|
Office Standard Edition 2003 (Excel, Outlook, Word, Powerpoint)
|
| Price: |
6 new or used available from £99.99
Average customer review:
Product Description
Microsoft Office 2003 Software Standard Edition Ref MS O2003
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #925 in Software
- Brand: Microsoft
- Model: 021-06145
- Released on: 2003-10-21
- Platforms: Windows 2000, Windows XP
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: .75 pounds
Features
- Microsoft Office 2003 Software Standard Edition Ref MS O2003
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.co.uk Review
Microsoft Office Standard Edition 2003 is a bundle of the most essential desktop applications: Word 2003 for word processing, Excel 2003 for spreadsheets, PowerPoint 2003 for presentations and Outlook 2003 for e-mail and personal information. Office applications share a common look and feel, which means there's less to learn when switching between them. There are also shared components, such as the drawing tools, which let you create charts, diagrams and text effects. Another strong point is that Visual Basic for Applications is fully integrated, enabling anything from simple macros to custom solutions that automate one or more of the Office applications.
Office has been a highly capable product for years, making it hard for Microsoft to come up with compelling new features. New in Office Standard Edition 2003 is great integration with SharePoint Services running on Windows Server 2003, allowing users to save documents to an internal website with features like update notification, task lists and version control. Tablet PC users get built-in support for Ink, letting you add handwritten notes and drawings to Office documents. Those with constant Internet access will like the updated Task Pane, offering online help and potentially third-party services direct from the Internet. Outlook has been reworked in this edition, with a better interface and more secure e-mail reading. Word 2003 is enhanced with a new Reading view, using ClearType technology and automatic page-sizing for ease in reading online documents.
Although this is the Standard edition, it is comprehensive and feature-rich. There is also a professional edition, which adds the Access 2003 database manager, Publisher 2003 for desktop publishing and some additional features in the area of XML support and rights management. Office deserves its position as the leading productivity suite. It's an excellent deal, but makes less sense as an upgrade unless you have a tablet PC or will make use of the new collaboration features. --Tim Anderson
Manufacturer's Description
Microsoft Office Word 2003, the latest version of the best-selling word processor, takes customer experience and feedback to deliver innovations you can use to create impressive-looking documents and help you work better together.
Microsoft Office Excel 2003 enables you to turn data into information with powerful tools to analyze, communicate, and share results. Microsoft Office Excel 2003 can help you work better in teams, and help protect and control access to your work. In addition, you can work with industry-standard Extensible Markup Language (XML) data to make it easier to connect to business processes.
Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 provides an integrated solution for managing and organizing e-mail messages, schedules, tasks, notes, contacts, and other information. Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 delivers innovations you can use to manage your communications, organize your work, and work better with othersall from one place.
Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003 includes new tools to help you create, present, and collaborate on presentations that have more impact.
Customer Reviews
Very intuitive, easy to use and produces great results...
I have just upgraded to Office 2007 but find myself still using 2003 Pro.
Why? It's just that good. The layout is by far the best out of all the office products, and the menu driven system allows you to create very professional work with little input. There are even templates and wizards to help you along the way. All the major office programs are here except FrontPage, which most people wouldn't use anyway, unless into web design.
Overall, I have given it 5 stars as it is the best value for money as well as being a very complete office package.
Recommended!
Worth it for Outlook & Access
It would appear that many of the people at Microsoft have had a very easy 2 years. Apart from Outlook & Access, the rest of the Suite remains virtually unchanged. Basically, the only major new suite-wide features and/or improvements relate to XML & (the controversial) Digital Rights Management. There are some improvements in Access, and Outlook has had a major overhaul, but Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are virtually unchanged.
Access has an excellent new feature: Object Dependencies-this feature allows you to see what forms, queries, and tables depend on each other. Another new feature allows you to add Smart Tags to your Forms and Tables.
Outlook is the only program in the entire Office Suite that looks like it's had a lot of development. It's been redesigned and streamlined, and it has a new Anti-SPAM feature that blocks external 'tracking codes' so that even if you accidentally open a SPAM E-mail, the SPAM Sender doesn't know and therefore can't confirm that your E-mail address is legitimate.
On the whole, if you have money to spare, you may like Office 2003 for the new look, but don't buy it because you think there are loads of new features-you may be better off buying Outlook on its own.
If you're a company, you may benefit from the XML features or from Digital Rights Management, but if you don't plan on using these features, you may just give this version a miss and, again, just buy Outlook 2003 for your office.
A good deal at half the price.
MS Office isn’t the leader in its class by accident. When I paid out for the upgrade, I fully expected a top class word processor, a powerful spread sheet, an integrated email / contact manager / diary and a powerful presentation tool. What’s more, I fully expected to be able to easily switch between and combine the four tools. MS Office didn’t let me down.
However, for most people, the decision to buy MS Office rather than one of its competitors has already been made for them. Why? Because like it or not, MS Office has become something of a world standard.
I know that if I prepare my slides in PowerPoint, there’s a strong chance that most places I go to are going to be able to fix me up with a computer to show them. If I buy a new mobile phone or PDA, it’s a good bet that it will come with software that “synchronises” with Microsoft Outlook. And the last time I saw a spreadsheet that wasn’t prepared in Excel was in the 80's.
In fact, I can hardly remember the last time anyone emailed me a document which wasn’t either PDF or MS-Office based.
The truth is, most people are stuck with MS Office, and if you’re going to be forced to have one product, it might as well be this one.
Having said all that, I do have my gripes (hence the 3 stars).
Firstly, I’m not sure whether this product really takes you to the next level.
There’s no arguing that things have moved on since the days of typewriters, when you had to find Tippex the right colour to match the paper you had, and then retype your mistakes to correct them. Remember when you had to print a document out from your word processor to see what it looked like without all those “back-slash B’s” for ‘bold’ and “back-slash C’s” for ‘centred text’? And the time was when spreadsheets had about a dozen functions, and a maximum formula length of 25 characters, and you needed columns and columns of formulae hidden away just to do simple calculations.
So yes, things have improved. But what about this product as an “upgrade”? How does it compare, for example to MS Office 97? Sure, you have rounder fuzzier edges, and more colourful icons. On the practical side, I’ve managed to do fairly extensive work with tables without the whole thing coming to a shuddering halt, and I can have several documents open and several panes on the screen without a noticeable slow down (although that may in part be down to a more powerful PC).
But for normal home use, I can put my finger on very few things which have changed dramatically since two (or is it three?) versions ago. Although I don’t doubt that it is packed with extra features, these are not features which will change the life of this home user.
In fact, the only thing that I would say is markedly improved is PowerPoint, which now has capabilities that some dedicated graphics programmes would be proud of. If snazzy slides is what you're after, I doubt if you can do much better than PowerPoint.
So why upgrade? Well, if you’re like me, and your new PC shipped with Microsoft Works rather than Microsoft Office, the good news is that you probably qualify for this upgrade. If you need PowerPoint for slides, graphics or presentations, and your “hand held” won’t synchronise with Outlook Express, you may just want to bite the bullet, and pay the ludicrous price. Cheaper than buying the product new, but to my mind way over the odds. The correct price should be nearer what students and teachers are asked to pay, particularly if you have already bought the product before.
If you have an earlier version of MS Office, and that already does what you need, you should ask yourself whether you really need this upgrade at this price.
