100%
OFF

Microsoft Office XP Standard

List price:	~~$399.99~~
Our price:	that is 100% off!
Manufacturer:	Microsoft
Release date:	31 May, 2001

Average user rating: Average user rating: 2.5

Good, but free substitutes are available.

Microsoft did a pretty good job with its office products. They are easy to use, powerful and versatile. Between Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, you can get al;; your office needs met, whether you are a beginner, student, or a professional
The best feature of the Microsoft Office suite is Outlook. It combines an easy to use calendar, email program that can handle multiple email accounts, task lists, and many other features that are just right if you need an all-in-one organizer.

HOWEVER ---

One of the other reviewers mentions that "the bottom line is value... why pay retail?" My question is - why pay at all? There is a FREE office suite called Open Office that you can download (again, for free, and legally). All you have to do is Google Open Office, and you will find the website. Granted, Open Office is not as good as Microsoft Office, but it is quite close. If you are looking for basic word processing, presentation software, and spreadsheet package, and if you do not require advanced features and your budget is tight, Open Office would be perfect for you.

Office

Well, actually I like Excel and hate Word. The other programs included I have little or no use for.
I use Excel all the time for engineering calculations, including writing VBA macros to automate things that I can't do easily in the cells. It's very useful, like having a calculator that remembers everything you've done, writes it down, but allows you to change inputs and recalculate everything automatically. Unfortunately, there is a bug in the help files, so I can't get Visual Basic help anymore. The IT guys at work fixed the regular help but never could get the macro help to work again. Very annoying.
Word is terrible compared to WordPerfect. What I used to be able to do with a couple of keystrokes, now takes minutes of navigation thru menus and dialog boxes. Outline formatting, numbered lists, etc. are especially frustrating in Word because nothing is obvious. You shouldn't have to get a college degree in word processing in order to learn to write a specification and get the formatting correct. One annoyance is that paragraph formatting is hidden in a selectable little space at the end of the paragraph, so if you try to delete the last few words by hitting shift-end and delete, you will delete numbering, formatting, etc. of that paragraph. Also, the thesaurus that came with WordPerfect was much better.
In general, Microsoft Office tries to be everything for every possible user, automates many tasks to do things that it thinks I want to do even though I don't, and makes it hard to figure out how to undo them.
I am using WordPerfect wherever possible and trying StarOffice.

Real problems with this one..

Installed the upgrade over Office 2000 on a well equipped XP Professional system. Liked it well enough but after an online update, File->Open began taking 20-30 sec per level to navigate to the file. Unfortunately, installing this package seems to put the 'better' file menus in and everything came to a crashing halt. Worse news is that it wouldn't uninstall nor reinstall/fix (something got corrupted). A Msoft A+ beat on it a long time then finally reinstalled XP (unfortunately an all too common occurance, for lots of reasons) and all was well until I installed Office XP again. The problem recurred but this time, a system restore cleaned it up. Still using Office 2000. Now using Office XP as a gold coaster. I've heard of this happening on other systems.. something in the networking maybe.. We're using a Linux server w/Samba drive. Works great with everything else..