Tech Trends - Industry Articles

WOW! Here’s a Quick Look at Some of Microsoft Office XP’s Great New Features

by H. Albert Napier, Ph.D.

Microsoft Office XP has a great new look, new security and reliability protections, and many terrific new user features, which can substantially enhance efficiency and productivity. Office XP’s new, streamlined, flatter look is designed to reduce onscreen clutter. New security features include the ability to remove all personal information, such as the author’s name, from documents when they are saved and support for digital signatures. New reliability features include an easy way in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to save data and recover documents on the next reboot after a system crash and an improved timed save process.

New Office XP features are designed to more quickly and easily support the most common user activities such as formatting text in Word, creating and editing formulas in Excel, or applying a design template and animation in PowerPoint.

New Office XP Features Common Across Applications

An Office XP task pane is a panel that appears along the right side of the application window and provides increased functionality and easy access to frequently used features. For example, each application has a New File task pane that replaces the old New dialog box by providing options for creating new documents and opening existing documents. Other task panes include the Word Styles and Formatting task pane and the PowerPoint Slide Layout task pane.

Smart Tags are labels used to identify data as a specific type that can then be used to perform actions in one Office XP application that normally would be taken in a different application. For example, a name keyed in a Word document can be added to Outlook contacts from Word using the Smart Tag menu.

AutoCorrect Options put the user back in control of Office XP’s automatic AutoCorrect changes. Users can quickly use the AutoCorrect Options shortcut menu to change the automatically corrected text back to the original text, stop automatically making the specific correction, or quickly open the AutoCorrect dialog box and change the AutoCorrect options.

The Office XP Clipboard is expanded to contain up to 24 cut or copied items. The Clipboard contents now appear in the Clipboard task pane, which replaces the Clipboard toolbar, and includes a portion of each cut or copied item for easy reference.

Paste Options allow users to quickly choose the formatting for pasted text in Word and PowerPoint and pasted data in Excel.

Faster Selection and Formatting in Word

At last! Users can now use the CTRL key to select variable text selections in Word.

Applying formatting or reviewing existing formatting is easier than ever using the new Styles and Formatting task pane and Reveal Formatting task pane.

Easier Worksheet Identification, Formula Creation, and Pasting in Excel

Users can easily differentiate worksheets by applying different sheet tab colors using a shortcut menu.

Several commonly used functions can now be inserted in formulas directly from the AutoSum button on the Standard toolbar.

More Efficient Application of Layout, Design, and Animation in PowerPoint

PowerPoint contains many new slide layouts that combine content options. Users can quickly create a slide containing a table, chart, picture, diagram, or video from one layout format.

PowerPoint takes advantage of the new task pane feature to allow users to speedily access a series of great looking design templates that can be applied with a single click.

PowerPoint’s new animation schemes can be applied with a single click to the current slide or all slides and then previewed using options in the Slide Design task pane.

Access contains many new features such as the ability to open and work with Access 2000 database files without converting the format, undo and redo multiple actions in Design view, new shortcut keys, and saving a report or form as a Data Access Page.

These and many other great new Office XP features, make the Office XP suite a valuable tool for any organization. Napier & Judd’s Mastering and Using Office XP series books cover the new Office XP features as well as MOUS core and expert certification topics.