Microsoft Office 2003

Research Task Pane
The Research task pane allows you to search for words and phrases in a variety of offline references and online databases. The offline books include dictionaries and thesauri. Online there are paid-for services including the Encarta Encyclopaedia, magazine-clipping services, company information services and free machine translation services. Microsoft says these services will be relevant both globally and locally and aren't exclusively US-centric but, as we rapidly approach launch day, there are still precious few offerings that aren't Microsoft brands such as MSN or Encarta.
Applets
Several small applications ship with Office. Document Imaging is a TIFF file viewer, which is great for viewing and annotating faxes and scanned documents. It can also OCR text from a fax or scan and push it into a Word document. The Document Scanning applet makes it easy to get pages scanned and the image or text into an Office document. The new Picture Manager applet deals with most types of image files, particularly with those from digital cameras. It will automatically correct colour balance, brightness and contrast and can help eliminate red-eye. However, the Business Contact Manager add-in for Outlook is to be avoided. It's designed to extend Outlook's contact facilities to give multiple levels of contacts and track dealings with those contacts more closely, but can only be used by a single person and can't be extended or customised. With no upgrade path, you could have a big problem migrating to a more capable package later.

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 OSes 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. Corporate customers may find more reasons to upgrade, particularly if they've already paid for it through Software Assurance.