Microsoft Office XP Standard for Students and Teachers

The focus in this release is on making Office smarter, providing better collaboration tools and self-customising to individual users (with a bit of help). The "Smart Tags" are a clever way of automatically matching data in documents to tasks such as inserting an address when you're writing a letter in Word or copying and pasting data in Excel. This is extremely welcome as is the ability to customise auto-correct (don't correct these types of errors but do correct these). Also new are "Task panes". Imagine a cross between a Wizard and the Help section that, by means of some drop-down menus makes relevant commands easily available, thus achieving results faster.

As well as the cross-product improvements, each suite has had an overhaul. Outlook has seen many tweaks that improve usability and productivity notably auto-correct during typing and improved ease of setting up mail accounts plus support for Hotmail. PowerPoint contains a plethora of enjoyable new effects that can be combined in multiple ways leading to the swishiest presentations and some useful new applications most notably the organisation chart creator. Word and Excel benefit the most from "Smart Tags" and "Task Panes". Some new useful features include a merge function in Word for incorporating other users' changes, a "Word Count" display for those late-night essays, a drop-down menu in Excel with commonly used functions and an extremely easy-to-use set of diagram creators.

Office XP will improve productivity and results across the entire application suite. The improved functionality especially with "Smart Tags" and "Task Panes" once learnt will save users considerable time in creating quality documents. --Colin Neal

*Important Note: Microsoft Office XP Standard for Students and Teachers is for qualifying students, parents/guardians or teachers only.
Student: must be enrolled on a full-time or part-time basis in a school, college or university, which is recognised by the applicable government agency.
Parent/Guardian: have children in the above category and wish to purchase on their behalf for their educational use.
Teacher: employed full-time or part-time to teach within any such school, college or university as above.

I've tried out most of the competition (Lotus 1-2-3, Corel Quattro, Sun StarOffice etc.) but none can compare with the Data Analysis and Graphing capabilities of Excel. It has the most advanced XY graphs of any of the office packages, with the ability to add X and Y error bars (with the exception of Quattro, the most anyone else offers is Y error bars, and most offer none) and also has the easiest to use Regression Line options including displaying the equation on the graph (useful for experimental data as the value of the regression line on the graph can be different for the data analysis toolpak regression add-in).

The Data Analysis Toolpak is a must for anyone doing serious scientific research with ANOVA and Regression options amongst others. These format all the output data in an easy to read way with headings and bold print etc.

The only minor quibble I have is that the Analysis Regression is static and so doesn't update with a change in the data (OpenOffice's regression, although less easy to read as it doesn't put the headings in, does update with a change in data).

That quibble aside, until OpenOffice.org implements X-error bars and displaying the trendline regression data on graphs, MS Office is simply the best for scientific analysis (or at least a cost-effective one for students).


Missing Access   April 16, 2003
 53 out of 59 found this review helpful

I like most Microsoft Office products (despite their faults!). I have always recommended that staff and students buy them. But no longer. This package reduces the options available to the straightforward presentation and communications software. Where, oh where is Access? This may be a difficult package to use but it is crucial for students to be able to learn it.

So if you are a student I would go for Star Office until Microsoft gets its act together and offers the Professional version to students and teachers - something it always has done in the past.