Customer Reviews

Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 Upgrade [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

The beta version arrived at my house, was installed, and had lots of bells and whistles. Fancy colors, buttons, etc. However, I am not sure that the changes are worth the kind of cash proposed by Microsoft's suggested retail price. Word, Access and Excel are basically the same programs as XP, Powerpoint has a few nicer features (it always has had nice features), and Outlook does have some data management not previously available. As a small business operator, I have found it much easier to track business contacts, emails, etc. I also have a FrontPage designed website. The new FrontPage has a nifty "split" screen which allows you to look at your HTML coding along with the actual published page, both at the same time. The new FrontPage also makes general HTML tagging, coding, and changing much more user friendly. However, it suffers from the traditional Microsoft misery; namely, the online help is virtually useless. This is also true for Publisher. You will spend lots of frustrating moments with both of those programs.

...

I have been using office since 1992 and frankly I was getting a little tired of the same look and feel. Well, after win xp came out I knew it was only a matter of time before Microsoft made office look and feel more lively.

Well, as soon as the beta version became available in June I purchased my copy of the 2003 Office and the whole bundle of the other products. I was a little reluctant to use the beta version for safety and stability reasons but I have to say that except for FrontPage 2003, ALL other software is 100% stable as a beta version. This only goes to show that the product really was programmed well.

Not a lot of change in the word and excel except for a few new things. However, outlook now looks fantastic and is incredibly productive. What a wonderful change... The look and feel of outlook is finally modernized and it is very useful in the office. I am CEO of a small company and we always struggled to keep a good track of our customers. With outlook 2003' contact manager that is now a snap. For example, every time you send an email to a client that you have previously registered in outlook as a customer, the email automatically becomes attached to that account. So, tomorrow you can just go the customers account and you will see all the emails they sent you and the ones you sent them all in one place. I love that!
PowerPoint has also gotten nicer. Many more transitions and themes. All around PowerPoint has always been a good piece of software and you can't fix something if it ain't broken.
Access looks great too. I think outlook and access both got a lot of things changed. I must say we use mysql for our company but if you are an access person, you will like the changes.
All and all I would absolutely recommend a change if you have a 2000 or older version of office. BUT if you are happy with your office xp now, really don't waste your money in this poor economy.
Hope this helps!

Let me tell you, I've used every version of Office that's been released since 1995, and this edition is by far the best one yet.
I was quite dissapointed with Office XP, luckily lots of problems have been fixed in this new version. First of all, all the programs that come with office load MUCH faster. It use to take nearly a minute to open word or excel, now they open in under 30 seconds.
Also, they have reintroduced Publisher as part of the main packages. Publisher, since I am a student who makes lots of paper creative design projects, was one of the most useful programs on my computer before the upgrade to Office XP. I was devastated when Microsoft pulled it from Office. I suppose I wasn't alone because it's back and better than before.
Along the same lines, Outlook has received it's first major update since 2000. In fact, it is now easy enough to use that I actually have picked it over Outlook Express (a personal first).
Overall, I must say that Office 2003 makes Office XP look like a train wreck of a program. I must recommend Office 2003 to anyone who uses Office of any edition, but especially to those who use XP because they have no idea how much they're missing.
Welcome to the future of Office.

I really like this new version of Microsoft Office. Like previous upgrades, there isn't too much of a difference in Excel and Word other than a few things, it is Outlook which has the largest improvements. I really like the new look as it uses "screen real-estate" much more efficiently. The Junk E-Mail filters are better than in previous editions (much better!) and I had no problems working with my previous PST files. Also, the ability to send busy and free times to people not on Exchange is really nice.

However, I do like the changes in Word and Excel, especially as it comes to sharing with other users. It is nice to have control over what is shared and what isn't shared. The improved digital signature is a fantastic benefit as well.

And Access. I use Access all the time for my personal databases. I was really concerned that this might be an upgrade like how 2000 was to 97 where you would need to convert everything over and it wouldn't be backwards compatible. Thank goodness everything is backwards compatible. That is a real life saver. The backup feature is excellent as well!!

My hats off to Microsoft for another great product!!

As far as features, I agree with much of what's been covered in the other reviews. There's much to like in this program; however, I've installed the upgrade on two different machines (the Small Business version on a Dell Dimension 8200 desktop, and the Professional version on an IBM T40 Thinkpad); upon intallation IE6 immediately began generating run-time errors. I've been using IE since it was first introduced and never had experienced a single run-time error; now I get them constantly. In checking the Microsoft support sites for both Office and IE, I found I'm not alone in experiencing this phenomena. It's extremely annoying, and the standard response from MS is: "it's probably due to spyware". Well, I've been running Spybot and AdAware for over a year, and my machines report no spyware (the Thinkpad is only a week old), but the problem persists (and didn't exist until I installed this upgrade). I can only conclude that any spyware causing these problems must be embeded in the upgrade!

So, beware of the potential for IE6 run-time errors if you install Office 2003. Also, if you use Act! (or a similar program) that runs on top of Outlook, you'll find that a supposed new security feature in Outlook requires you to manually permit Act to retrieve e-mail from Outlook every time new mail arrrives. It's a real pain!!!

To summarize, there's not enough in this upgrade to justify putting up with these problems (or features, in Microsoft parlance), and I wouldn't have upgraded had I known what I was in for.

Outlook 2003 is a fantastic product, especially for those using Exchange Server remotely. The caching mode makes it alone worth the money for just Outlook. Email triage is also top notch. The rest of Office 2003 is a snoozer though. Very difficult to tell what is new from Office XP or in many cases, Office 2000.

After having used Offfice XP Pro, in particular, Word, Excel, and Access, I have nothing but praise for a better refined UI. The package seems to operate extremely well in the Windows XP Pro environment. I cannot say the same; however, for the Windows 2000 Pro environment. I was very frustrated by numerous "hangs" while processing and from the multiple program crashes that occured in MS Word on a document that ran about 93 pages and heavily laden with charts. The older version of MS Word (Office XP) never had this problem. I cringed four times in 3 hours as i watched the "Do you want to send an error report to Microsoft" come up within a couple of hours.

The upside to this is that every document was recovered fully each time that this occured in Word. I have not experienced any problems in Excel or Access yet.

My outlook is that it is probably more cautious to install this on Windows XP machines and not Windows 2000. Too much dissruption of workflow with the numerous crashes.

I am writing with reference to Office 2003 Standard in both Upgrade and Full (non upgrade) versions.

The upgrade CD would not accept the 25 alpha numeric `product ID' key. It would take 4 characters then jump to the next box. It would not allow you to return to the previous box and back fill the missing letter or number. In short, you could not ever enter the correct product ID. I can't say more about this version as I could not get past this point.

The Full (non upgrade) version seemed more stable. It accepted the `product ID' key at least but that is where the problems began.

The first problem I had was that in PowerPoint there was no preview. Sure enough, less than 30 days out and there was a critical upgrade to fix this problem.

I went to the Microsoft Update page to download it. It failed several times. I then contacted Microsoft Technical support. This is a known problem and you must download (at least for now) all updated to your local hard drive and install from there. If they don't solve this problem, its going to be a major problem when there are more than a few updates for Office 2003 available.

I also started to receive `run time error messages' when I used Microsoft Internet Explorer. Microsoft technical support says this is not an Office 2003 issue, but an Operating System issue. Sure it is! I did not have this problem before I installed Office 2003. The resolution was to disable all Third Party devices (such as the Google tool bar), and remove some other things as well.

The new Outlook interface looks great, but what good is a great looking interface if it does not work?

For some reason, email sent using Outlook 2003 is identified as `Spam' by several spam filtering programs, including Spam Assassin. I found this out when some people I was sending email to did not reply. I telephoned one of them and said they had not received any email form me. They then checked and found it in the `spam' folder. Here is the error message that Outlook 2003 generated:

> Content analysis details: (5.70 points, 5 required)
> FORGED_YAHOO_RCVD (2.7 points) 'From' yahoo.com does not match 'Received'
> headers
> MSG_ID_ADDED_BY_MTA_2 (0.8 points) 'Message-Id' was added by a relay
> (2) FORGED_MUA_OUTLOOK (2.2 points) Forged mail pretending to be from
> MS Outlook MISSING_OUTLOOK_NAME (0.0 points) Message looks like
> Outlook, but isn't

This is also a known problem to Microsoft Technical Support. The fix is to turn off all firewall and virus protection and to remove some networking package updates. I tried this but it still did not solve the problem. It remains unresolved.

I had more problems but I think this illustrates the point that this product was just released to soon.

If you enjoy `bleeding edge' technology, this is for you. If you are looking for something that works without `bleeding edge' features (bugs or problems) then take to heart the advice I was given by Microsoft Technical Support; ". . . I usually wait 6 months after a release before I upgrade. By then most of the major problems have been resolved."

Sage Advice!

As for me, I am returning to an earlier edition of Office at least for a while.

Here is the phone number for Microsoft Technical Support. If you buy this product right now, you are going to need it: 1-888-346-5229

Martina

I had my first look at Office 2003 while it was still in Beta - which was kind of buggy (mostly Outlook) - but the production release of Office 2003 is well worth the money, and seems very stable. I upgraded from Office 2000 sp4, and find that Office 2003 has tighter integration, more functionality, better filters and rules in Outlook, and incredible prospects with the XML function set that enables easy exchange of information with other platforms and systems.

The Business Contact Manager in Outlook makes keeping track of your suppliers and customers easier than ever! Just register the contact as a business in Outlook, and all documentation created through Outlook is automatically attached to their business profile - basically creating a one stop data pool for each registered business client.

I use SQL, mySQL, and Access as data tools, and find the XML functionality in Access is great for moving data from one format to another. It's also very useful for creating data driven XML documents for use in front ends built with Flash MX.

While Word and Excel are pretty much the same, with a few added bells and whistles, the newer functionalities in Outlook and Access make my life easier and definitely pay for the upgrade in saved time.

Amazon offers the lowest price out there (beleive me when I tell I've looked around) on the upgrade. Add the availability of rebate offers through Amazon, and you really can't go wrong.

Happy computing!
Boc
Get a Life Style!
http://www.getalifestyle.org

If you use Microsoft Office in you daily work you are going to love this latest version of Office Professional.
Folks who use the water-down free-ware that's available get exactly what they pay for!
There are too many advances beyond Office XP Professional for me to attempt a worthy list. My favorite improvement so far(installed less than 24 hours ago) is the Reseach tool allowing me to immediately look up words in a dictionary, thesarus, or various websites and in several different languages. Its nice that results appear in a side-bar. This is an extremely powerful feature.