Microsoft Office Professional 2003 [OLD VERSION]

Tip: at +$400, this is very expensive for most folks. But you can buy it for well under $200 with an educational discount as long as you take a class somewhere. Take a community college course for $35 (wordworking, basketweaving, - anything) and you're paid registration receipt will make you eligible for an educational discount. Not sure if Amazon sells this way, but there are several online retailers who specialize in educational products.


Too expensive   December 1, 2003
 54 out of 80 found this review helpful

If you have to use MS Windows, you have a binary choice when it comes to office suites:

1. Open/StarOffice
2. MS Office

The first one is great, but is way too slow and its *.doc and *.xls converter is not perfect.

The second is really fast -- Word 2003 on P4 1.5G 1G RAM loads in two seconds. But... the professional edition, which is what you want/need/desire costs way too much. I was able to buy it only because I am a student so I get 50% discount on software.

In other words, why would anyone pay $500 for an office suite? And if you have four computers at your home (like me), then you can't even install it on all of them (actually, you can install office on your desktop and laptop for non concurent use only). Thanks God I use Linux at home, so I have no other alternative than to use free software ;-)

But... if you do use MS Windows at home and you have money to pay for it and it does not really bother you, then you are getting a really good piece of software. I have been using it for a while and it runs smoothly even on XP inside a VM.

However, I would like to see MS adding OneNote and FrontPage to the professional edition, so you feel that spending $500 was worth it.

I give it only three stars not because of the software quality, which is really good, but because of the price, which for people like me is just to high, and licensing.


don't do it!   November 30, 2003
 25 out of 63 found this review helpful

expensive, not backwards compatable
Not a happy experience!


Buyer beware   November 26, 2003
 59 out of 83 found this review helpful

One of the worst products that came out of Microsoft, it is not backward compatible, it can't recognize any controls from excel 2000, as soon as I started an excel 2000 file in it (after lowering the macro security) it started giving me error, cannot reference the object etc. and was unwilling to stop the debugging. I have to end the task. This happened with practically all my excel 2000 spreadsheets, in some it doesn't recognize the ActiveX controls from previous version, in some cases references. I checked the reference under tools and excel 2000 reference objects were not there. At last I had to uninstall office 2003 and install office 2000 in my new PC. It is frustrating to see how Microsoft is using their monopoly in office application to squeeze as much as they can. It essentially means that one has to go on paying MS $400+ every year for new versions and over that have to redo their whole applications (excel, access etc.) in order for it to work. It definately doesn't increase productivity.
I must agree I should have listened to the other comments and should have thought of converting to OpenOffice but now it is too late for me but not for you I hope. I have finally started to migrate to Openoffice though slowly, I will also recommend to others to do the same if they want to stop paying Microsoft money everyyear for softwares that doesn't work.


Five starts is debatable, its utility is not.   November 26, 2003
 245 out of 250 found this review helpful

O2k3 is Microsoft's latest iteration of their cash cow product, Office, and in some ways fully realizes their previous dreams of integration and utility.

For example, the taskpane that now appears stage-left (screen- right) does more than display a stacked clipboard; if you've been repeating a series of formatting commands, those too appear in the stack for easy access. This is what computers have promised to deliver for some time now. In this and other ways, Microsoft is finally bringing it to users in a usable, intuitive manner.

Previous features such as spellchecking, grammar, integration and smart cut-copy-paste operations are all present. Perhaps the best addition to the suite is Microsoft's OneNote, which promises to capture freeform notes and text in whatever way you like, digitizing tablet handwriting or keyboard entry; the killer app is how it recognizes the handwriting and indexes the text for finding your notes again. Call it system-wide Graffiti for Windows.

Still, this is Office and the usual bloat in disk space, system requirements, and price tag all apply. This is a release most-targeted for businesses that can afford to roll this out to many users under a favorable license. If a company such as GE had to pay $450 a seat, you can bet GE would be using a competitor's product tomorrow. So for an individual, Office is still a four-star player.

For anyone considering Office 2003, let me weigh in with a wet blanket on previous rave reviews: if you have Office 2000/2002/XP, you don't need this release. Honestly. This iteration does not contain a truly compelling feature set that will bring you to spend a few hundred dollars. Microsoft's OneNote is good, maybe even killer, but you've gotten along without it for quite some time now, haven't you?

To put all this in a single paragraph: if you're on Office 97 or earlier, and can score the upgrade, and have the bucks, this is a good release to use. However, if you don't have the bucks, Office 2002 or even Office 2000 are still viable alternatives that provide 95% of the features at 30-70% of the cost.