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The Best of the Rest

Other suitewide changes are less controversial than the Activation Wizard, but not always a vast improvement. Office XP's collaboration features, while slightly improved, retain some drawbacks. The new SharePoint Team Services are revamped versions of the collaboration features found in Office 2000. As before, they let workgroups quickly set up a Web-based home with message boards, folders for shared documents, and other teamwork tools. New refinements include more control over a site's look and feel, options for giving different users varying levels of access, and a nifty polling feature that lets you quickly set up online surveys.

Some SharePoint features remain surprisingly crude, however. Subscriptions--which notify you of changes at your team's site--do their job in such vague fashion that they aren't very useful. And SharePoint needs better integration with the rest of Office: For example, shuttling appointments and contacts between Outlook and SharePoint's repositories for that information could be a lot easier.

Clippy seems headed for an early meeting with the Recycle Bin. The reviled Office Assistant has become the poster boy for unpopular features in the earlier editions of Office, and Microsoft has launched a PR blitz about the death of the animated paper clip character. But you won't be completely rid of him in Office XP. Clippy has been silenced by default, but he still lurks in the Help menu, ready to irritate anyone whose errant click frees him.

The addition of voice recognition features in Office XP probably won't radically change the way you work. The included technology is limited to fairly basic commands and still requires significant use of the keyboard.

For serious data divas, Access 2002 has some nice additions. Users can now use PivotTables and PivotCharts to analyze data more easily. And good news for Web developers: Access now includes substantial support for XML.

Publisher 2002 sports no radical changes. As before, the desktop publishing software is slick and easy to use. It now looks and feels more like an Office app, with features it should have had already (such as a print preview mode) and plenty of Office XP's interface tweaks, including Smart Tags and the Task Pane.

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