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

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.


Excellent   January 7, 2006
J. Parr (Preston, England)
7 out of 12 found this review helpful

I have been using Office since I can remember (well, Uni from 95-98 anyway!) and this seems the best most intuitive version of Office yet. I have Office Premium with Visio which I use for both my studies and work and can honestly say I have never experienced a problem with any bugs in it; and documents produced work fine on my works PC which has Office 2000 installed. I don't use Outlook as I have on-line access to my works email account which is all I use, so I can't comment on it. The other apps are impressive though. It could be beneficial for them to sort out the Options dialog box in each individual application but that is only a small issue! It is a lot of money granted, but I would have no hesitation in recommending it


Outlook 2003 Bug   February 16, 2005
37 out of 45 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.