Microsoft Office 2003 Professional Edition

Note: Clicking on all images will open a larger version of the picture.

Microsoft released Office 2003 (O2003) last October, the latest in a long line of office productivity suites. I have been using it daily since February this year. It has almost no real competition and it is rare to meet someone who uses OpenOffice or WordPerfect Office in a business setting. For our purposes, it is not necessary to list the thousands of features found in O2003, so I will focus on those that are important to me or are otherwise noteworthy.

Figure 1. I made a
Windows toolbar that
works almost like the
old Office Toolbar.

For Windows 2000 and XP Only

O2003 is part of the Microsoft "Office System", which includes the server products and other applications. If you are still using Windows 98 through Me, or Windows NT, then Office XP was the end of the line for your PC. O2003 requires Windows 2000 or Windows XP.

Ignoring volume products such as the Enterprise edition, SME and SOHO users have four to six versions to choose from, depending on where you look or how you buy a PC.

Installation

My installation took up 627 MB of disk space after using Custom Install. Two hundred and seventy two megabytes can be left on the drive to help with maintenance and updates. There were two updates available when I installed the product. There was a warning to software pirates that a copy obtained from a suspect source might not accept updates. I had a chuckle to myself when I saw that, for the first time, Office programs were installed in their own program group, instead of taking up space as orphan programs below the program groups. About time.

No Shortcut Toolbar?

I am one of the few people who liked using the Office Shortcut Toolbar in Office XP and earlier versions, not only for the Office icons but for shortcuts to other frequently used programs.

You can create a new shortcut toolbar by right-clicking on a blank area on the Windows Taskbar. Make sure it is unlocked and create a new toolbar folder and drag the Office and other shortcut icons to it (see Figure 1). You can drag that new toolbar and place it or resize it anywhere on your desktop. I put mine on the right-hand side.

No Photo Editor?

Nearly every day I used the simple applet known as Microsoft Photo Editor. Many people aren't even aware of it. It was an optional installation in Office XP and earlier versions. I used it mainly to paste an image from the clipboard, typically a screen capture, resize it, brighten it, and so on, then save in the desired format.

It is now called the Microsoft Office Picture Manager (see Figure 2) and I don't like it. It is a completely different program. The fabled IrfanView doesn't come close for the features I need, but it has many other great features, so it is my substitute. I suppose I could install just the Photo Editor from the old version, but I have not tried it, in case this overwrites a file needed by O2003. Of course, for heavyweight image editing I use Corel or Macromedia products.

Word 2003

A significant improvement is the ability to save a document in eXtensible Markup Language (XML) format and convert back to .doc format without any loss of information. XML is required for Web Services and other Web-based work, so this is a long-awaited feature. See Figure 3.

One of the first differences that you notice is when you open a Word attachment in e-mail. Beware that the new Reading Layout view messes up the formatting so you may panic needlessly if a 3-page, badly-formatted page is really a well-formatted one-pager. See Figure 4.

The Research pane is new and gives you access to reference books such as Encarta Dictionary and a thesaurus, and research sites such as Encarta Thesaurus, eLibrary, Factiva,
NineMSN, Thomson Gale Company Profiles and MSN Money Quotes Australia. I searched for "BHP Billiton" and was not excited to find the same results that I could have found with a Web browser. Searching for "crocus sativus", "john howard" and "mark latham" was more rewarding because the results were encyclopaedic, hence more "authoritative" than random Web pages, so I feel that the tool is better for researching objects and people than companies.

The rest of Word is fairly similar to previous versions and there are no unpleasant surprises. See Figure 5.

Excel 2003

Other than XML capability, the changes introduced since Excel XP are minor. I like the ability to scroll two worksheets side by side. See Figure 6.

Figure 6. Compare two worksheets.

Figure 7. Outlook 2003 with a reading/preview pane used
in a folder containing e-mail from a known sender. My
Inbox always has the preview pane turned off out of
habit, as O2003 will not download Web bugs by default.

Outlook 2003

Major improvements have been made to decrease the risk of external threats, whether they are malicious or related to tracking your movements. For example, if you open an HTML e-mail, you don't see the embedded images unless you right-click and ask to download them or you choose to place the sender or their domain in a Safe Senders or Safe Domains list. See Figure 7.

In addition to existing forms of notification when new e-mail arrives, we now have the Desktop Alert (see Figure 8), a semi-transparent box that appears for a few seconds with the sender's name and subject. You can vary the duration between 3 and 30 seconds, and the transparency between 0 and 80 percent. While it is visible, you can click it to open the e-mail. I like this feature.

Another major improvement is the handling of Junk Mail. Outlook uses a set of rules to divert certain e-mails to the Junk Mail folder. In the first few weeks of my use it was 100 percent accurate but the spammers have since worked out how to bypass it, so I have had to tweak its settings. I get e-mail at many domains, most of which do not have the advantage of Melb PC's free spam filter service.

Figure 11. Some of the top-level domains
you can block.

Finally, Microsoft has given us a way to block spam in non-English languages. In Outlook XP and earlier, you could try pasting the high ASCII characters in the Rules but they were invisible to the filter. Now you can simply block country domains (top-level domains) and specific character sets (see Figures 10 & 11). I can't read Korean, Chinese or Japanese, so I have chosen to block them. I have seen at least one e-mail with the sender's address in Chinese, so I am not sure if this feature works.

You can also nominate e-mail addresses as Safe or Blocked. My Safe list mainly consists of subscribed newsletters that were borderline -some were marked as Junk and some not. You can also adjust the sensitivity of these filters from no protection all the way to Safe List Only.

The Preview Pane is now called the Reading Pane and you can choose to have it on the right, below, or off. The link to the newsreader (in Outlook Express, as Outlook does not have a newsreader built-in) has been flaky in previous versions and this is still the case. After disappearing for a while, it has reappeared, minus its icon. See Figure 12

O2003 will not send an e-mail if your SMTP host (usually your ISP) subscribes to a spam blacklisting service. In a bizarre incident, I was allocated a dynamic blacklisted address, so I was unable to send e-mail until I rebooted my ADSL modem, waited for a while and was allocated a different number. See Figure 13.

Figure 12. The elusive News menu option
that went away and then came back.

Are you the type of person who has lots of unread e-mail and uses many folders with rules, so that you never know where unread mail lies forgotten? O2003 offers a new Unread Mail folder that groups all such messages within one view. See Figure 14.

Microsoft and Spam Control

I asked Kevin Burke, Group Manager Small Business, Microsoft Australia, how Microsoft is working to help combat spam for small business? His reply follows:

Microsoft is building better spam filters every day and is investing heavily in research and development to help small businesses combat spam. Microsoft's investments in filtering technologies have already paid off through innovations available in new versions of products such as Outlook and Exchange and we continue to make technology easier for consumers to use and better enable filters to distinguish between legitimate e-mail and spam. The good news is that billions of junk emails are being blocked every day, and spamming has become a more difficult and less rewarding business.

Reducing spam for users is a significant and integral pillar of our promise of trustworthy computing. Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 includes new and improved functionality specifically for addressing spam. The most notable of the new anti-spam features is the Microsoft Office Outlook2003 Junk E-Mail Filter with Microsoft SmartScreen Technology. It uses state-of-the-art technology developed by Microsoft Research to evaluate whether a message should be treated as junk email based on several factors, such as the time it was sent and the content of the message. Any message that is caught by the filter is moved to your Junk Email folder, where it can be retrieved or reviewed at a later time. You can add e-mail addresses to your Safe Senders List to ensure that messages from these senders will never be treated as junk email and block messages from certain e-mail addresses or domain names by adding the sender to your Blocked Senders List.

SmartScreen uses machine learning technology to help distinguish spam from legitimate e-mail. With the help of many e-mail users and through the analysis of hundreds of thousands of items of spam, common words and characteristics have been identified that can be associated with spam. These words and characteristics are stored and scored in a database which is then matched against incoming mail to determine the probability of it being spam or otherwise. Whilst no system can ever be totally spam proof, the ongoing learning characteristics of SmartScreen mean that it is continually improving as new spamming techniques are introduced.

Outlook 2003 is one of the first of our communications products to integrate this state-of-the-art technology of SmartScreen. Future versions of Exchange Server, Hotmail, MSN and other products will also offer intelligent spam filters to protect users at all layers of the network and Microsoft will continue with their commitment to delivering on our long-term vision of trustworthy computing for small businesses.

Business Contact Manager

Business Contact Manager for Outlook 2003 is new and will appeal to small business owners who need to work with sales prospects and existing customers. It requires .NET Framework 1.1 to be installed. It can be likened to a less-featured version of ACT! or GoldMine. It adds more fields to the more familiar Contacts; it has Opportunities and Products. You can link conversation logs, e-mail and documents to each business contact, so everything pertaining to the individual is at hand within one view (see Figure 15). You can thus leave personal contacts in the old Contacts folder and truly separate your private and business affairs.

PowerPoint 2003

You can now create custom slide shows and share them on a CD-ROM with someone who doesn't have PowerPoint installed. This is a handy feature as a backup should your laptop computer fail at the last minute and you have to rely on a borrowed machine.

There are new, attractive templates (see Figure 16), which will help those of us who like having a larger selection. SmartTags are also supported. These provide additional information when you hover on the dot-underlined word, such as an e-mail address.

Access 2003

Although Access appears to be unchanged, it has a new file format now and supports SmartTags. As is the case with the other programs in the suite, you can set its default file format to an older version and you can export to XML. The latter results in four files: .xsd contains the schema; .xml contains the data; .xsl contains the presentation of the data; and .htm is the Web page.

In case you are wondering how this all hangs together, Figures 17-21 show some screen dumps of what XML looks like when exported from Access.

Figure 17. The .xsd file contains the schema of the database.	Figure 18. The .xml file contains the actual exported Access data .
Figure 19. The .xsl file contains the style sheet.	Figure 20. The .htm file is very tiny but displays the formatted data taken from the .xml file and according to the rules in the .xsl style sheet.

Publisher 2003

My children use Publisher regularly (their school gives them assignments that require it) and this version is as easy to use as the previous one. See Figure 22.

Information Rights Management (IRM)

Critics have said that IRM is a proprietary technology but the capability (see Figure 23) is very interesting and promising (I did not have the environment to test IRM):