Microsoft Office Professional 2003 [OLD VERSION]

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.


Good product, but not worth the money   November 15, 2003
 0 out of 4 found this review helpful

Office 2003 is an excellent program. Despite what people say, it does have some nice features that Office XP did not (spam filter for instance). However, for $400, it's just not worth it. If it wasy say $150, I might be able to recomend it. But with it's current rediculous price tag, I just can't.


Induced compulsion to upgrade software   November 14, 2003
 18 out of 33 found this review helpful

Why should the average user spend lots of money, which in turn corresponds to a considerable quantity of sweated work time, which in turn corresponds to time taken away from one's own interests, family and friends, just to buy a new version of an Office suite ? The same job of a new version of, say, a wordprocessor, can basically still be done by a word processor of 20 years ago. Do we really need all these improvements, all these animations, these "cute effects" etc. when what we need is simply write a letter or a report and spell-check it? In most cases not at all. But software houses are very good at inducing people to buy their products and let them believe the new version will make them save time: but to save that time they have to work more to pay the bill.

This induced compulsion to ever upgrade one's systems is becominng an manipulative invisible taxation system. Much better to use free producs: OpenOffice.org or any other.