Microsoft Office 2003 Professional

Reviewed by: Howard Carson, October 2004 Published by: Microsoft Corporation Requires: Pentium II or faster CPU, 128MB RAM, Microsoft Windows 98 or later, 1GB free hard disk space MSRP: US$599.00 The time has come to purchase an office suite less for its features and functions than for its ability to fully integrate all of your office document and communication needs in one place. Controlled sharing of documents within workgroups is also a crucial need in most networked business environments. Competitors abound, but Microsoft Office continues to lead the way toward increasingly more robust integration. Unifying and controlled access to spreadsheets, word processor documents, presentations, databases, schedules, outlines and projects is easily achieved by giving your office over to Microsoft's sometimes not-so-tender mercies. At the end of any working day however, the measure of the value of any office suite of software resides in the degree to which it helped you and your people get their work done. Microsoft Office 2003 Professional, from the ground up, is designed to work hard and relatively efficiently, creating exchangeable, protected, secure office documents using broadly compatible and usable design, input, formatting and communications methods to set up, create, print, transmit, store and secure all of the information created and used in your business. That, in any case, is the theory. The reality is somewhat different. I've been using Microsoft Office in a variety of capacities since 1995. I love it and I hate it. I love it for what it does well, but I hate it for all of its (to me) useless bloat that can't be completely turned off or put out of sight. I love it for its ubiquity and broad document exchange capabilities, but I hate it for the absence of features which are important to me. I've grown increasingly frustrated by Office's seemingly endless parade of document security holes. I've never personally suffered any losses because of a Microsoft Office document security problem, but the technical maintenance overhead resulting from the need to regularly check and update Office has worn my patience mighty thin lately. Bill Gates and Microsoft are making big money, but I have to take time away from my own money making efforts to continually update and repair Microsoft's products. What's wrong with that picture?

I'll forgive some of Office 2003's excesses because of the inclusion of nifty new tools such as OneNote, Microsoft's new note-taking and information gathering tool (terrific on a Tablet PC where the Tablet's pen and ink capability can be brought to bear, but great also on a notebook or desktop computer). I love the concept behind OneNote, but I hate the fact that it's a crappy tool for creating project outlines as part of a project setup process—Microsoft still doesn't have a decent outlining tool, sad to say. Equally new and even more useful, InfoPath 2003 (included with the Office 2003 Professional Enterprise Edition) is a useful little business program built on Microsoft's new XML development platform (not that you should care about the technical details mind you) and is designed to connect directly to organizational information and act on it. Designed more for medium and larger business environments, InfoPath is used to gather, collate and generally manage digital information for the purpose of creating a base of information supporting specific projects. I've used it successfully for structuring and exchanging information within research projects, but InfoPath has many more uses. I love the potential of InfoPath, but I hate parts of the implementation and the requirement for a serious database backend in order to fully use it in the first place. The new Research Pane arrayed to the right of the working document window is also a Jekyll & Hyde proposition. I love the presence of the research pane within a working environment, but I hate the fact that you can search with any search engine as long as it's MSN Search. Grrrr. The new Reading Layout view makes it easy to flip through documents of any size and I love the accessibility it provides. I hate its viewing limitations. I love Excel's continuing power and large spreadsheet handling, but I hate its dated and rudimentary looking 3D charts and graphs.

World wide business concerns about copyright violation, document theft and intellectual property management, have pushed Microsoft into developing the Information Rights Management (IRM) technology built into Office 2003. It's designed to help companies control documents and e-mail. Office 2003 Professional can be used to create protected e-mail messages, Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents that can't be printed, forwarded or copied. After using similar third-party utilities of questionable value for many years, this is a very welcome improvement and for many offices will be the main reason to upgrade to Office 2003.

Outlook's interface has been dramatically improved and also now features something called the Business Contact Manager (BCM) which functions as a reasonably robust customer relationship management (CRM) tool. BCM can track sales contacts from inception to closing, track new research contacts from first meeting until the end of a project (as I use it), and generally performs all of the basic functions of a thoughtfully designed CRM program. It works well and you will use it, unless you're already using a dedicated CRM program such as ACT!, Goldmine or Maximizer. The rest of Outlook is improved as well. The new spam filtering works well and is regularly updated with new filtering profiles. The default four pane view works well, but the viewing pane remains a dangerous feature in this day and age of virus-ridden spam. Virulent spam not caught by your antivirus and antispam filtering will display automatically in the viewer pane, so I recommend it be turned on only in mail folders which are known to be safe. Aside from that, Outlook remains the most powerful e-mail tool for business desktops of all kinds.

Cons: This monster of a resource hog does not have a lot to offer in terms of improved functionality compared to Office XP. In fact, unless you a) need to make use of the new Reading Layout view, b) do research from inside active Word or Excel documents, or c) spend a lot of time using a Tablet PC, there's not much to recommend Office 2003 Professional over Office XP. The proofing tools are still not intelligent enough to be useful to anyone except novice writers and editors. I still despise Outlook's popular contact management and scheduler, despite its powerful workgroup and network and Exchange Server integration. Microsoft is the biggest target on the block—in the world actually, at least where software is concerned—which also means that it is a focal point for every virus writer, script kiddie, and digital vandal on the planet. Install Microsoft Office 2003 Professional, then almost immediately begin an interminable process of downloading and installing security updates and service packs. The whole situation is maddening and serves to ruin what should be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. anything that costs this much money, should not be so onerous to install and use. IRM-encoded documents will only work with the distributable viewer or other installations of Office 2003; web-formatted documents are viewable only in Internet Explorer. If you're already using Office XP, upgrade Outlook only because the improvements in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access just aren't worth the cost of the upgrade. Wait for Office 12. For small business users upgrading to Office 2003, it's worthwhile primarily if you can make extensive use of Business Contact Manager and Publisher's New Publications Task Pane, but if you're using mainly Word, Excel, Access and PowerPoint, forget about it—upgrade Outlook only. OneNote's integration with Microsoft's average handwriting recognition is daunting for many Tablet PC applications. Despite Microsoft's entry into the desktop search sweepstakes (with its MSN Toolbar and MSN Desktop Search utilities), Outlook's own search function is still dumbfoundingly slow.

Pros: Love it or hate it, Microsoft Office is the mother of all office suites and has worn that distinction for many years. Corel WordPerfect Office Professional cannot boast the powerful workgroup features and functions so thoroughly integrated throughout Microsoft Office 2003. In contrast as well, OpenOffice, while powerful enough for the vast majority of home-office and very small office users, is simply not in the same power league as Microsoft Office. Lotus Notes, as a medium to enterprise size business product certainly has its adherents, but compared to Microsoft Office remains an engineering, configuration, installation and maintenance mountain scalable only by a phalanx of IS/IT staff. Outlook remains a much better choice than CorelCentral for contact management, personal communications, workgroup and network interaction, and scheduling. With the addition of Business Contact Manager, Outlook has stepped up into true customer relationship management. Play full screen videos within PowerPoint presentations, which finally makes PowerPoint a truly multimedia application. The New Publications Task Pane in Publisher now makes it much easier to format documents for print or web sites. Word and Excel remain responsive and generally intuitive for experienced Office users. New document security features enhance both business security and long term document accuracy and stability. OneNote's usefulness is delightful as long as you stick to typed input and it automatically saves notes so you never lose anything—a nice standalone or integrated addition to Office 2003. As I stated before, Bill Gates and Microsoft are making big money, but I have to take time away from my own money making efforts to continually update and repair Microsoft's products. The good news is that viable, less burdensome and less expensive home-office and small office alternatives abound including OpenOffice and WordPerfect Office. Stick with Microsoft Office 2003 Professional only if you truly need all of its considerable power. If you're already using Office XP, upgrade Outlook only.

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