Microsoft Office 2003: It's a Pretty Suite Upgrade

Microsoft's own team of Office-cionados would be the first to tell you that many of the features in the company's market-dominant software "applications suite" are targeted at corporate constituents. There's a reason the thing is called Office.

So when Office 2003 turns up in stores, you naturally might ask: What's in it for me?

Most of us already rely on Office at work for its staple components -- Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint are the John, Paul, George and Ringo of software -- but we usually tune in to a small percentage of features. What's more, upgrading can be expensive.

The Professional version, including the Access database and Publisher desktop publishing, costs $329 to replace a previous version of Office, or $499 for a full version. On the other hand, students and teachers qualify for a $149 basic package, and "standard" and "small business" versions cost something in between.

Though I mostly like what I've seen in Office 2003, for lots of people a full upgrade is overkill. Office has been a solid performer for years. And if you bought the XP makeover, there's no compelling reason to take the plunge again so soon. In fact, only modest tweaks have been applied to some core programs, including an improved list function in Excel and movies in a slide that can take over the entire screen in PowerPoint. This from a company that was a primary contributor of "bloatware," padded with unwanted extras.

Microsoft sells some components individually, and you may well want to spend $109 for the dramatically improved Outlook. (Another nice $99 option is OneNote, a stand-alone program aimed at journalists, students or anybody else who takes notes. I'll take a closer look in a future column.)

Outlook's clean new layout displays more info at one time. When viewing your inbox, the screen splits into three vertical sections: mail folders on the left, with favorites on top and one-click buttons below for calendar, contacts and tasks; the first new lines of incoming messages in the middle, conveniently arranged by time received; and, when you click on one of those, as much of the full message as can fits on the right side. The program creates three "virtual folders" to group unread mail, mail worth following up on and large mail, no matter in which folders it actually resides. You can organize your inbox with other virtual folders and multicolor message flags. Outlook also does a fine job spotting spam; suspicious messages are sent to a junk folder. There were a few false positives in messages received through Microsoft's Web-based Hotmail service, though you can retrieve e-mail that ends up in the junk pile. E-mail addresses also can be assigned to a "safe" list or automatically blocked. You also can choose not to view images hidden in certain messages.

Now a few words about Word, beginning with the Reading Layout view. Text appears in two wide snaking columns, as if you're reading pages of a book. You can easily alter text size and otherwise make editing changes, though you are primarily reviewing pages in this layout. If you share documents with others, you can password-protect sections of a page from being edited. It also is now much simpler to compare documents side-by-side: Start scrolling on one side, and the other moves in tandem.

Another handy addition is the Research Task Pane on the right side of the screen that lets you explore the Encarta encyclopedia, dictionary and thesaurus quickly. Well, not always quickly. Whenever I opened Word or PowerPoint and clicked on the thesaurus, one of those truly peculiar error messages popped up: "Microsoft Office Word can't open the thesaurus. Microsoft Office Word cannot install the necessary files due to Windows Installer Error 1605.

This action is only valid for products that are currently installed." I had to click OK three to seven times before the thesaurus appeared. I spent the better part of a weekend and more than seven hours on the phone with Microsoft techies before resolving the bug, apparently a problem with Windows' impenetrable Registry. The good news is, Office 2003 customers get free unlimited phone support relating to installation problems like this one. The bad news is, if you're one of the unfortunate customers who hits a snag, you can't count on getting the red-carpet treatment a reviewer does.

The bottom line

Microsoft Office 2003 ( * * * out of four, various upgrades and full packages $149-$499, www.microsoft.com/office)

* Pro. Excellent anti-spam and other dramatic enhancements applied to Outlook. Word improvements include reading view, research pane and ability to protect portions of a document. Several useful features targeted to businesses.

* Con. Full upgrade is expensive and overkill for average solo user who bought the last major makeover, Office XP. Experienced a few annoying bugs.

Microsoft Office 2003: It's a Pretty Suite Upgrade

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