Microsoft Word XP Features
Microsoft word XP designed by Microsoft is a component of the Microsoft Office XP pack that is sold as a standalone product and that can run all Windows platforms as long as the minimum installation requirements have been met. Using the Wine compatibility layer, then application can also be run on systems running the Linux operating system. The changes that Microsoft word XP came with included the addition of a feature called the Task Panes. This feature, not available in the earlier release of the Windows Word 2000 have users a quicker way to locate information and also have control lots of other features that earlier office releases had modeled into dialog boxes. The removal of the Office Assistant by simply disabling it also offered a new line from where Microsoft based their advertising strategies on. Instead of the Office Assistant, a new help system was used instead. The addition of the clipboard that could hold multiple objects at once, introduced in the earlier Word 2000 release was maintained together with other new features from that earlier release.
Microsoft Word XP uses the commonly accepted de facto standard of the .DOC file format that is known by many Microsoft Office users. However, it also supports other file format such as .rtf, .txt among others. The file format implemented in this version of word plays a part in how the document file size is determined. The Object Linking and Embedding file format or OLE is a structured storage format that is used and it behaves like a conventional hard drive file system. Since each word document is composed of blocks with 512-byte chunks, the Word document file size is usually a multiple of 512. The fact that Microsoft Windows XP uses the .doc file extension as its default file format means that the newer .docx extension used by Word 2007 for Windows cannot be recognized by Word XP. In order to open documents created in Word 2007 using Office Word XP, the document needs to be saved using the .doc file extension.
Word XP supports the embedding of programs and macros. This functionality means that it can be used to run and propagate macro viruses in documents via email and USB Keys. The good news however is that nearly all anti-virus software can detect and clean these macro viruses. Caution is nevertheless advised. In almost any other way, Microsoft Word XP will prove as valuable as the other versions of word and possibly much easier to work with.
