Labs

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.

Conditional formatting is on a par with that offered by OpenOffice, running to three variables. This should be plenty; if you need more, it points to a poorly organised document rather than a limitation of the application. However, where OpenOffice used style-based conditional formatting, Excel lets you define formats on-the-fly. This is easier for the uninitiated to understand, but could lead to inconsistencies in your results.

The auto-formatting styles are subdued and businesslike, which is a welcome relief after the busy razzmatazz of some of the styles in Quattro Pro (WordPerfect Office). It's also easy to create list-based tables that will mean most users can happily do without Access.

Arrays can be easily turned into drop-down lists, in which the cell at the top of each column is converted into an index. Clicking on it brings up a list of the variables used in the columns below, which can then be used to narrow down the range of data on display. There's also a custom entry on the drop-downs, allowing you to specify that the range should include, among other things, variables 'equal to or greater than' a specified value.

This is a quick and dirty solution to data sorting, and as such has a few limitations. If your opening column is the days of the week, for example, they'll be rearranged into alphabetical order in the drop-down, so Friday comes first rather than last.

POWERPOINT

PowerPoint usurped the OHP and acetate - as well as Lotus

ADVERTISEMENT

Freelance Graphics - several years ago and is now the default choice for presentations. This is as much down to the speed with which you can create slides as it is to the assurance that you could send your completed files to almost any workspace and someone there will be able to read them.

Setting it to display slide designs and then clicking through them immediately applies the selected style to your current slide. This isn't a simple matter of switching the background image; it reformats the text style and even position of standard elements on each slide.

The styles themselves are somewhat hit and miss, but if you stick to the more business-like designs you should get away with using the PowerPoint defaults.

The view can be set to greyscale or black and white to emulate a laser print, which will help to diagnose potential handout problems before you get too far with your design, while a new 'package for CD' feature burns a self-running version of your presentation to disc. It can then be played back on PCs running Windows 98 or later, even if they don't have PowerPoint installed. This doesn't rival OpenOffice's ability to save your presentations as Flash files for online use, but it's a welcome addition nonetheless.

The integrated charting tools fall short of those offered by WordPerfect Office, as the datasheet is a dumb table, rather than a cut-down spreadsheet capable of parsing formulas. Considering Microsoft owns Excel and should be able to provide the necessary links through Windows, this is disappointing.

OUTLOOK

Of all the packages in the suite, it's perhaps Outlook that has moved on the most since Office XP. For starters, it has a whole new look and feel, with the default view being a side-by-side layout. Your emails now more closely mimic their printed equivalents in the new reading pane, while the inbox itself can be expanded and contracted so that only emails sent or received within a specified timeframe are on display. Better still, they can be organised as a series of threads, like entries in a newsgroup, which simplifies the task of tracking an extended email conversation.

The mail folders and remaining Outlook features, such as your calendar and contacts, have been split into separate expandable sections. This simplifies things considerably, as the whole interface will always be dedicated to the task in hand.

Meanwhile, a new junk email filter can be set to work on a sliding scale, depending on how far you're willing to trust it. No messages are automatically deleted unless you really want them to be. Instead, they're moved to a junk folder so you can retrieve any false positives that manage to slip in. We won't be dumping our copy of InBoxer just yet, though. When we asked it to trash the most obvious pieces of junk from a download of 2,314 spams, it filtered out only 950 - much less than half.

As an added safety measure, images aren't now displayed by default. This is because spammers commonly reference JPEGs stored on a server within their messages. If Outlook downloaded them, it would confirm that the message was delivered and your address is valid, and so attract further spam.

Incoming messages trigger a Desktop alert, which fades onto and then off the screen, displaying the name of the sender and the subject line of the message itself. This is far more obvious than the old system of pinging your speakers and dropping an icon in the system tray, yet is discreet enough to not distract too much.

If you want a well-integrated communications tool as part of your suite then Microsoft Office is the only way to go. None of the others have anything that comes close to rivalling Outlook's range of features, and the fact that WordPerfect Office relies on it to implement group working features shows the extent to which it has become the industry standard.

CONCLUSION

Microsoft Office remains the most polished suite money can buy, but we can't recommend it over our Labs winner, OpenOffice. An impressive set of updates hasn't been enough to see it pull clear of the rapidly advancing free alternative, which just gets better with every release and now offers many features - PDF export included - which Microsoft Office just can't match. As such, if you opt for Microsoft you're paying more than £300 just for Outlook, which is hard to justify when there are so many competent alternatives in the form of Mozilla Mail, Eudora and Opera (which also includes spam blocking).

What Microsoft offers that the others don't is the complete belt-and-braces solution, providing the ultimate combination of usability and guaranteed compatibility. Making a small sacrifice in both of these areas can pay a significant dividend - in both the office and the home.

Another consideration for business users is Software Assurance, the licensing scheme introduced in 2001. Open only to those who buy in volume, it bundles support, training and unlimited updates into a three-year contract, during which businesses effectively lease the right to run Microsoft software - including Office 2003.

This has several benefits, not least of which is the option to upgrade on a rolling basis for one set fee. In the days when Microsoft was updating its flagship products on an 18- to 24-month basis this was an excellent deal, but this is no longer the case. The proposition is therefore far less appealing.

Analysts are already speculating that we could see an interim release of Office purely as a means of propping up the scheme, but if this is true then you have to ask whether the release serves the end user as much as it does its creator. If the answer is anything but a resolute 'yes' then IT teams would be advised to take a more serious look at the competition as their three-year contracts start to expire.

When they do, they have three choices: renewal, buying new Microsoft software outright, or switching to a substitute supplier. For many people - more than ever before - that substitute will be the best, most cost-effective option.