Take a look at what's included in each of these suites, and then read on to find out about new features and enhancements in your favourite Office applications. The standard edition is aimed at home users, small businesses or lone professionals. The professional editions are optimised for businesses of any size and the developer edition is for those who wish to develop custom Office solutions for their enterprises.

Personal experience

Whether you're an IT worker, a small-business owner, a company employee or a home office worker, you can use Office applications to increase your productivity and make your job easier. Here are some of the ways that using XP can improve the individual's Office experience.

• new smart tags are shared across all Office applications--they appear when you make an error or paste text into a document or file and give you the option to keep or change your action.
• new task panes give you access to all your important tasks from a single integrated view. Use the panes to perform searches, open new documents, format presentations and more.
• context-sensitive smart tags let users access names, dates, addresses, phone numbers and stock symbols from within Office applications.
• auto-correct options smart tags let you control and modify auto functions within Office applications--i.e., you can choose to not auto correct a certain spelling, like your name, in the future.
• the new document recovery feature lets you save files at the moment an error message appears, so you don't lose valuable documents, spreadsheets, database entries or presentations. Users can also shut down a non-responding application while initiating recovery of the file.
• digital signatures let users digitally sign entire documents.
• new speech options let you dictate text, make direct formatting changes and navigate menus using voice command.
• Office assistant is hidden by default, and can be turned on at the user's discretion (a big plus for people who cringe every time they see that little paper clip appear when they open an Office application).
• access, analyse and refresh Web data when in Excel.
• the new Office Template Gallery and Media Gallery provide professional templates and clip-art images, sounds, photos and animations.

Collaborative experience

Another important part of the XP experience allows Office-users to work with others. Office XP makes it easier for users to share and review documents and work together more effectively.

• Send for review makes it easy to combine revisions from multiple reviewers into a single document.
• improved reviewing toolbar gives users a variety of views and options when editing documents.
• Microsoft SharePoint Team Services provides an easy-to-create Web site that lets team members create contact and task lists, event calendars, libraries for storing documents and surveys. Users can also store and share Office documents by using Document Libraries within this Web site.
• Microsoft SharePoint Team Web pages can be edited directly in FrontPage, which allows users to customise the site as much or as little as they like.
• when scheduling meetings in Outlook, users can now propose a new time as opposed to simply declining a meeting request. Users can also save multiple group calendars within Outlook for easy access to team members' or conference room schedules.

Organisational experience

When you improve personal and team productivity, the result is usually a general improvement in the organisation as a whole. Office XP also offers some new capabilities, designed to help organisations build and edit Web-based, collaborative solutions that lower costs and increase overall efficiency.

• Excel now supports XML, while Access users can import and export XML schema and data documents.
• smart tags can be customised to make communicating with third parties, such as clients and customers, easier than ever.
• new Intelligent Setup eliminates the need to re-enter data when upgrading from a previous version of Office.
• the Save My Settings wizard lets users save their settings directly to a file or on the Web, where people can easily access them and upload them to another machine. This saves time for users who interface between a home and work computer, as well as for system administrators who hop around many machines.
• improved international support allows independent set up for each language, a new multilanguage pack set up wizard, and automatic detection of operating system language settings. In addition, FrontPage is now available in 26 languages (more ways than ever to say "buy now" on your Web site).
• tight integration with Exchange 2000 means users can store and work with files located on their Exchange servers. A new Web storage system lets you store custom properties, such as document authors and descriptions, with each item in the database. As a result, it's easier for organisations to search, view, index and access information.
• organisations can also use Office XP with SharePoint Portal Server, Microsoft's new document management server, to share information with others and manage documents from within. Edited Office documents are also tracked so that previous versions can always be retrieved.