Microsoft has famously supported its operating systems and office suites long after their prime years have passed, but another important milestone is arriving, end of life for Office XP. The nearly 10 year old productivity software will see it’s last patch Tuesday on July 12th 2011, and Microsoft is advising customers to upgrade before it fades forever into obscurity.
In the 10 years Office XP has been on the market it has seen hundreds of patches and security fixes, including seven alone in December 2010. If for some reason you prefer only using tried and tested older versions of Microsoft products, it’s worth noting that nothing stops you from using Office XP past the July 2011 end of life deadline, but then again nothing stops you from licking the handrail on shopping carts either. Neither however is a particularly good idea if you plan on avoiding virus’s in the future.
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Steve Stone
March 13, 2011 at 1:59pm
I guess you guys didn't read the report 2 weeks back reporting more fecal matter found on shopping cart handles than other obvious places...!
With Open Office and Lotus Symphony for free and my existing copy of Office XP doing what I need to accomplish why would I want to upgrade to today's version of Office?
COMMANDER_COOK
March 13, 2011 at 4:44pm
Open Office is a dead man walking IMO. Since Oracle bought Sun and pissed off the community, many (if not most) of the developers created a fork called LibreOffice and all of the major Linux distributions have announced they are going to support LibreOffice going forward.
praetor_alpha
March 14, 2011 at 4:50am
Saying that OpenOffice is walking in any way, shape, or form is stretching the truth. Gotta admire how fast Oracle killed it.
Also, it's not just the Linux distros that are backing LibreOffice, it's non-Oracle corporate backing too (Novell, Google, IBM...). In fact, I can't think of anyone aside from Oracle that supports OpenOffice now.
illusionslayer
March 13, 2011 at 11:54am
I can see all the emails tech support is going to get after every skiddie and their mom can exploit OfficeXP.
As I write this I wonder if one of the reasons for keeping XP on is so that they can keep the gaming industry on DX9. Since Neither XP nor the 360 can use anything later than DX9 that is...
RUSENSITIVESWEETNESS
March 13, 2011 at 11:09am
I've got Office XP on my machine right now, and I use it every day.
It works, and I don't see the need to shell out hundreds for a new package.
Next time I take classes at the local university, I'll buy whatever is out cheap. Maybe one day, I'll even have a computer capable of running it.
RUSENSITIVESWEETNESS
March 13, 2011 at 11:09am
I've got Office XP on my machine right now, and I use it every day.
It works, and I don't see the need to shell out hundreds for a new package.
Next time I take classes at the local university, I'll buy whatever is out cheap. Maybe one day, I'll even have a computer capable of running it.
Caboose
March 14, 2011 at 9:49am
Good luck opening and working on documents created in the new formats going forward. I'd say it's safe to say that once Office XP is killed off, so will all support for it and working with new formats.
livebriand
March 13, 2011 at 11:04am
The only reason you'd need Office XP is if you use Windows ME/98SE and you want the latest office suite for it. No one uses Office XP anymore. Windows XP and Office 2003 will be much harder to kill off than this.
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