Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Value
Review: It was hard for me when I originally made the transition from WordPerfect to MS Word/Office, but once I did I never looked back.The Students and Teachers edition is an excellent value as it contains 4 full versions of programs that cost more individually than you'd pay for this entire bundle. The catch? First, by installing the software you are agreeing that you are a student or teacher engaged somehow in academia (no, they won't send people to your house to check...it's an honor system kind of thing). The other catch, and the one to really pay attention to, is that you can't upgrade these programs like you could if you purchased the individual program or one of the other Office bundles. This means that if a Word 2004 upgrade becomes available one day you could not install it to upgrade the version of Word that comes with this bundle. You'd either have to buy the next edition of the Students and Teachers bundle or purchase another full version of Word (either in one of the other bundles that Microsoft Offers at substantially more than the S&T edition or as the stand alone program which still costs more that the S&T edition). Small price to pay, however, as the money you save in obtaining the Students and Teachers edition will still allow you to buy upcoming versions for generations to come and you'd still come out ahead as this bundle is such a great deal.
Rating: 
Summary: Not an Alternative, The Answer to Microsoft Office
Review: Like most of you, I was lookig for an inexpensie alternative to Microsoft Office. So I was investigating if I should purchase the Student Microsoft Office to save some money. Well I read what others said, and others recommendations. I ended up going with Open Office (http://www.openoffice.org/). I've become hooked to Open Office! It FREE!!! And its a far better product. You are compatible with all the other suites out there (i.e. Office, StarOffice, WordPerfect, etc.), takes up less disc space, is easier to use, and the interface looks great.
Also, you get several more products.... And its FREE!
If you are skeptical, just put off your purchase for a few days, download it, use it for a while, and see.
I'm very well versed in using Microsoft applications, and if thats a worry, no problem there either. Its interface, and formulas are almost the same, and more intuitive.
If you have dialup, or prefer installing it with a CD, you can get it on Amazon with a pretty good instruction book. Its called OpenOffice.Org 1.0 Resource Kit and the ISBN is: 0131407457 .
Rating:
Summary: Best version of Office yet, great value
Review: Microsoft Office Student and Teacher Edition 2003 is the academic-priced version of the "standard edition" of Office 2003. In functionality it's identical to the standard edition and comes with the four major components of Office:
- Word (word processor)
- Excel (spreadsheet)
- PowerPoint (presentation)
- Outlook (e-mail, calendar and addressbook)
Missing from this package are Publisher and Access, but very few home or educational users would need these programs, especially with regard to Access.
While you do not need to prove to Amazon or any other retailer that you are a qualified "academic user" before buying this package -- that's right, *anyone* can purchase it -- you are at legal risk if you are not a qualified user but still use it. A qualified user is:
- any student in K-12 to grad school, full-time or part-time
- any home-schooled student
- any faculty or staff of an accredited educational institution (K-12 and beyond)
- any household member of such an ademically affiliated person
So the qualifying criteria are pretty generous, and the license lets you install the software on up to three PCs in your household. The only other requirement is you not use the software for money-making purposes.
Anyway, Office 2003 as a whole is a minor upgrade from Office XP ("2002"), which was in turn a minor upgrade from Office 2000 (except for XML support, which 99% of users don't care about). The only significant upgrades were in Outlook, which simply gets better and better with time. Outlook 2002 introduced integration with Hotmail, and the new version in this package has better security and more robust e-mail support. One feature I like in particular is the ability to password-protect your Outlook data file, which was not available in Outlook 2000 and prior.
All four applications run smoothly and I'm very happy with both the performance and stability. I never had a problem with Office 2000, and hopefully I won't have any problems with Office 2003. BTW, you must be running Windows XP (either Home or Pro), or Windows 2000 with service pack 3 or later, in order to run the version sold on Amazon, which is the latest version. I also recommend at least 512MB of RAM in your PC, otherwise you'll find running multiple applications (e.g., Word and Excel at the same time) somewhat sluggish.
The software comes on a single CD-ROM and includes a 46-page getting started guide. If you are completely new to Office you may want to get a third-party book like the excellent Microsoft Office Inside Out.
If you qualify, this academic edition of Office 2003 is simply a great value. It deserves five stars for offering a rich and useful set of features and solid performance, and another five stars for being such a great value. If you don't qualify, marry or move in with someone who does! :)
PS: If you wonder whether you should use OpenOffice in lieu of Microsoft Office, let me say this. I've used the latest version of OpenOffice and, one, it's far inferior in design and functionality to Microsoft Office, and two, it's not very compatible with real Office documents, even for some simple Word files. Don't subject yourself to the cruelty of half-baked software. Get the real thing.
Rating: 
Summary: Great new feel
Review: Not huge changes to the Word or Excel programs, just overall great changes to the look and feel of the programs. If your an Outlook user though, the significant changes that are made to this version make it more than worth the upgrade expense.
Rating:
Summary: Great For Newbies
Review: OK, here's the deal. If you don't own Microsoft Office (any version). This is a must have software for students. They need it to work on their school projects at home. (Grades 6+ really) Also, teachers would find it useful to create presentations at home to show their students at school. But, if you own office Xp you don't need to upgrade unless you like the new outlook look or if you need the new powerpoint features/ package to CD feature. Office 2000 and previous should buy this.
Rating: 
Summary: An american employer???
Review: Read the news. Microsoft is a huge investor in India and hires tons of Indians to work in this country as well. They are no friend of american developers. Get a clue.
Rating:
Summary: Better things to spend money on, when OpenOffice is free
Review: Schools and governments and regular people in the rest of the world are switching like gangbusters to OpenOffice. Sweden, Peru, China, you name it. There's movement in the US too but judging from the other reviews, apparently there are still people who don't know about OpenOffice and assume that you have to fork out a few hundred bucks every couple years in order to just produce a decent document. Which of course Microsoft Office in any version does. It does decent documents and spreadsheets and presentations. Fine. But for pete's sake, you can do all that for free with OpenOffice.org and no one from Uncle Bill will ever come knockin' at the door wanting to know where your licenses are. Still using Microsoft Office is like leasing your phone for $30 a month from the phone company when you can buy one for cheaper. Our schools have better things to spend money on than Microsoft Office, whether it's this 2003 version with all the new bells and whistles or the license for whatever version you're on now.
The latest release of OpenOffice.org 1.1 has even better compatibility with MS Office, it handles the new formats, it runs on Windows and UNIX, and it prints straight to PDF. So what is anyone doing paying for MS Office? Beats me.
Rating:
Summary: Cheap
Review: The pricing is good for what you get,i am on a 60 day trial and i love it. what i love the most is the office outlook 2003 i put all my stuff in it to keep organised. I would concider it.
Rating:
Summary: Best Software Ever!
Review: This computer software, "Microsoft Office 2003" is ten times greater than the 2000 edition. This edition has been enhanced in every program that the CD contains. This products give new a new and improved Office, Excel, Powerpoint (GREATEST!), and Outlook. I used this edition throughout my junior and senior year in High School and absolutely loved this program. Here are the biggest features and upgrades on the different programs.
Word 2003: Over fifty new typing fonts to choose from. Expanded clipart with hundreds of photos and provided is a search engine to find the picture for you. This new clipart database has over a thousand photos, if not even more.
Excel: Features the same new and expanded font styles to choose from. The graphs have been seriously enhanced through pie graphs, bar graphs, linear graphs and many more.
Powerpoint: This is definitely where Microsoft enhanced this program to the max. The greatest aspect of this program is that in the old 2000 version, the slide layouts (background) were the same for all the slides. Now you can have individual slides with different backgrounds of your choice with a much better and more expanded variety of backgrounds to choose from. The slide layout, "Night Sky" is a mountian peak with the night sky gleaming over it. Beautiful! My personal favorite! New text transitions to choose from. All new slide transitions and slide sounds to choose from, too.
Outlook 2003: More staionaries to choose from for your emails featuring the create-a-stationary section.
Microsoft Office 2003 really is an outstanding program and it is all worth is for the money. This version I used in my high school career and all the class presentations I did with Powerpoint especially were better than ever before becuase of all the great special effects and transitions and backgrounds I was able to use.
This version is the cheapiest of the Microsoft Office 2003 selections and is the best choice for the price. Your work on all of these programs will be better than they ever have been before.
Rating:
Summary: Good product at a great price
Review: This IMHO is a great price for getting all the basic MS Office programs, which I dont use very heavily as company would, but its very nice the new looks of the software, specially outlook. I have never bought in the past MS Office because of the price, now that they have this value version, I gave it a try, and very please with the outcome, I just wish that I could upgrade the software, but you cant ask much at this price. If MS continues on developing value packs of MS office on the future, I will continue buying, I'm really happy with my buy.
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