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If Microsoft's Office 2000 were an employee, it would be an eager, smart, and capable assistant. Sound like the perfect worker? Well, not quite.

Sometimes the helper, eager to please, doesn't completely understand what to do. The assistant "fixes" things that aren't broken, and has an infuriating habit of disappearing at the worst possible time--with your critical project.

With Microsoft's new Office XP, it's as if that employee had undergone rigorous training. The result is an improvement, but this worker still may not be named Employee of the Year.

New Features (and New Twists on Old Ones)

You can find many new features throughout the Office XP suite. To help guide users through complicated jobs, Microsoft introduces a new feature called Task Panes--vertical windows on the right side of the screen that pop up when needed and offer one-click controls for intricate operations (such as sending out a form letter in Word.)

Smart Tags are small gray boxes that attach themselves to certain entries. In some cases, they help you control (or at least direct) Office's habit of making automatic changes. Smart Tags can also perform new tricks, such as linking an address in an e-mail message to an entry in your Outlook address book.

Microsoft also tried to address--if not fix--Office's frustrating habit of locking up and taking your hard work with it. The software giant hasn't found a way to prevent Office from crashing, as we discovered first-hand. (We examined shipping versions of all the apps except Publisher, which we used in prerelease form.) Instead, the new applications include built-in Disaster Recovery tools that can save a copy of your work even as the program is crashing.

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