Microsoft Gives
You a Whole New Outlook on Office:
Microsoft Office System
Software; Software Review; Product/Service
Evaluation
By Gregg Keizer
MICROSOFT HAS RELEASED not just a new version of Microsoft
Office, but a family of interrelated applications called Microsoft Office System, made up
of the various versions of Office 2003.
This time, however, Office isn't a must-have upgrade for
the average home user, because most of its new features will benefit only large
enterprises.
The $399 Standard Edition features Word, Excel, PowerPoint,
and Outlook, as does the Student and Teacher Edition at its relatively low price of $149,
a great option for those families with students. Small businesses should check out the
$449 Small Business Edition, which adds the often-overlooked Publisher, while the $499
Professional Edition also features Access.
Office retains Microsoft's controversial product-activation
process, the antipiracy scheme that debuted in Office XP. Product activation locks Office
to a specific computer and requires reactivation if you need to reinstall the software.
Although Microsoft relaxed its licensing requirements for the Student and Teacher Edition,
letting you install that version on up to three different Windows machines, all of the
other retail editions allow installations on only two computers.
Of all the core applications within Office, only Outlook
received a total makeover. It looks quite different: The preview pane now shows twice as
much of a message as before, and the main interface features a much-improved navigation
bar at the left, as well as several, new tools.
Outlook's junk-e-mail filter is perhaps the most important
new feature. It didn't trap every piece of junk mail in out tests, however. Third-party
products from McAfee and Symantec do a much better job, stopping between 90 and 95 percent
of spam, while Outlook nabbed only 80 to 85 percent.
Additional new Outlook tools group messages and replies
into conversational threads, quick-flag messages for later follow-up, and customize views
to show, for example, all messages from the last week or all those with attachments from
John Doe. When new mail arrives, Outlook now displays small desktop alerts that show the
sender, the subject, and a small slice of text. The alerts then allow you to open the
message on the desktop, flag it, or delete it without pulling up the entire Outlook
interface. Also, Outlook no longer automatically downloads images from Web servers--good
news, because some spam images eat up Internet bandwidth and sometimes contain offensive
nudity.
PowerPoint now lets you produce custom slide shows for
burning to CD. It gives more multimedia options as well, including support for streaming
video or audio content within slides. Plus, a new toolbar puts a highlighter and other
annotation tools at your fingertips so you can add notes on the fly as you play a
presentation. Like Word and Excel, both PowerPoint and Access now support Smart Tags,
which mark addresses, names, and other selected data for quick reference.
Working across all the applications is Research Library
(accessible from within Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Publisher). The Research
Library includes direct access to a dictionary, a thesaurus, translation services, MSN
Search, MSN Money Stock Quotes, and the Encarta Encyclopedia. Third-party resources such
as eLibrary and WorldLingo are also available.
A new view in Word called Reading Layout duplicates the
look of a printed page and, unlike Print Preview, lets you edit text. You'll also find the
nifty "Compare side by side" feature, which shows two documents next to each
other with synchronized scrolling so that you can quickly see any changes between the two.
Excel also offers the same tool, useful when viewing a pair of worksheets simultaneously.
Office includes a new information rights-management (IRM)
technology that 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. If your business wants rights management, you have to buy Office Professional,
but all other editions of Office 2003's applications will view and edit IRM-locked files
if permission is given.
Microsoft Office System might not be a vital upgrade for
many consumers, but serious Outlook users will appreciate the successful overhaul of the
e-mail application.
EDITORS' RATING 8.0
PROS
Outlook filters spam, better organize e-mail; Word Excel
offer side-by-side document viewing; academic edition can be installed on as many as three
PCs
CONS
Few worthwhile improvements for home, small-business users;
controversial product-activation scheme
SPECS: 233MHz Pentium II or faster; 128MB RAM; 260MB to
400MB hard drive space; Windows 2000 or XP
Microsoft
888-218-5617
www.microsoft.com
DIRECT PRICE $399
BYLINE: Keizer, Gregg,Copyright 2004
Gale Group, Inc. ASAP Copyright 2004 ZDNet Computer Shopper January 1, 2004 |