Microsoft Office 2003

Microsoft Office is the suite by which all others are judged. It's attractive, contains the five best-known business apps around and, being produced by the same company as the world's dominant operating system, can take advantage of many Windows features.

The Office core comprises Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access and Outlook, which together define the formats to which other suites comply. As such, they have unprecedented industry support, with corporate admins rolling them out across countless desktops regardless of how many or how few of their features will be put to good use.

There are four editions. Standard comprises Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and Excel, as does the self-explanatory Student and Teacher version - available to full- or part-time teachers, plus students aged five and above who are enrolled on a course that will deliver an academic qualification recognised by the Department for Education and Skills - while Small Business Edition adds Publisher and a contact manager.

Only Professional includes Access, XML tools and information rights management. The applications share an intuitive interface, with a task pane featuring Encarta tools and links to commonly performed tasks running down the right-hand side of each screen. This has been adopted as the standard Office help system, and ought to be one of the biggest draws the suite has to offer.

WORD

There are improvements to Word's already strong collaborative working features. You can now compare documents side by side, allowing you to display the original and the amended work onscreen at the same time. Scrolling one does the same to the other, so that the same section is always displayed in each document. If you'd rather work with colleagues in real-time, rather than waiting for them to return their amendments, you can save documents on a SharePoint Services website and email colleagues from within the task pane to invite them to take part in the edit.

One of the most radical features is AutoSummarize, which will reduce your document to a specified percentage of the original length by picking out key features of the text to produce a summary. Unlikely though it sounds, our tests showed this to be fairly accurate, picking out many of our key points and cutting out much of the flab. Dragging a control bar to the left and right expands or contracts the summary. Switching to the executive summary feature, which adds new content of a specified length to the top of the document (we chose ten sentences) also produces some excellent results, and saves time on what can otherwise be a tedious, thankless task.

In the unlikely event you have a tablet PC, Word has improved features for incorporating electronic ink, and you'll welcome the new reading view: this reformats your document to look like the pages of a paperback, opening as a spread to fill the screen. This works well on a desktop monitor, too, and keeps a selection of tools at your disposal, including the highlighter.

EXCEL

Excel adopts a similar interface to Word, with context-sensitive menus and the now familiar task pane. The most impressive improvements appear only in the Professional edition, though: most notably, XML support. This allows you to extract data from a range of document types, and integration with SharePoint Services for collaborative working that haven't been implemented in lower-end editions.

But that still leaves plenty of advanced options. The grouping feature, though very welcome, remains a little confusing. If you want to keep track of what you've grouped, you have to leave the first or last column or row ungrouped so that it's not hidden from view when the group is collapsed. Furthermore, the expansion point for the group appears in the first available cell after the end of the group. This could therefore appear above the exposed title cell of the next hidden group, leading to confusion when trying to keep track of which expansion point controls which group.