paste some information into a document, for example, and a Smart Tag will appear near the new information: click on it, and you'll have the option to keep the new information's existing format, format it like the document you're pasting it into, or apply a new format.

The key is that Smart Tags are completely optional and context-sensitive - they only offer options that apply to what you're doing, which means you'll discover new ways to work with your documents.

New Smart Tags can also be created, so you're not stuck with the ones Microsoft thinks you'll need. These can be as simple or as complex as you like; for example, a company might devise a Smart Tag that inserts the corresponding product information from an Access database into a Word document whenever a product number is typed.

Help at hand

Smart Tags almost replace the need for a help system, since they can perform complex tasks for you rather than just tell you about them. There is still help in Office XP but not in the form you'd expect.

The Office Assistant - the bane of Office users worldwide - is still there but it's no longer activated by default. Microsoft has even made a remarkable about face and admitted that the Assistant wasn't the greatest idea in the first place - see www.microsoft.com/Office/clippy to see what we mean.

In its place is the 'Ask a Question' box. Unsurprisingly, this allows the user to type in a query and (hopefully) receive an answer, without going through the usual rigmarole of choosing Help from the menu and trawling through the different topics.

Panes and gains

A foolproof experience seems to have been Microsoft's goal with Office XP, as there's yet another feature that helps users produce their documents with the minimum of effort.

Every application has a Task Pane - a window that opens at the right of an Office application window, much like the ones that appear on the left of an Internet Explorer window.

When open, a Task Pane displays shortcuts for such common tasks as creating a new document, opening recently-used documents and even performing simple foreign language translations.

The Task Pane doesn't offer anything you can't do without clicking Toolbars or opening menus, but it does speed up the process.

Actually, one new thing it does is expand the Clipboard for copying and pasting parts of a document. Not only can up to 24 different pieces of information be copied to the Clipboard, but each is also displayed in the Task Pane as a thumbnail, so it's easy to see what's in there.

Fault fixing

As we will see later on in the year with the launch of the Windows XP operating system, Microsoft has taken a proactive approach to fixing faults in its products. All Office XP applications now support something called 'dynamic bug reporting' which allows an application to report specific problems directly to Microsoft over the internet. The user then receives tailored support on how to fix their particular problem.

Office XP also improves the way in which it deals with program crashes. Crashes, locked applications and spontaneous reboots are a fact of Windows life, and if it happens when you're editing a document, you may not be able to get it back.

Office XP now lets you save any open documents even if their application crashes, and will attempt to repair damaged files when you try to open them. It's still no substitute for saving your document regularly, though.

Sharing documents

If you share documents with colleagues in an office or over the internet, Office XP has some new features for that too. Documents can be emailed as attachments simply by choosing the option from an application's File menu, and changes made to shared documents can be automatically recorded.

Unlike in previous versions of Office, these changes are noted in a document's margin, preventing the document's format from being changed by repeated alterations.

To XP, or not to XP?

So should we all upgrade to Office XP when it appears? If you're frustrated by your inability to get things done with your current office suite, then the answer is 'yes' - XP's improved user assistance and document collaboration tools will be a godsend to many.

If not, don't fall into the "New version ... Must upgrade ..." trap. XP's benefits are tangible, but they won't change your life and they don't come cheaply.

Contact
Microsoft: 0845 700 2000 www.microsoft.co.uk

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ADSL Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line. A technology that converts an ordinary household telephone line into an extremely fast internet connection - 10 times faster than a 56K modem.

CD-R Standard for compact disc recordable format, or blank CDs onto which information (such as data or music) can be recorded - but only once. Playable on most CD-ROM drives and CD players.

Compact Flash Matchbook-size memory cards with no moving parts. These slot into various devices to store data. Popular with digital cameras and handheld computers.

FireWire A super-fast data link between your PC and devices such as digital camcorders. Also known as IEEE 1394.

Gb Gigabyte. A measurement of storage capacity - usually for hard disks. 1Gb is equal to 1024Mb.

HTML HyperText Mark-up Language. The language used to create pages for a website. HTML code is written as text that is converted to a web page by a web browser.

LCD Liquid-crystal display. Technology used to create low-power, slim display panels. Used in everything from digital watches to flat-screen monitors.

Mb Megabyte. A measurement of storage capacity, usually for computer memory. 1Mb is equal to 1024Kb.

Mbit/s Megabits per second. A measure of data-transfer speed. A megabit is one million bits.

Mhz Megahertz. A measure of how fast the processor in your PC works - 800Mhz Pentium III, for example. As a rule of thumb, the higher the number, the faster a PC will be.

MP3 A standard for compressing digital audio. The sound quality of an MP3 file is close to that of CD audio but requires only a fraction of the storage space.

PCI slot Peripheral Component Interconnect. A high-performance expansion slot for desktop PCs, allowing simple installation of PCI components like sound cards and modems.