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 At its June 2001 meeting, DACS members were
introduced to Microsoft latest office suite: Microsoft Office XP. Sonal Shah substituted for John
Stroiney, Microsoft regular speaker at DACS meeting. Like the
presentations done by John, Sonal breezed through hers in typical
Microsoft
fashion: to the point, organized and entertaining at the same
time.
Sonal Shah put an emphasis on the improvements obtained with
the new suite. She compared the collaborative (a document that
is updated among several people vs. the personal (one user).
She briefly demonstrated some of the new features in Outlook, Word, Excel, and Power Point
New to office XP are the smart tags and the word pane which results
in time saving, and right clicking enabled to get fast information.
For example a user right click, and an address is inserted and
automatically added from Microsoft Outlook. Or it can display
a map and with that information one can go online to display
directions to a particular address. Smart tags can be removed
or modified as necessary.
A few tidbits from the presentation:
- 24 new pieces of information can
be used in the new clipboard, cut and paste seems to be much
easier in between the different applications.
- Start bullet buttons and smart
tags will continue numbering for a user.
- Formatting is much easier to access
by changing styles.
- Saving of documents is done automatically.
A user can pick up immediately where s/he left with no loss of
data if the computer crashes.
- For example from the Excel task
pane you can change tab color to differentiate the sheets.
- In Outlook you can access all of
your e-mails, even those e-mail addresses that you have on Hotmail,
USA.Net or other types of e-mail. Insert another e-mail account
with a short cut or on the panel. Messenger can also be added.
Outlook offers single reminder window and appointments or tasks
can be color coded.
- Power point has multiple slide
and design animation.
- Error reports are sent to Microsoft
and the details are automatically saved about why a computer
crashed.
- XP has voice recognition. A user
can dictate information using a microphone to the different programs.
This capability has been mentioned several times over the year
by speakers at different DACS general meeting. I wonder how many
people actually dictate information to their computer.
Many more features are available
in the new suite, but Sonal kept to her schedule and demonstrated
the main points. She closed her presentation and demonstrated
Microsoft latest simulation program: Train Simulator. It probably enthralled train
enthusiasts, but personally I am more impressed by Microsoft
Flight
Simulator series.
Sonal’s presentation probably convinced me because I requested
the XP Small Business module when I purchased a new computer.
I have not yet taken advantages of all the features that Sonal
described because I have yet to use the programs. One item that
Sonal did not mention during her
presentation is when a user right click with the mouse, words
or an entire document can be translated from English to Spanish
or French, and Spanish or French into English. My son discovered
this feature but I did not yet have a chance to use it. I just
wish I had this feature in Word at work, but this is wishful
thinking. XP, as Sonal pointed out, can be installed only on
your desktop and on your laptop. Microsoft wants to avoid people
making illegal copies of XP.
At the end of the meeting, Sonal raffled some very nice door
prizes and made, I’m sure, the winners grateful that they
belong to DACS, an organization that keeps us on the edge of
the computer technology.
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