Microsoft Office Suite Office XP (10.0)

2001, May 31

Microsoft Office XP (codenamed Office 10) is an office suite which was officially revealed in July 2000 by Microsoft for the Windows operating system. Office XP was released to manufacturing on March 5, 2001, and was later made available to retail on May 31, 2001. A Mac OS X equivalent, Microsoft Office v. X was released on November 19, 2001.

New features in Office XP include smart tags, a selection-based search feature that recognizes different types of text in a document so that users can perform additional actions; a task pane interface that consolidates popular menu bar commands on the right side of the screen to facilitate quick access to them; new document collaboration capabilities, support for MSN Groups and SharePoint; and integrated handwriting recognition and speech recognition capabilities. With Office XP, Microsoft incorporated several features to address reliability issues observed in previous versions of Office. Office XP also introduces separate Document Imaging, Document Scanning, and Clip Organizer applications. The Office Assistant (commonly known as "Clippy"), which was introduced in Office 97 and widely reviled by users, is disabled by default in Office XP; this change was a key element of Microsoft's promotional campaign for Office XP.

Office XP is compatible with Windows NT 4.0 SP6 through Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. It is the last version of Microsoft Office to support Windows NT 4.0, Windows 98, Windows 2000 RTM–SP2 and Windows Me.

Office XP received mostly positive reviews upon its release, with critics praising its collaboration features, document protection and recovery functionality, and smart tags; however, the suite's handwriting recognition and speech recognition capabilities were criticized and were mostly viewed as inferior to similar offerings from competitors. As of May 2002, over 60 million Office XP licenses had been sold.

Microsoft released three service packs for Office XP during its lifetime. Support for Office XP ended on July 12, 2011.

History

At a meeting with financial analysts in July 2000, Microsoft demonstrated Office XP, then known by its codename, Office 10, which included a subset of features Microsoft designed in accordance with what at the time was known as the Microsoft .NET strategy, one by which it intended to provide extensive client access to various web services and features such as speech recognition. SharePoint Portal Server 2001, then codenamed Tahoe, was also in development at this time and was slated to improve collaboration for users of Office 2000 and Office 10. In August, Microsoft released Office 10 Beta 1 for product evaluation purposes. During this period Office 10 was characterized as an interim release between its predecessor, Office 2000 and a future version, and was planned to include new formatting options; integrated speech recognition; improved collaboration capabilities and enhanced support for web services; and a web portal complete with web parts.

Before the release of Office 10 Beta 2, there was speculation that Microsoft intended to rebrand the new product as "Office 2001," "Office 2002," "Office.NET," or "Office XP." The latter was shorthand for eXPerience and was positioned as a brand that would emphasize the new experiences enabled by the product. At the time, Microsoft intended to name the latest version of Visual Studio as "Visual Studio .NET" but unnamed sources stated that the company did not desire to do the same with Office 10, as the product was only partially related to the company's .NET strategy. Microsoft ultimately decided on "Office XP" as the final name of the product. In spite of this, individual Office XP products such as Excel, PowerPoint, and Word would continue to use Microsoft's year-based naming conventions and were named after the year 2002.

Office XP Beta 2 was released to 10,000 technical testers in late 2000. Beta 2 introduced several improvements to setup tools. The Custom Maintenance Wizard, for example, now allowed setup components to be modified after their installation, and the setup process of Office XP itself used a new version of Windows Installer. After the release of Beta 2, Microsoft announced a Corporate Preview Kit Program for Office XP that would allow up to 500,000 corporate customers to evaluate a Corporate Preview Beta version of the product on a total of 10 machines per copy; individual copies cost $19.95 and expired on August 31, 2001.

Office XP was released to manufacturing on March 5, 2001, and was later made available to retail on May 31, 2001.