If I had written the review as originally intended, it would have been a mammoth undertaking, hard to read and digest in one sitting. Simply listing the new features and improvements throughout the suite, and for the individual applications, required some half dozen pages in Word. But a funny thing happened, though it should have come as no surprise: Because of the size of the thing, and the sheer number of improvements that it offers, a simple review of Office XP Beta 2 just wasn't possible. My original goal with the release of Beta 2 was to provide a quick overview of the new features, highlighting the changes users can expect when this new product ships in Q2 2001. So one doesn't undertake a review of a new Office suite lightly. To say that these applications are widely used and, indeed, required, is an understatement.
I'm not a big Excel, PowerPoint or Access user personally, but many people are. The other Office apps gets varying degrees of use, but in my case, FrontPage is my third critical Office application, as I use this tool for my personal Web sites, such as Thurrott Dot Com.
Like many of you, I live with the Office suite daily: In my case, Outlook is literally open 24/7, primarily for its email, contact, and calendaring functionality, and as a writer, I use Word often enough to consider myself an expert in the features I need.
I'm not sure what it is about Office, but this suite of productivity applications has grown over the years from being a loosely coupled grab bag of functionality into the cohesive collection of mission critical applications we all know and love (and sometimes hate) today. When I received my copy of Office 10 Beta 2 at Fall COMDEX in November 2000, I did what any self-respecting computer geek would do: I found a (relatively) quiet corner somewhere (in this case, the side of the stage at one of Microsoft's product theaters) and installed it immediately on my laptop.
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