(In all honesty, I don't remember using it.)Ībout a month after installation, Office started giving me trouble at work. It appears that the new Office installation removed the program from my computer or replaced it - I'm still not sure.

Microsoft technical support sent me to a Startup folder where the offending shortcut was listed, but it didn't make for an auspicious start. After installing XP on both my home and office machines, I received a message on Startup saying that 'Microsoft Find Fast.lnk' couldn't be found. Problems like this were annoying - and there were several. I had to take the Web address that Microsoft wanted to send me to and copy it into Microsoft Internet Explorer's address bar to see the map. Every Smart Tag and Task Pane request from Word resulted in the browser displaying an error message. Office XP doesn't like Netscape Navigator 4.76, my default Web browser. To get them, it reached out to Microsoft's Expedia.Com on the Internet and a few clicks later, I was looking at a map of downtown Baltimore. When I typed The Sun's office address into a document, Smart Tags offered a map and driving directions.

For example, when I typed a name into a document, an icon appeared, offering to send that person e-mail (through Outlook Express). Smart Tags often live up to their billing. Microsoft, of course, decides where these Smart Tags take you and who will answer the questions - which makes Smart Tags a major weapon in the company's effort to dominate the Internet the way it dominates the desktop. Copy something in Word to paste in another location and you'll see it on the clipboard in the Task Pane.Īlso worthy of praise is Microsoft's Smart Tags system, which warns you of possible errors in your document and allows you to look up words quickly and conduct Internet research on topics you're writing about. Open Excel and click on File and then New, and the Task Pane opens to reveal options for your new spread sheet.

Upgrading from microsoft office 2002