Office Professional 2003
By William LaMartin, Editor, Tampa PC Users
Group
lamartin@tampabay.rr.com
How many reviews of Microsoft Office have I written? Let me count the times. And here we go again. It is not that I dislike Office; in fact, I use its programs everyday. I am just running out of things to say about it. Furthermore, this newest version’s new features, as far as I can tell, are aimed mostly at corporate users. For example, they will benefit from the new XML integration, which makes it much easier to move information from one program to another, including programs outside the Office suite. Additionally, the new version has much-enhanced collaboration features--again something more geared for corporate and intranet usage, as opposed to the individual user. In all honesty, there is really no reason for the typical member of our user group to upgrade to Office 2003 if they have Office 2000 or Office XP. However, if you are still using Office 97, it is time to move up.
For my newsletter review of Office 2000, go to http://www.tpcug.org/newsletter/nl_2000/march2000/microsoft_office_2000.htm and http://www.tpcug.org/newsletter/nl_2000/april2000/ocffice_2000_part2.htm. For my notes on Office XP, see http://www.tpcug.org/newsletter/nl_2001/september2001/officexp.htm
Before you rush out to buy Office 2003, you need to check your operating system. This version of Office will only install on Windows 2000, SP3 or Windows XP. The installation requires approximately 500 MB with the options I selected. That includes Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint and Publisher, along with Visual Basic for Applications for each of the applications and Microsoft Document Imaging. After I made my selections, the actual installation took less than five minutes. Then there is a check on the web for updates.
After the installation, on the first run of one of the applications, the activation wizard starts and completes quickly. Following that, you are given a chance to register, which is not required. It is good that it is not required, since my attempts at registering never completed. I can’t remember the problem, but I think they were supposed to send me an email with some information that I was then to use to finish the registration. The email with the information never arrived. But activation is what is important. That is what will supposedly keep you from installing the programs on more than one laptop and one desktop computer and also check if it is a pirated copy.
As to new features, Outlook 2003 has received the greatest overhaul. It has a new, larger preview pane called the Reading Pane. It provides junk email filtering and in the calendar view gives you the ability to display two calendars side by side. I don’t use Outlook 2003 much except for doing mail merges with Word and for programming it with VBA—mainly to see if I can do the programming instead of using the programming for creating needed applications. I do use Outlook XP on my second computer as my contact manager and calendar. But on my main computer, my email program is Outlook Express. I think my reason for that goes back to when it was considerably safer to use Outlook Express instead of Outlook for email since it was not programmable and thus less subject to virus attacks than was Outlook. Since then a lot more security has been built into Outlook, and I should perhaps reconsider my use of Express.
Word, Excel and Access appear less changed, and all use the same file format as Office 2000. Access has a new file format, but you can, however, set Access to default to the Access 2000 format. Word has added a neat Read toolbar that formats your document into two pages where they appear much as they would look if they were printed as a book. This makes it much easier to proof-read or browse a long document and also allows for minimal editing in this format.
SmartTags, introduced for Word and Excel in earlier versions, are now available for PowerPoint and Access. Recall that a SmartTag is a feature that is applied to text such that when your mouse hovers over the text, you are provided additional information. For example, holding the mouse over an address might possibly supply a link to a map of that address.
In Word, Excel and PowerPoint there is a new menu item under Tools, called Research. This allows you to go to a collection of sites on the web to do a search for information on a topic. There is also a translation feature available that will translate a word, phrase or document. The translation is done at a web site (http://www.worldlingo.com) and the translation is displayed in your browser. So you need to be connected to the Internet for this—unless there is a built-in translation ability that I missed.
Here is the French translation of the SmartTags paragraph above:
SmartTags, présenté pour le mot et excellent dans des versions plus tôt, sont maintenant disponible pour PowerPoint et accèdent.Rappelez-vous qu'un SmartTag est un dispositif qui est appliqué au texte tels que quand votre souris plane au-dessus du texte, vous êtes des informations additionnelles fournies.Pour l'exemple, tenant la souris au-dessus d'une adresse pourrait probablement fournir un lien à une carte de cette adresse.
Now here is the English translation of the French translation:
SmartTags, presented for the word and excellent in versions earlier, are now available for PowerPoint and reach.You point out that SmartTag is a device which is applied to the text such as when your mouse planes above the text, you are provided additional information. For the example, holding the mouse above an address could probably provide a bond to a chart of this address.
Much of the annoying auto formatting has been turned off by default. In Word XP, for example, it could be quite frustrating to try and start a new line with a lower case letter since Word would by default keep changing the letter to a capital. If you started a line with “1.”, then some text, Word would want to start the next line with “2.”. So that is an improvement.
Now for a few annoyances:
One annoying thing (at least for me) that has not changed is the way Word saves a document as a web page (htm, html). Word 2003 has two ways to save as an HTML page, filtered and unfiltered, but both produce HTML code that most old time HTML coders would consider cluttered. The purpose, I am sure, is to produce a web page that is as close as possible in appearance to the Word document. However, this has the byproduct of producing web pages for which you cannot change the font size in your browser. My way of producing more standard HTML code from a Word document is to copy the text that is in the document, paste it into WordPad, then copy that text and paste it into FrontPage (or any other web page editor). That will yield a web page for which the font size can be changed in the browser.
Another annoyance was what appeared to me to be an Office program’s propensity to go online for help on a topic when all I want is for it to search its own help database. That was until I realized that the default was for online help but that I could easily change it to offline help. So that is not really an annoyance.
To me a more serious problem is in Microsoft Document Imaging—something that perhaps not many people use. Microsoft Document Imaging allows you to scan in and OCR a printed document. In Office 2000 and Office 2002 I could save the result in Rich Text Format (RTF). However, in Office 2003, if I try to save the results in RTF, I get an error message. The only format that I am able to save my OCR’ed results to is in HTML. I have searched Google and the Microsoft site, and not only can I not find a solution, I can’t even find any mention of the problem. Norton Antivirus has caused similar problems in the past, but the Office plug-in for Norton is disabled in my setup, as is script blocking, so I have no solution at the present other than saving the OCR results as a web page and then extracting the text from there. There seems to be next to nothing on the web about Microsoft Document Imaging. Is no one but me using it?
A great deal is made over XML in the reviews of Office 2003 that I have seen. First, it is noted that to get it you need Office Professional and not a lesser version. Then they say that it facilitates the exchange of data between Office and other programs. Then they say no more, since I don’t think they know any more, and most people, in fact, don’t want to know any more.
I don’t know much about XML myself, but here is what I do know and how I use it. First, in Office XP Professional I could export an Access table to an XML file—actually two files, one ending in .xml and the other ending in .xsd. The .xml file contained the data and the .xsd file described the field types of the table (the schema for the data). Also in Excel XP you could save a sheet as an XML spreadsheet. So saving to XML is not new with Office 2003. What is new is that you can now additionally save a Word document in XML format. I see no such option for Publisher 2003 and PowerPoint 2003. However, it appears that you can save a PowerPoint document as a Word document, which, as noted, you can save as XML.
A Word XML file is nothing but a text file containing the text of the Word document, along with document information like creator and time of creation, along with loads of formatting information. Thus, a program that understood the Microsoft Office Schemas could extract the data and formatting from the XML file and reproduce the Word document.
The only way I have used XML in Office is to export Access Tables to XML files and then use them as data sources on web sites. This is necessary at some hosting companies hosting Microsoft ASP.Net pages (the pages end in .aspx instead of .asp or .htm or .html). They consider using Microsoft Access databases as data sources at ASP.Net sites a security risk, but the XML files are safe since they are just text files. It may strike you as odd that it is safe to use Access with Active Server Pages (ASP) but not with ASP.Net pages (ASPX), but they are different technologies.
Here is what a table of books in my library looks like when exported to XML. You can see the structure with field names like ID, Title and Subject. This table contains 527 entries and is another example of one of my unfinished projects. I would guess that I am about 30% through entering my books.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF
-8" ?>So you have now seen more than you wanted to about XML, but at least now you will have some idea of what people mean by the term. Oh, by the way, it stands for Extend Markup Language.
To finish, let me briefly describe how I use the different Office products.
Word I use Word for letters, articles like this one, longer monographs and for business documents containing embedded and linked Excel tables and charts. I also use it in conjunction with Outlook in doing email merges for around 250 email addresses. I should note that in the 2003 version, the email merge seems to run faster than in the XP version.
Excel I use it to calculate my business and personal taxes, to do “what if” business scenarios and to keep track of various items involving numbers.
Access I keep databases for this user group membership, my neighborhood organization, the data required for various web sites that I manage, personal information like the database of books mentioned above and for analyzing the data in the server log of my websites. It is the Office component to which I most apply my Visual Basic programming ability. And we feature it in one of our Special Interst Groups.
PowerPoint is used to do presentations like the ones I have done for this group on digital photography, programming and the visit to a data center.
Outlook I use it as a contact manager and calendar but not for my email. I do use it along with Word and Access for email merges.
To reiterate what I said in the beginning, if you already have Office 2000 or Office XP and are not working in a corporate environment with collaboration and are not a person who has to have the latest version of everything, then this version is probably not for you. For me it is nice to have, since it integrates with Visual Studio 2003--something I did not go into in this review.
If you already have Office, CompUSA is offering an upgrade to Office Professional 2003 for a net price of $180 after an instant rebate of $50 and a mail-in rebate of $100. That looks like a good deal. Their price for the non-upgrade Office 2003 Professional package is $500.
Again, you must have Windows 2000, SP:3 or Windows XP to install Office 2003. If you are using windows 98 or Me, then you can purchase Office XP--for not that much less than Office 2003. So go out and get yourself a new computer with XP installed, and then you can purchase Office 2003 Professional for $500--which is probably not much less than what some of the cheap new computers cost. u