Microsoft Office XP (codenamed Office 10) is an office suite created and distributed 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.It is the successor to Office 2000 and the predecessor of Office 2003.
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 incompatible with Windows 95. Office XP is compatible with Windows NT 4.0 SP6, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows XP and Windows Vista. It is the last version to support Windows NT 4.0, Windows 98, and Windows Me, as its successor, Office 2003, does not support these operating systems.
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 were sold.
Microsoft released three service packs for Office XP during its lifetime. Mainstream support for Office XP ended on July 11, 2006 and extended support ended on July 12, 2011.