Microsoft's recent announcement of the next big development in its business applications suite promises new features that make Office XP a major step forward. Office XP's new and improved features will simplify and enhance the way you work, integrate your data with the Web, make it much easier and more productive to connect with others in the office and around the world to share data and collaborate on projects, and provide a stable, secure, reliable, and extensible office productivity platform. Smart tags, an extensible technology, let you identify not only Web links and email addresses but also data anywhere on your computer, on your network, or on the Web. Developers can devise new smart tag definitions for different data types. A Task Pane in each Office application presents you with a single location to access the most common tasks you perform and accomplish them with one or a few clicks.
Office applications understand speech input.
Dictate text, make direct formatting changes, and navigate menus and dialog boxes using spoken commands. Handwriting recognition lets you write notes on your handheld computing device and upload them directly to Office, which will interpret them as text, or write directly into Word. Office understands not only Western alphabets, but also Chinese and Japanese characters. You can then use the scanned text in your Office documents. Compress Pictures lets you shrink the file size of graphics you paste into Office documents, optimizing them for Web publication.