The default options of Office Pro - Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, Publisher and Access - took up 509MB, plus an optional 227MB of installation files. This is small change by today's hard disk sizes but an order of magnitude away from around 200MB of the last Office version we reviewed. And this time around you'll need Windows 2000 SP3 or Windows XP to run Office 2003: it won't run on any earlier versions.
As with Office XP you must activate the product either over the Internet or by phone. Using the former method this took just a few seconds and required no user input beyond a mouseclick. Although we elected to keep our previous version of Office XP (apart from Outlook, which must be upgraded) the installation made an excellent job of preserving the existing settings and customisation.
New look
Although there are no radical surprises in the menus and toolbars, the look of these is considerably changed. Instead of the flat, austere look of Office XP and 2000, the toolbars and menu sidebars are almost tactile, with voluptuous cylindrical curves. Buttons and menu items glow pale orange when the mouse is hovered over them and a deeper orange when pushed in. Apart from the fun factor this makes it a lot easier to see, for example, whether you have bold or rightaligned text selected. Leaving the cosmetic for the technical, the major selling point of Office 2003 can be summarised in three letters - XML. Like HTML this is a mark-up language consisting of tags, but whereas HTML tags are primarily concerned with appearance, such as , XML tags can address content and be defined according to a schema. So, a group of wine traders can define a tag that indicates that the tagged data contains information relating to wine from that region.
Furthermore, documents and other data saved in XML format can be searched by other data-processing engines on the basis of data types rather than just plain words.
The advantages are obvious - it's like finding a flight using a dedicated search engine such as Expedia compared to typing 'flight+gatwick+rome+tuesday' into Google. XML can also be used via web services to do things such as enable an existing ordering software system to talk to a stock-control program either in the same, or across different organisations.
Research
The next new feature is the Research task pane. This is all rather sparse until you activate Office, whereupon it becomes populated with a variety of offand online sources. The former includes the local thesaurus and dictionaries, and the latter includes Microsoft Encarta, Elibrary, Factiva, and Gale Company Profiles. When you perform a search, the Research pane gets populated with short extracts from the results found, grouped under each source with links to the main article.
Although this is an impressive presentation of XML at work, there is rather less to this than meets the eye. Many of the links we tried to Encarta articles, for example, ended in a 'pay to join' screen, although searching Encarta directly from a browser produced the full article for free. Links to Elibrary and Factiva articles also ended at a pay screen, even though many Chunkier toolbars and menus make it easier to see what you're doing citations in the latter were from web pages at the BBC, Observer or Times and could be freely accessed from those sites.
Although you can customise the Research services, you can't just add a site of your choice, such as Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.com) or Google (www.google.com). This is a shame, and a cynic would conclude that this feature is provided not to enrich the knowledge of the user but the coffers of Microsoft's Office marketplace partners. Although unavailable at the time of writing, a deal with Amazon has been announced and a free download will enable users to search Amazon from the Research pane. It will allow copying of book details and cover art into documents, or purchases to be made without having to leave the confines of Office.
Rather better is the translation service provided byWorldlingo. We were able to translate a 3,000-word document into French in a matter of seconds - it returned in an IE window. Apart from the customary howlers of machine translation, it didn't do a bad job, although someone needs to tell it that URLs ending in .co.uk should not become .co.r-u in French. There are many more languages on offer including Greek, Russian and Chinese.
Staying with the Task Pane, inWord, Excel and Powerpoint we have the Shared Workspace pane. This is designed for collaboration, and within its tabs team members can share and update documents, set tasks, schedule meetings and share links to external resources.
Rights
You've long been able to password-protect documents and spreadsheets, either from opened at all or being edited, but Microsoft has taken this a step further with what is grandly named Information Rights Management. This tool, which is only available in the Professional edition or standalone applications, gives the author or administrator of a document the ability to restrict access on a per-user basis, as well as set restrictions on formatting and/or editing all or parts of a document. To implement this to its full extent, your organisation needs a rights management server but, should it not have one, you can sign up for a free trial with Microsoft using a .Net passport.
Word
In addition to the standard Normal, Print Layout, Web and Outline views, Word has a new contender - Reading View. Primarily intended for laptop or tablet users, this isn?t quite as much of a self-parody as it sounds. It hides unnecessary toolbars; optionally displays the document map or the new page thumbnails; ignores the line-wrapping layout and shows the document on a paper-like background. You can still edit text, use the mark-up tools, and zoom to whatever level you find most comfortable - the line wrap changes to suit.
As mentioned earlier, you can save documents in XML format. If you are using the Professional edition of Office (or a standalone copy of Word 2003), you can attach an XML schema to any document from the Templates and Add-ins dialogue.
Unlike the Excel team, Word?s developers have never quite mastered the challenge of arranging two documents side-by-side in the same parent Window. They abandoned the quest in Office 2000, presenting every document as if it was running in a separate instance of the program and, although it?s possible in Office XP, it involves a lot of manual resizing. Word 2003 is somewhat better, with a 'Compare side-by-side' command. Our other pet peeve - the sheer awfulness of the file search interface - stays unimproved and it still takes 10 mouse clicks to drill down to a typical third-level target folder.`
Excel
Apart from the common ground of XML, Rights Management and Shared Workspace, Excel users have a few more treats. Smart Documents work like supercharged templates and can be used in an expenses claim, for example, to fill in form fields that it 'knows' about, such as your name and department and, when you've filled in the details, send itself to your boss.
There's improved list functionality that integrates with the shared workspace; improvement to statistical functions such as CRITBINOM and HYPGEOMDIST for those who appreciate such things; and as with Word, the option to view workbooks side by side.
Powerpoint
Powerpoint boasts a long-awaited update to the standalone viewer, which runs on Windows 98 or later. There?s a CD packager that works in conjunction with the Windows XP burner or with third-party software on Windows 2000. A new slideshow toolbar features tools for pen annotation and highlighting, as well as navigation buttons. Finally, users have the same Information Rights Management and Shared Workspace features seen in Word and Excel.
Access
Access sees a number of minor improvements including the enabling of the Smart Tags seen in Word and Excel XP. You can view information on dependencies between database objects, both upwards and downwards. There's automatic error checking in forms and reports, for things such as two controls using the same keyboard shortcut. There's also automatic propagation of field properties, so when you modify the properties of an inherited field, controls bound to that field can be updated accordingly. There?s also a useful backup feature that lets you save a 'justin- case' version of a database before making major changes.
Outlook
Outlook is definitely the pampered child of the family in terms of care and attention. First, it has had a complete visual makeover, as our screenshot (right) shows. When reading mail, for instance, the screen is split into three columns. On the left the Navigation pane shows a list of mail folders, as well as navigation buttons to go to other parts of Outlook. The central pane shows a list of items in the current folder and on the right is a reading pane, which replaces the former preview pane. It not only shows more text but, like Word's Reading Layout view, does so with an emphasis on readability. You can still double-click an item to display it in a separate window, but you may well find you never need to.
Outlook's enhancements are more than cosmetic. There's an option to block external content in messages. This will stop your PC 'phoning home' to access a graphic stored on the sender's server, for example. Although this can be enough of a nuisance in its own right, the blocking also deals with another undesirable - the web bug or beacon. These are tiny graphics which send a request to the sender's server which can be logged. They can be used to return information such as the IP address of the computer, the time and duration of the reading and other information that you may well consider is none of the sender's business.
Another very welcome improvement is a junk email filter which uses technology developed by Microsoft Research to evaluate whether a message should be treated as junk spam. Such messages aren't deleted but moved to their own folder and you can add rules to consign (or rescue) messages on a per-sender basis.
Other enhancements include 'Quick Flags' - if you don't have time to answer an important email right away, quick flagging it will put it in a 'For follow-up' folder. Threading is improved with an 'Arrange By Conversation' option; you can view calendars side-by-side; extract messages to 'Search Folders' on a variety of criteria, and a load more things we just don't have space to tell you about.
The deals
The Standard and Student/Teacher editions comprise Word, Excel, Outlook and Powerpoint. The Small Business edition adds Publisher and the Outlook Business Contacts Manager, and the Professional edition adds Access to the mix, as well as additional support for Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Information Rights Management (IRM). The Professional Enterprise edition, only available for volume licensing, also includes Infopath, which is a tool for designing and filling out forms. As with Office XP the web-design application, Office Frontpage, is a separate purchase, as is the rather fine Tablet/PDA/PC note-taking and sketching application, Onenote.
Other buy-alone members of the Office System family include Visio 2003 for diagrams and Project 2003 for project management.
Pricing
As is customary, Microsoft was unable to confirm recommended UK prices. However, at the time of writing www.amazon.co.uk was offering the following prices. Note that all upgrades require Office 97 or later (any edition) or Works 6 or later. All prices include VAT at 17.5 per cent:
I f you have a copy of Office XP purchased between 14 August 2003 and 30 November 2003 then you can upgrade to the equivalent 2003 edition for just £10. In addition, for another £35 you can jump from Office XP Standard to Office 2003 Small Business edition.
Should you upgrade?
Microsoft derives nearly 90 per cent of its Office revenue from corporates and other large organisations. So it is not surprising that the main improvements in this version of Office - XML, Information Rights Management and Document Workspaces - are designed to be 'must haves' at this level. For the rest of us who aren't going to be rushing to define our own XML schemas or aren't too concerned with restricting the contents of our documents, then the pickings are slimmer.
Outlook, however, is a notable exception - the improvements here are considerable, and should be welcomed by all end users. Unfortunately though, the other main new feature - the Research pane - is a great disappointment as it currently stands. It could be a very useful and versatile tool, but its present implementation does little more than turn Office into adware.
Contact: Microsoft 0870 601 0100
www.microsoft.com/uk
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