Page #212 (Network Smarts)

Microsoft Office XP Inside Out

Chapter 1

An Office XP Overview

A Rundown on Office XP

The Microsoft Office XP suite provides more applications and utility programs than ever before. Which ones you have depends upon which edition of Office XP you own or which individual Office applications you've obtained. This book covers all the major Office XP applications:

• Microsoft Word (Part 3)
• Microsoft Excel (Part 4)
• Microsoft PowerPoint (Part 5)
• Microsoft Outlook (Part 6)
• Microsoft FrontPage (Part 7)
• Microsoft Access (Part 8)
• Microsoft Publisher (Part 9)

The book also covers many of the valuable utility programs and add-ons that are included with Office XP (or are available on the Web) and that help you work with the main applications:

• Office Shortcut Bar (Chapter 4)
• newfeature! Clip Organizer (Chapter 6). See Figure 1-1.
• Microsoft Graph (Chapter 6)
• Microsoft Equation (Chapter 6)
• Save My Settings Wizard (Chapter 9)
• Office Resource Kit, including the Custom Installation Wizard (Chapter 2)

Figure 1-1. You can run the new Clip Organizer program in its own window, shown here, or through the new Insert Clip Art task pane.

Even if you don't have one or more of the applications covered in this book, you might want to read some of the information about these applications to help you decide whether to add an Office program to your software collection or whether you're better off using the applications you already have.

Advantages of the Office XP Suite

Obtaining and installing the Office XP application suite, rather than acquiring individual applications here and there, isn't just a way to economize by buying programs "cheaper by the dozen." The real advantages of a software suite such as Office XP lie in the common user interface and the application integration features.

In Office XP, the individual applications share more common features than in any previous Office version. An obvious advantage of a common user interface is that once you learn one application, it's much easier to learn another. Also, as you switch between applications, you won't have to switch working modes quite so radically. And, perhaps most important, a common user interface frees your focus from the individual applications and their idiosyncrasies and lets you concentrate on the documents you're creating. The following are examples of important common features in the Office XP suite:

• The menus, toolbars, shortcut keys, and the methods for customizing these features.
• The common dialog boxes (notably, the Open and Save As dialog boxes), with shared features such as the Search command that now lets you find either files or Outlook items.
• The task panes (described later in this chapter). See Figure 1-2.

  

  Figure 1-2. The new Search task pane, which is available in most Office applications, lets you locate either disk files or Outlook items.

• The methods for displaying and setting document properties.
• The speech and handwriting interfaces.
• The drawing features (Drawing toolbar, AutoShapes, Diagrams, WordArt, and others). See Figure 1-3.

  

  Figure 1-3. The new Diagram Gallery dialog box lets you quickly insert a variety of ready-made conceptual drawings.

• The proofing tools (Spelling, Thesaurus, AutoCorrect, and others).
• The help interface and the Detect And Repair command.
• The Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming features.
• The ability to store and share documents on SharePoint team Web sites.

The Office XP applications are also more tightly integrated than ever. Application integration extends the usefulness of the individual applications. It lets you combine applications in a synergistic way to solve more complex problems and to easily accomplish otherwise difficult tasks. The following are examples of application integration features available in Office XP:

• The Office Shortcut Bar, as well as the New Office Document and Open Office Document commands on the Start menu in Windows, which let you create or open any type of Office document
• The ability of Office applications to import and export each other's documents (using the Open and Save As dialog boxes, as well as special purpose commands for importing and exporting documents or data)
• The capability of using data stored in Outlook or Access when creating mail-merge documents in Word
• Commands for linking and embedding data from several Office applications in a single compound document
• VBA, the common programming language of the Office applications and the most powerful way to create solutions using multiple Office applications