Microsoft Office 2003: First Look

Richard H. Wiggins, III, MD has reported no financial interest, arrangement or affiliation with a commercial organization that may have a direct or indirect influence in the subject matter of this presentation.

Objectives

1. Understand the options for productivity software suites.
2. Learn some of the new features in Micorsoft Office 2003.
3. Learn the software packages included in Microsoft Office 2003 suites.

Introduction

Microsoft's newest version of the Microsoft Office suite is the 2003 Edition (otherwise known as Office version 11). This productivity desktop suite of software has a new look and offers some new task panes, and further integration of the software programs.

Unlike some other software packages from Microsoft, this one was actually released in the year of its name: on October 21, 2003. In a continuing effort to describe this as multiple integrated software applications, Microsoft calls this the Microsoft Office System, instead of the old Microsoft Office name. But this suite requires Windows 2000 or XP. Clearly, Microsoft is focusing on collaboration here, and therefore, on the Enterprise, not the average home user. The short answer about if most users should upgrade or not is "probably not". Most of these big new features are geared for the Enterprise users, and will have no big effect on most home users. If, however, you are a Mac user, and want your Windows computers to look more like Aqua, as with prior releases, the Graphical User Interface (GUI) of Microsoft software looks more and more like the Macintosh GUI. Notably, some of the software in prior editions, like InfoPath, FrontPage, Project, and Visio are not in any of these packages.

Microsoft is even willing to let you have a trial version of the applications, so you can get a taste for them here: http://www.microsoft.com/office/trial/default.mspx, for shipping costs of the CD, that is…

There are different editions of the 2003 suite of software, with different combinations of the software included with the Microsoft Office suites:

The Standard Edition and the Student and Teacher Editions have similar software included, but the Student and Teacher edition is less than half the cost, can be loaded on up to 3 different computers, and is for noncommercial use only. The additional support (last row above) included with the Professional Edition is additional support for eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and Information Rights Management (IRM). You can find out more information about these editions from Microsoft here: http://www.microsoft.com/office/editions/howtobuy/compare.mspx

The additional support in the Professional Edition focuses on the XML support. XML is an Internet language that uses standard tags within files to index, search, combine, and reuse text, often in conjunction with a shared data server. For example, a Web site might use XML sales data from an Excel file to display the most current information, which sounds great if you are a large enterprise, but not so much for most home users, small businesses, and many midsize companies.

Getting Started

For the Office Professional Edition, you will need at least a Pentium 233 MHz CPU (I would recommend at least 500 MHz), 128 MB RAM (I think at least 512MB), and 400 MB hard drive space, as well as Windows 2000 or XP. The initial installation for Office 2003 has not changed significantly since Office XP. You can choose which of the software applications you want to install, or just do everything:

The complete installation of the suite may take up from 300 - 600 MB of hard drive space, depending on disk formatting settings. The Product Activation scheme is still there, and it just takes a few seconds to activate Online, or if you are the suspicious type, you can call a number, and through speech recognition, read off your product ID numbers to a computer that will check everything, and give you a bunch of random numbers to put in to activate Office, all without talking to a real person! The Student and Teacher Edition will let you install on up to three different computers, but if you are still running Win 98/ME/NT, you are out of luck with this suite; Windows 2000 or XP is required.

Applications

The three big applications in Office remain Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, but there are no really big additions in this version to make most people want to run out and get it. There is a new interesting Research Library feature that can help with looking up complicated words:

It even has a translation section, like having Google, Merriam-Webster, and Babel Fish all in one! This can be opened from any of the applications, through the right mouse pop-up window, by going to "look up", and contains direct access to a dictionary, a thesaurus, translation services, MSN Search, MSN Money Stock Quotes, and the Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia.

Word 2003 now includes a Reading Mode, that looks like Print preview, but will let you edit the text in that mode, and a Compare side by side function (also in Excel) that will let you scroll 2 documents side by side, like associating a new and old T2 series and scrolling through them together in PACS:

Word also has some improved tracking and annotation tools. New to this version of Word is the ability to limit editing and formatting abilities of others who look at your document. The reviewing toolbar and markup balloons were present in Word XP, but are improved in Word 2003.

Excel 2003 now offers enhancements with functions in charts, with collinearity detection, calculations of sum of squared deviations, normal distributions and continuous probability distribution functions. Some of these higher math functions never worked correctly in earlier versions, reportedly due to a "rounding off" that Microsoft would do, but that is supposedly correctly in Excel 2003. These applications and Access now all support Smart Tags that mark certain things for future quick reference.

PowerPoint 2003 has some new features, including a PowerPoint package option for CD presentations, so that the recipient inserts the CD into their CD drive, the presentation automatically launches in slide-show mode using the improved PowerPoint Viewer. The new PowerPoint also has additional support for play list formats and playback of full-screen video. A user can now play video full screen and use playback to stop, start, rewind, or find screens from within a slide show. Reportedly, supported file types include ASX, WMX, M3U, WVX, WAX, and WMA, and if a media codec is not available, PowerPoint and Windows Media Player will attempt to download it. And they still have the great Office assistants!:

If you like viruses, um… I mean Outlook; there are some new things in the latest software here. There are new tools and a new navigation bar, and better spam support. Technically the software from MacAfee and Norton will block more SPAM, but we could all use a little help here, huh? There are also come customizable new features in the new Outlook:

Outlook also now will show pop-up alerts when new mail arrives, allowing the user to see a snippet of the message and open it from the pop-up, similar to the Alert in Novell GroupWise. There is also improved calendars and scheduling in the new version of Outlook.

The new Microsoft Publisher 2003 has some new Web page design wizards, with an interface similar to PowerPoint:

There are also new changes in the more complex Web page builder from Microsoft, Microsoft FrontPage, such as improved XML support, but it is not included in these packages.

The new Information Rights Management (IRM) technology lets creators of Office documents and Outlook e-mail messages determine who gets permission to edit a file, forward e-mail, or pass along an Office file attachment, but that is only in the Professional Edition. For some of the new more advanced collaborative functions in Office, you will need to pay, and get one of Microsoft's two current intranet portal offerings, Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services (free with Windows Server 2003) or the full-fledged Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 ($3,999 per server plus $71 per user). One of these is a shared workspace, similar to using Microsoft NetMeeting:

There are also improved Digital Signatures, and File password encryption, with Microsoft CryptoAPI standard (present in Office XP, but improved in 2003), which is now also included with PowerPoint. There are also improved Online assistants, through Office Online services, so you can connect to the Microsoft home office even easier now!

Conclusion: To Upgrade, or not to Upgrade…

Well, this is a hard question to answer for everyone, as always with new software. If you are a geek, and feel like you have to have the latest versions of everything that is out, then you should definitely upgrade, there are some new little things here that look like they may be helpful. I will let you know my viewpoint next year, in the follow-up "Second Look" article on Office. There are always alternatives, like WordPerfect Office 11, from Corel: http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=Corel2/Products/Home&pid=1047022702409, and StarOffice from Sun Microsystems: http://wwws.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/. But be warned, both of these office software suites may have some loss of data when trying to save files in a Microsoft office format, which may be a big problem if you are working with others that have only the Microsoft office software suite. For the Enterprise that is looking for a collaborative suite of software that will incorporate XML and allow increased abilities with document sharing, Microsoft Office Systems is here for you, but for the average home user, this is not a big change from Office XP, with the few exceptions above. There are some neat additions that may improve efficiency and productivity a small amount, but no big startling reasons to upgrade here.

References:

ZDNet review: http://reviews-zdnet.com.com/MS_Office/4520-3513_16-5092597-1.html ?tag=prmo1

CNet Review: http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-3513_7-5092597.html?tag=txt

PCWorld Review: http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,112030,00.asp

PCMagazine Review: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1273050,00.asp

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