Office Professional 2003 (Excel, Outlook, Word, Powerpoint, Publisher, Access)

Office has been a highly capable product for years, making it hard for Microsoft to come up with compelling new features. One of the most interesting is Information Rights Management, which lets you restrict document access to specific individuals. This requires a Rights Management Server and is not for casual use, but will be attractive to those with sensitive data. Office Professional 2003 is also underpinned by strong XML support, a powerful feature though mainly of interest to developers. Another aspect is great integration with SharePoint Services running on Windows Server 2003, allowing users to save documents to an internal web site with features like update notification, task lists, and version control. Tablet PC users get built-in support for Ink, letting you add handwritten notes and drawings to Office documents. Those with always-on Internet access will like the updated Task Pane, offering online help and potentially third-party services direct from the Internet. Outlook has been reworked in this edition, with a better interface and more secure email reading. Office Word 2003 is enhanced with a new Reading view, using ClearType technology and automatic page sizing for ease in reading online documents.

Office deserves its position as the leading productivity suite. It's an excellent deal, but makes less sense as an upgrade unless you have a Tablet PC or will make use of the new collaboration, XML or rights-management features. --Tim Anderson

Product Description
Microsoft Office 2003 (Professional Edition) represents a major upgrade to previous versions of the world's most popular suite of software applications. Office 2003 includes new and familiar products, features, and functionality that can help organizations and their employees connect to coworkers, information, and business processes quickly and effectively. Advances in intranet collaboration through integration with the collaboration and information-sharing portal, Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003, enable employees to access and share information both internally and externally. Support for information rights management (IRM) and industry-standard Extensible Markup Language (XML) provide a platform on which to quickly build cost-effective solutions that can have an immediate impact in your business and productivity.

But recently I've stopped using Microsoft Office products altogether, for the simple reason that the latest release of OpenOffice is now every bit as good. It uses open-standard file formats, can read/write Microsoft Office file formats, and is built by a reputable company (Sun Microsystems). It can even write Adobe PDF documents - which is very useful. Most remarkably of all, it costs absolutely nothing! It is a completely free download off the Internet from it's own official web site. It's not even a "trial" version - you get the whole thing for free, to keep.

So take a long look at OpenOffice before you spend any money on Microsoft's offering. You'd be mad not to.


Office 2003 - Very Good   March 3, 2004
45 out of 71 found this review helpful

I recently perchased Office 2003 Professional and WOW it is brilliant. I mainly use Powerpoint but Publisher looks useful and Word just looks nice. I'll do a brief description of all the Office Programmes:

Word 2003 - Word is used for word processing at a higher level than Word Pad or Works' Word Processor. I used to own Word 2000 which was blocky and square but Word 2003 is very nice to use and nice a curved.

Excel 2003 - Excel is a spreadsheet programme. They are cutdown versions in Works and WorksSuite. It is more powerful in Office, you can see why WorksSuite is cheaper. Also it has very good icon. ;-)

Outlook 2003 - Outlook is the full version of Outlook Express. Although in principal it is fairly similar it has some extra features for advanced mail users and a reformed interface.

Powerpoint 2003 - Powerpoint is the presentation/slideshow maker, unfortunately there is no cut-down version in Works and WorksSuite. However it is very useful and looks amazing when you use Custom Animations.

Publisher 2003 - Publisher is for creating Newsletters, Leaflets and Letters. Although you can most of these things in Word is does make it a bit easier. It is not exactly important but might be useful for new users.

Access 2003 - Access is the database, there is a sort of cut-down version in WorksSuite and Works although thats very basic. I haven't really used Access yet, just browsed through it.

There are other programes avalible like Visio and OneNote though these are very expensive addons.


Outlook 2003 Bug   February 16, 2005
36 out of 44 found this review helpful

I bought Office Professional with the specific intention of using Outlook as my email provider. Unfortunately this particular version has a number of bugs and potentially conflicts with Norton antivirus.

The problem is that Outlook from time to time does not send out emails in the Outbox a problem that appears to occur on a random basis, but more often when an email in the outbox is re-edited.

There does not appear to be a fix for this on the Microsoft site and the software developers seem to be unclear how to resolve this problem. After hours of frustation trying to get Outlook to send out a set of emails, I finally gave up and downloaded a free emailing package call Thunderbird from Mozilla, which does all I need.


2003 better than the rest   March 10, 2004
35 out of 39 found this review helpful

This the latest version of Office is the best version that I have seen to date. All the other versions have been unrelible and unstable. This version has corrected most of the bugs that were in office XP. And compared to Office 2000 2003 is much better than this version. Microsoft have also given a new approach to the design of the toolbars and graphics that make this product stand out above all the other versions of office


Overpriced and buggy   November 13, 2003
M. Scott (Great Yarouth)
19 out of 29 found this review helpful

Sorry but although this is the industry standard it is just far too expensive for the home user like me.

I think Microsoft need to realise that 400 pounds for it's office product is just obscene.

It is also buggy and slow and hence I use a version I bought for 20 quid that is Office compatible and is much better.

Way overpriced and I recommend you buy and look elsewhere.