Microsoft unveils Office 2003

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Posted on 20 Oct 2003 at 12:57

The December 2003 issue of PC Pro - already with subscribers and on the newsstand from Thursday 23 October - has no less than 20 pages dedicated to Microsoft Office 2003. And no wonder. This latest release has huge numbers of changes, particularly under the surface. Real World Contributing Editor Simon Jones summarises here the key parts of Microsoft's suite, and what those changes could mean to you.

THE OFFICE SYSTEM

The Office suite and related Office applications are now rebranded as the 'Office System'. All the usual applications are present, plus two new ones, but not all are available in the various editions of 'Microsoft Office 2003'. FrontPage and the new OneNote application are only available as stand-alone applications. The new InfoPath application is available stand-alone or in the Professional Enterprise Edition, which is only available to volume licence customers. The rather complicated rules as to what is available and how much it costs are summarised in the table pictured.

All the Office applications have had a cosmetic makeover and most have become easier to use, though some applications have benefited more than others. FrontPage and Publisher have improved, while Outlook has changed the most, featuring a vastly improved user interface.

XML
Word and Excel can now save documents in a new XML format. This preserves all the formatting and features of their native file formats but in a defined XML schema. Files saved in this format cannot be read by previous versions of Office but can be parsed or altered by any application that understands XML.

The Professional versions of Word and Excel (that is, those bought as standalone applications or in the Professional or Professional Enterprise editions of Office) can also mark up documents and workbooks with custom defined XML Schema. This allows any application or process that understands XML to get at or insert data inside these documents without having to go through the Word or Excel applications. Indeed, you can arrange for data from these documents to be saved as pure XML files without any Word or Excel formatting.

Access 2003 can import and export XML data and you can use FrontPage 2003 to create data-driven web sites from XML data sources.

SharePoint
Another feature of Office that Microsoft has been trumpeting is its integration with SharePoint, Microsoft's workgroup website technology. SharePoint Services is a free add-on to Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft is using the launch of Office 2003 to further publicise SharePoint. Through SharePoint, Office users can get document collaboration facilities including check-in/check-out, meeting workspaces where attendees can see the agendas, decisions and minutes of meetings and much more. It is important to remember, however, that you don't get any of these features unless you're running Windows Server 2003 and implement a SharePoint website. For more on SharePoint, see the feature starting on p206 in the magazine.

Conclusion
If you're thinking of upgrading, you must remember that none of the Office 2003 applications will run on Windows 95, 98, 98 SE, ME or NT. Windows 2000 (with SP 3), Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 are the only operating systems supported. Single users of Office XP won't see much change except in Outlook and that may not be enough to tempt them to upgrade. The step from Office 97 or 2000 to Office 2003 is much more pronounced. On the other hand, corporate customers may find more reasons to upgrade, particularly if they've already paid for it through Software Assurance.