Microsoft Office System 2003

Microsoft has released not just a single new version of Microsoft Office, but a family of interrelated applications called Microsoft Office System 2003. And, as is the case whenever a new edition of Microsoft Office shows up, it's news. This time, however, Office 2003 isn't a must-have upgrade for the average user. The bulk of its new features -- the integration of XML throughout, rights-management tools and tie-ins with the SharePoint Server -- will benefit only large enterprises.

That said, anyone looking to buy a new version of Office for the home should consider the affordable Student and Teacher Edition, a £109.99 (inc. VAT) collection of Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint that you can install on three PCs, while small businesses should check out the £350.99 (inc. VAT) Small Business Edition, which also includes the often-overlooked Publisher. And while InfoPath, FrontPage, Project, Visio and the particularly cool OneNote for Tablet PCs are technically part of the new Office 2003 family, none of these programs comes bundled with any edition. If you want one, you'll have to invest in an expensive standalone application.

Microsoft Office System 2003 also covers a number of additional standalone applications available for purchase separately. These include InfoPath 2003 (£166.79), SharePoint Portal Server 2003, FrontPage 2003 (£153.49), OneNote 2003 (£156.99), Project 2003 (£473.99) and Visio 2003 (£158.49).

Setup & installation
Microsoft Office 2003's installation process hasn't changed since Office XP. Choosing a Customized installation allows you to add Word and Excel but omit PowerPoint. Choose the Typical installation, and the complete Office package consumes 260MB to 590MB of disk space, depending on the edition. Office 2003 retains Microsoft’s controversial product activation, the anti-piracy scheme that debuted in Office XP. Product activation locks Office to a specific computer and requires reactivation if you need to reinstall the software. The process is obnoxious to those who think activation is an invasion of privacy, but we found it painless. It took just seconds for Office to connect to the proper Microsoft server and match our machine with our copy.

Recently, Microsoft has relaxed its licensing requirements for the Office 2003 Student and Teacher Edition, letting you install that version on up to three different Windows machines, making this the best deal for people with young children still in school or for those who are continuing adult education. All of the other retail editions -- Standard, Professional and Small Business -- allow installations on only two computers. Unfortunately, Office 2003 runs only on Windows 2000 and XP. So, if you're using Windows 98, ME or NT, give Office 2003 a miss.

Communication tools
Of all the core applications within Office 2003, only Microsoft Outlook 2003 has had a total makeover. It looks quite different: the preview pane now shows twice as much of a message as before, and the main interface boasts a much-improved navigational bar at the left, as well as a range of new tools. As far as we're concerned, Outlook's junk email filter is perhaps the most important new feature. Unfortunately, Outlook didn't trap every piece of junk mail in our tests. Third-party products from Norton and McAfee do a much better job, stopping between 90 and 95 percent, while Outlook 2003 nabbed only 80 to 85 percent. Still, Outlook makes a good effort.

Additional new Outlook tools group messages and replies into conversational threads, quick-flag messages for later follow-up, and customise views to show, for example, all messages from the last week or all those with attachments from Joe Bloggs. Want more? Outlook now displays small desktop alerts as new mail arrives that show the sender, the subject and a small slice of text. The alerts then allow you to open the message on the desktop, flag it or delete it without pulling up the entire Outlook interface.

Finally, Outlook no longer automatically downloads images from Web servers -- good news for both home and office users, since some spam images eat up Internet bandwidth and sometimes contain rather offensive nudity. No doubt in our minds: Outlook 2003 is the one application in Office that we wouldn't want to give up if we had to drop back to an earlier version of the suite.

But communication improvements within Office 2003 aren't limited to email. Microsoft Publisher 2003, which comes bundled in the Small Business and Professional editions, sports new Web design wizards that make it easier to build a credible, if unsophisticated, Web site for personal use or a very small business. We also love the new wizard that walks you through the process of creating catalogues from data stored in, say, Excel, and the one that helps assemble and distribute newsletters by email. If you want to market your small business, Publisher is a good tool to have.

Microsoft FrontPage 2003, the big brother to Publisher, now supports XML and the ability to add flash animation and dynamic Web templates. FrontPage is available only in Office 2003 Professional, the most expensive -- and for most home and small business users, the least attractive -- version of the suite.

Productivity tools
Microsoft Word 2003, Microsoft Excel 2003 and Microsoft PowerPoint 2003 remain the heart and soul of Office 2003. Although this trio offers some interesting new twists, none makes a compelling case for upgrading. Microsoft PowerPoint 2003 now produces custom slide shows for burning to CD. It gives more multimedia options as well, including streaming video or audio content within a given slide. Finally, a new toolbar puts all the tools, such as a highlighter and other annotation tools, at your fingertips so that you can add notes on the fly as you play a presentation. And like Word and Excel, both PowerPoint and Microsoft Access 2003 now support Smart Tags, which mark addresses, names and other selected data for quick reference.

Working across all the applications is Research Library (accessible from within Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Publisher). To open it, either right-click a word and choose the Look Up option or call up the separate Research Task Pane alongside an open document window. The Research library includes direct access to a dictionary, a thesaurus, translation services, MSN Search, MSN Money Stock Quotes and the Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia. Third-party resources such as eLibrary and WorldLingo are also available. Enterprises may use the area to supply employees with internal corporate intranet information, such as style guides and internal sales information, via XML.

Microsoft Word 2003 offers a new view called Reading Mode that duplicates the look of a printed page and, unlike Print Preview, lets you edit text. There's also the nifty ‘Compare side by side’ feature that shows two documents next to one another with synchronized scrolling so that you can quickly see any changes between the two. Microsoft Excel 2003 also offers the ‘Compare side by side’ tool, which is useful when viewing a pair of worksheets simultaneously.

Office 2003 includes a new Information Rights Management (IRM) technology that lets creators of Office documents and Outlook email messages determine who gets permission to edit a file, forward email, or pass along an Office file attachment. The back-end requirements for this are considerable, including the use of Windows Server 2003. If your business wants rights management, you have to buy Microsoft Office 2003 Professional; no other version of Office is equipped to initiate such permissions. Fortunately, all other editions of Office 2003's applications will view and edit IRM-locked files if permission is given.

One final productivity note: Microsoft OneNote 2003, a nifty note-taking application that's a member of the Microsoft Office System, is missing from all bundled editions of Office. OneNote, which keeps track of random notes, phone numbers and ideas -- perfect for Tablet PC use -- is overpriced at £156.99 (inc. VAT). Were it a part of the Student and Teacher or Standard editions of Office, we might recommend that everyone upgrade to Office 2003.

Collaboration tools
Perhaps the most significant collaboration tool in Office 2003 is the eXtensible Markup Language (XML), which has been available in Corel’s WordPerfect Office 11 since the beginning of this year. XML uses standard tags within files to index, search, combine and reuse text, often in conjunction with a shared data server. For example, a Web site might use XML sales data from an Excel file to display the most current information. But although large enterprises will want and use XML, it doesn't do much for most home users, small businesses and many medium-sized companies.

Other collaboration tools include Document Workspaces, a virtual meeting place where Word, Excel and PowerPoint users share documents in real time. Document Workspaces requires the use of a Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services site. The SharePoint technology is a crucial part of Microsoft's strategy to drive new Office 2003 sales and upgrades. Windows SharePoint Services, which comes as part of Windows Server 2003, lets Office users collaborate more effectively on group documents from within the suite's applications. Small businesses, which are less likely to indulge in SharePoint on their own, can still get on-board through Microsoft's bCentral or third-party hosting services that run SharePoint for them. Home users, however, will have no use for this collaboration technology.

Service & support
Overall, Microsoft's technical support is very good; however, calling the Microsoft Contact Centre will cost around 8p a minute. The Centre is staffed from 8am to 6pm weekdays and 9am to 5pm on weekends. The always-free Office Online is a one-stop Web resource for everything from free templates to how-to guides and is accessible from the Help menu of any Office application or from within the Task Panes within the Office programs, as long as you're connected to the Internet. In fact, when you fire up help within an application, it pulls the information from Office Online, in addition to files located on your hard drive, so assistance is always up-to-date. Office 2003 retains Check For Updates and Detect And Repair options in the Help menu. These features operate online; the former sniffs for updates or patches, and the latter repairs any damaged or corrupted application files. Often this resolves the problem.

Images