MICROSOFT XP By: David Visschedyk It's pretty easy to bash Microsoft. They have long been called copycats, who watch small companies develop new technology only to later buy them out, or co-opt the technology and put inside their products. They've been in legal trouble with the American government, and for the first time they missed an earnings estimate a few quarters back. There are a lot of reasons to hate Microsoft, but there are a lot of reasons to like them too. In fact, I think there are many more reasons to like the company than to dislike it. Techno-geeks will tell you that Microsoft products are not very good, but for you and I–the average user–it's almost impossible to say that we are not better off using Windows than living in an archaic Command Prompt world. C:\this sucks Microsoft recently released Office XP, an upgrade from Office 2000, which has begged the question, should I upgrade? The question to that isn't easy. It's never easy, if it was, I'd be out of a job. Here's the deal, most people fall into one of three categories: Home User: This user opens up Word to write a letter to their dear old Grandma who doesn't have email. Nothing but basic functions are used, and the most important need for the software is for it to work well, and print nice documents. Power User: This type of user wants to have everything available. They use functions like mail merge, they integrate access documents into word documents, they want to be able to quickly and easily port any Office document onto the Web. Corporate Users: For this user, it isn't a matter of setting up the program on one machine, they set it up on an entire corporate network, and expect, no demand that each user can collaborate on the same document, without it crashing, and without much back-end support. My question to you is, which group do you fall into? It's ok, you can admit it. I won't hold it against you. The benefits of this upgrade for home users is negligable. It has more functions, and it can do more things, but for the average user who does only basic jobs like writing an essay or a letter, and rarely if ever opens a database or spreadsheet, there is no need to upgrade. In fact, for this user, there is no need to have any Office product, in most cases buying the stand alone Microsoft Word will be sufficient. Power Users are different. They will use the new functions in Office XP, such as Smart Tags. Smart Tags work to offer you suggestions on formatting or other options right when you need them. No longer do you need to hunt through menu's to try and find how to add a subscript, Smart Tags will do it for you. While there are times when this can become annoying, more often than not the service makes using Office XP easier than ever before. The ability to save documents into HTML has never been easier, or more percise than in XP. While in 2000 the HTML code would sometimes be clunky, this upgrade has seen vast improvements, making the documents smaller, faster to load and less likely to have coding mistakes. For the corporate user there is no question that they should upgrade. The upgrades in functionality over a large network are outstanding. Never before has an Office product been so easy to use and stable when put into a situation when three or four people have the same document open. This rarely if ever happens, but the fact that Office XP can handle it means that your company's IT can breathe easy. So there you go, the decision to eXPerience XP will depend upon a lot of factors. No matter what you decide, the software available by Microsoft continues to improve, and no matter how many geeks disagree, you won't regret buying anything with the Microsoft name on it.