Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 Upgrade [OLD VERSION]

The upside to this is that every document was recovered fully each time that this occured in Word. I have not experienced any problems in Excel or Access yet.

My outlook is that it is probably more cautious to install this on Windows XP machines and not Windows 2000. Too much dissruption of workflow with the numerous crashes.


Worth every penny!   March 7, 2004
 8 out of 9 found this review helpful

If you use Microsoft Office in you daily work you are going to love this latest version of Office Professional.
Folks who use the water-down free-ware that's available get exactly what they pay for!
There are too many advances beyond Office XP Professional for me to attempt a worthy list. My favorite improvement so far(installed less than 24 hours ago) is the Reseach tool allowing me to immediately look up words in a dictionary, thesarus, or various websites and in several different languages. Its nice that results appear in a side-bar. This is an extremely powerful feature.


Office 2003 Saves Me Time   March 2, 2004
 2 out of 5 found this review helpful

I can't tell you how much I appreciate Office 2003. I spend most of my day in front of the computer and I really can feel the time savings now that I have upgraded. It was so easy and quick to upgrade, and all my settings were still there (I have a bunch in Outlook). I would definitely recommend Office 2003 and the templates that are included when you open a new file are fabulous... I use and benefit from Office 2003 every day!


Unnecessary waste of money   January 27, 2004
 4 out of 19 found this review helpful

This whole thing is pure waste of money.

Not just because OpenOffice is free and compatible as mentioned (though there's always the point of liking the look and feel of an application, of course) but it has been reported to be awfully buggy, ressource-consuming and full of errors even in pre-release state. I do have the feeling that you guys from the US are pretty much misinformed (how about reading magazines?!). Here in Europe hardly anybody complaines having spent just a few hundred bucks and later recognizes that it was garbage in the package.

The most sensitive disadvantage of all MS products is their permanent attempt to infiltrate your business in a certain way, herewith controlling you - just with a laughing face to "steal" the money right out of your pocket.

The only thing you do whenever anybody supports MS products is to increase their influence and therewith prevent others to provide really productive tools - at a much lower cost, in most cases.

With the new version, MS again tries to get into deep structures by setting up software environments that limit possibilities to predefined areas. The user is not free to decide independently. And this exactly is what MS does since its foundation. Things won't work which have worked before, structures and interfaces have changed so no one keeps the overview (which, of course, is a good reason for the next upgrade where the changes of the changes of the changes are called user input), and so on. Especially MS office seems to be an excellent platform to test future strategies at the cost of users. This, in a way, happens quite anonymously because nobody will encounter all bugs at the same time.

Microsoft does product testing while at the same time getting paid for it. That's what I call CLEVER WORK!


Like Bugs? If Yes, Then Buy This!   December 18, 2003
 11 out of 12 found this review helpful

I am writing with reference to Office 2003 Standard in both Upgrade and Full (non upgrade) versions.

The upgrade CD would not accept the 25 alpha numeric `product ID' key. It would take 4 characters then jump to the next box. It would not allow you to return to the previous box and back fill the missing letter or number. In short, you could not ever enter the correct product ID. I can't say more about this version as I could not get past this point.

The Full (non upgrade) version seemed more stable. It accepted the `product ID' key at least but that is where the problems began.

The first problem I had was that in PowerPoint there was no preview. Sure enough, less than 30 days out and there was a critical upgrade to fix this problem.

I went to the Microsoft Update page to download it. It failed several times. I then contacted Microsoft Technical support. This is a known problem and you must download (at least for now) all updated to your local hard drive and install from there. If they don't solve this problem, its going to be a major problem when there are more than a few updates for Office 2003 available.

I also started to receive `run time error messages' when I used Microsoft Internet Explorer. Microsoft technical support says this is not an Office 2003 issue, but an Operating System issue. Sure it is! I did not have this problem before I installed Office 2003. The resolution was to disable all Third Party devices (such as the Google tool bar), and remove some other things as well.

The new Outlook interface looks great, but what good is a great looking interface if it does not work?

For some reason, email sent using Outlook 2003 is identified as `Spam' by several spam filtering programs, including Spam Assassin. I found this out when some people I was sending email to did not reply. I telephoned one of them and said they had not received any email form me. They then checked and found it in the `spam' folder. Here is the error message that Outlook 2003 generated:

> Content analysis details: (5.70 points, 5 required)
> FORGED_YAHOO_RCVD (2.7 points) 'From' yahoo.com does not match 'Received'
> headers
> MSG_ID_ADDED_BY_MTA_2 (0.8 points) 'Message-Id' was added by a relay
> (2) FORGED_MUA_OUTLOOK (2.2 points) Forged mail pretending to be from
> MS Outlook MISSING_OUTLOOK_NAME (0.0 points) Message looks like
> Outlook, but isn't

This is also a known problem to Microsoft Technical Support. The fix is to turn off all firewall and virus protection and to remove some networking package updates. I tried this but it still did not solve the problem. It remains unresolved.

I had more problems but I think this illustrates the point that this product was just released to soon.

If you enjoy `bleeding edge' technology, this is for you. If you are looking for something that works without `bleeding edge' features (bugs or problems) then take to heart the advice I was given by Microsoft Technical Support; ". . . I usually wait 6 months after a release before I upgrade. By then most of the major problems have been resolved."

Sage Advice!

As for me, I am returning to an earlier edition of Office at least for a while.

Here is the phone number for Microsoft Technical Support. If you buy this product right now, you are going to need it: 1-888-346-5229

Martina