The undisputed market leader in office suites for over a decade, Microsoft rewards, or depending on your point of view, taxes, its faithful with regular upgrades.

In the Professional version reviewed here, you'll find Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook (with Business Contact Manager), Access and Publisher.

There are various other editions, ranging from an OEM-only Word-Excel-Outlook trio to the top-of-the-range Enterprise, which adds Infopath to the Professional line-up. You'll find full details if you click on the URL at the end of this review. Office 2003 will only run on Windows 2000 with Service Pack 3 or Windows XP.

The first thing you'll notice about Word - and the rest of the suite - is that Microsoft has abandoned its widely imitated flat-button look in favour of something more voluptuous, with curvaceous toolbars and buttons that glow orange when pressed.

Under the skin, however, the arrangement and function of its default toolbars and menus has changed little over the past decade, despite a steady influx of new features.

Most of what you need is stored in two toolbars, but there are others, which can either be switched on manually for tasks such as drawing shapes, or will appear automatically when, for example, you insert a picture. All this is configurable: you can alter the menus, toolbars and keystrokes to suit how you work.

DTP options
Word has near-DTP capabilities for page layout and design - you'll find newspaper-style columns, dropped caps, text-wrapping around graphics and a set of drawing tools and shapes that are practically an application in themselves.

You can link frames of text, just as in DTP programs, so that a story can flow from one frame to a non-contiguous one. Document organisation is also well catered for, with nested numbering of headings and subheadings; footnotes and endnotes; indexes and cross-references; and tables of contents, figures and authorities.

The 2003 version brings some new features to Word. First, in common with the rest of the suite, you can save and open files in XML format. As HTML tags are to formatting, XML tags are to content, and you can create custom schemas of tags that relate to a sphere of activity such as trading stocks or supplying spare parts.

The other main innovation for large organisations is Information Rights Management, which lets document authors control viewing and editing rights via Windows Server 2003.

Word also gets a new, eyeball-friendly reading view and the task panes of Office XP are joined by the Research Pane, which adds access to various on- and offline reference sources.

There's a variety of proofing tools, such as spell check, and a customisable autocorrect feature to rectify common spelling mistakes. There's a similar feature (without autocorrect) for grammar, but this, like most of its kind, is unreliable. The thesaurus is also poor, having undergone an Orwellian purge of potentially offensive words.

Word has various tools for automating tasks. As with all word processors, there's a mail-merge feature for sending out personalised circulars, and an Autotext feature for inserting chunks of frequently used text.

Throughout the suite is the VBA macro language, which can be used for simple automation tasks, such as carrying out a sequence of commands, to solutions for corporate environments.

Many of these features can be turned off, but other irritations prevail: the Word development team lost the plot with tiling documents in the same window two versions ago, though Excel has no such problems, and searching your folders for a document containing a word or phrase is appallingly awkward.

Excel stores your data in tables called worksheets, each having a maximum size of 256 columns and 65,536 rows. Each cell in a sheet can contain text, such as column headings or item descriptions; figures such as dates or costs; or calculations based on the contents of other cells.

You can use simple numeric operators or any of over 300 ready-made functions and formulae. Having entered your data, you have a huge variety of ways of visualising it, with over 70 types of chart ranging from simple bar and line graphs to high-low-close stock prices.

Database wizards
Access takes a lot of terror away from relational databases by the use of wizards.

The basic matter of a database is a set of tables consisting of columns of fields - such as name, address, phone number - and rows of records, such as Smith, Jones and Robinson.

When you create a new database, the wizard offers you a choice of over 40 typical tables for home and business use, and you can select the fields. Having done that, the wizard creates a primary key for the table - a unique identifier, like a car number plate - then creates the table.

You can then add records to your table by typing them in directly or by filling in a form, which the wizard will create for you.

There are also wizards to help construct queries and reports on your data, and the sample Northwinds database gives an opportunity to experiment.

Powerpoint, Microsoft's presentation creator, also features a lot of wizardry. If you choose the Autocontent Wizard, you get a choice of presentation topics, such as 'Project overview' or 'Reporting bad news'. These generate a set of slides offering subtopics and suggestions, which you replace with your own text, charts, and graphics.

Open the Design Task Pane, and you'll find a generous set of templates, colour schemes and animations, which you can apply piecemeal or to the whole presentation.

One feature that lifts Powerpoint above its rivals is that the workspace can be split three ways, with room for the current slide, the presentation outline or slide thumbnails, and the speaker's notes.

Microsoft Outlook brings together contacts, calendar, email and task lists. This version has had a major visual redesign, so everything fits neatly into place.

Click on one of the buttons to the left, and the main window shows email or appointments, with other navigational aids, such as a list of email folders or a monthly calendar tucked in above the buttons. There are several different ways you can view items, and you can create your own 'Outlook today' page combining lists of mail folders, tasks and appointments.

There's a lot of automation in Outlook, with messages sorting themselves into various folders according to sender, size and other criteria.

Outlook has become so entrenched as the de facto standard for email and organisation that it has little competition - even Corel has ditched its rival product. However, its very success is also its vulnerability, and it's a juicy target for virus writers, spammers and hackers.

Whereas nothing can prevent terminal stupidity, Outlook 2003 does have some good safety features. It will block access to potentially unsafe attachments received and, by default, it won't retrieve images stored as links in email messages that phone home to their place of origin. There's the option to encrypt outgoing messages and a configurable junk email filter.

If you want to go beyond the DTP or web-page capabilities of Word, then Publisher, included in the Professional edition, offers hundreds of ready-made designs - all you need to do is to replace the sample text and graphics.

Even though it's expensive, Office is still top of the pile and wins our Editor's Choice award.

Contact: Microsoft 0870 601 0100
www.microsoft.com/uk/office

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