Rating: 
Summary: The BEST Office Suite
Review: If you want to increase your productivity, and overall use of your PC and need a rock solid Office this is for you. DO NOT be mislead by Open office it is not worth the time. You will be very disappointed by it, on the other hand you will be very pleased with Microsoft Office Professional. On a rating on 1 to 10, I give MS Office 2003 an 11!
Rating: 
Summary: Get StarOffice from SUN its better and much less
Review: its pirated and it doesn't load and the vendor does not return e-mails
Rating:
Summary: Major problems since hour 1
Review: My current issue is Outlook locks up for no good reason constantly. This has caused a bunch of interesting problems, such as when I try and synch my palm and outlook decides now is hard lock time. I get this nice little message in the system tray informing me that outlook appears to be locked up or has stopped responding. This is obvious to me. Luckily I was mailed a copy of this from MS (I guess you buy 36 copies of Office 2000 Pro and they love you). I have submitted numerous feedbacks, an average of 2 or 3 error reports per day, disabled com add-ins, etc. As it stands Outlook has been giving me hell. Also, the junk email filter, I don't know what logic they're using but it isn't half as effective as cloudmark or GFI. Excel now does rock, word seems slightly improved, access I have not played around much with but it appeared to work. My question though, WHY IS CLIPPY STILL ALIVE!??!!?AHHHH!!!
Rating:
Summary: Major problems since hour 1
Review: My current issue is Outlook locks up for no good reason constantly. This has caused a bunch of interesting problems, such as when I try and synch my palm and outlook decides now is hard lock time. I get this nice little message in the system tray informing me that outlook appears to be locked up or has stopped responding. This is obvious to me. Luckily I was mailed a copy of this from MS (I guess you buy 36 copies of Office 2000 Pro and they love you). I have submitted numerous feedbacks, an average of 2 or 3 error reports per day, disabled com add-ins, etc. As it stands Outlook has been giving me hell. Also, the junk email filter, I don't know what logic they're using but it isn't half as effective as cloudmark or GFI. Excel now does rock, word seems slightly improved, access I have not played around much with but it appeared to work. My question though, WHY IS CLIPPY STILL ALIVE!??!!?AHHHH!!!
Rating: 
Summary: Five starts is debatable, its utility is not.
Review: O2k3 is Microsoft's latest iteration of their cash cow product, Office, and in some ways fully realizes their previous dreams of integration and utility. For example, the taskpane that now appears stage-left (screen- right) does more than display a stacked clipboard; if you've been repeating a series of formatting commands, those too appear in the stack for easy access. This is what computers have promised to deliver for some time now. In this and other ways, Microsoft is finally bringing it to users in a usable, intuitive manner. Previous features such as spellchecking, grammar, integration and smart cut-copy-paste operations are all present. Perhaps the best addition to the suite is Microsoft's OneNote, which promises to capture freeform notes and text in whatever way you like, digitizing tablet handwriting or keyboard entry; the killer app is how it recognizes the handwriting and indexes the text for finding your notes again. Call it system-wide Graffiti for Windows. Still, this is Office and the usual bloat in disk space, system requirements, and price tag all apply. This is a release most-targeted for businesses that can afford to roll this out to many users under a favorable license. If a company such as GE had to pay $450 a seat, you can bet GE would be using a competitor's product tomorrow. So for an individual, Office is still a four-star player. For anyone considering Office 2003, let me weigh in with a wet blanket on previous rave reviews: if you have Office 2000/2002/XP, you don't need this release. Honestly. This iteration does not contain a truly compelling feature set that will bring you to spend a few hundred dollars. Microsoft's OneNote is good, maybe even killer, but you've gotten along without it for quite some time now, haven't you? To put all this in a single paragraph: if you're on Office 97 or earlier, and can score the upgrade, and have the bucks, this is a good release to use. However, if you don't have the bucks, Office 2002 or even Office 2000 are still viable alternatives that provide 95% of the features at 30-70% of the cost.
Rating:
Summary: Good product, but not worth the money
Review: Office 2003 is an excellent program. Despite what people say, it does have some nice features that Office XP did not (spam filter for instance). However, for $400, it's just not worth it. If it wasy say $150, I might be able to recomend it. But with it's current rediculous price tag, I just can't.
Rating: 
Summary: Buyer beware
Review: One of the worst products that came out of Microsoft, it is not backward compatible, it can't recognize any controls from excel 2000, as soon as I started an excel 2000 file in it (after lowering the macro security) it started giving me error, cannot reference the object etc. and was unwilling to stop the debugging. I have to end the task. This happened with practically all my excel 2000 spreadsheets, in some it doesn't recognize the ActiveX controls from previous version, in some cases references. I checked the reference under tools and excel 2000 reference objects were not there. At last I had to uninstall office 2003 and install office 2000 in my new PC. It is frustrating to see how Microsoft is using their monopoly in office application to squeeze as much as they can. It essentially means that one has to go on paying MS $400+ every year for new versions and over that have to redo their whole applications (excel, access etc.) in order for it to work. It definately doesn't increase productivity.
I must agree I should have listened to the other comments and should have thought of converting to OpenOffice but now it is too late for me but not for you I hope. I have finally started to migrate to Openoffice though slowly, I will also recommend to others to do the same if they want to stop paying Microsoft money everyyear for softwares that doesn't work.
Rating:
Summary: The latest version
Review: Perhaps I am jaded but again it seems that Microsoft has cranked out another product that looks and acts so much like its predecessor that you wonder at first if you loaded it onto your computer properly.
Office 2003 gives you what you already have in Office XP (and a few earlier versions) so learning how to use it is never going to be a problem. In virtually every way the program looks and feels like the previous Office versions.
There are improvements although I am not sure how much a home user will need the XML functionality. It may be a god-send one day but today it is still not a major factor and certainly does not demand a major update. The RESEARCH option is something to contend with and could be quite useful - it is almost like having Encarta loaded on your machine as well. I found it a bit limiting though; it is good as a thesaurus but there is no world atlas, quotation source, etc. Many people have applauded the new look and feel of Outlook. Again, it behaves just the same as previous versions of Outlook did.
Microsoft chose to retire the Office bar and that is a big mistake. They are trying to push the Quick Launch bar but most businesses and almost all Office users preferred the Office bar.
Don't get me wrong: Office 2003 works very well and with Word, Outlook, Excel, Access and Publisher you can literally do anything! It also preforms very well. But, again, unless Microsoft starts making major changes, these releases should not be heralded as new. If anything, they should be upgrades that former users should be able to download if they registered the original product - the cost is too prohibitive to justify upgrading. And, as your Office 97 or XP works just as well, you should think seriously before spending the money.
Rating:
Summary: Still finding all kinds of useful tools
Review: Some people are still waiting for color television to be perfected. It no longer takes a brave sole to be on the technical edge. Money may be an issue however aside from that the product works and the worth is what you get out of it. Other people may prefer other packages but that does not diminish the useful ness of this one. I had zero problems with the installation. However it took some time for all the updates that were not on the CD to download. You also need the net to register. Even though I asked for a complete install instead of some upgrade the system did recognize my previous version and kept all the settings. I do have a tendency to say if it works don't fix it; however I have benefited form this version in many ways. The one most useful to me is the use of the thesaurus; many times I miss spell and misuse words. The older version of Word still required a dictionary standing buy for words that were spelled correctly like "bear" and "bare" or sense and since, or some foreign phrase. Now I can go out on the net and get a good definition, from inside the word program. I am also finding a lot more flexibility with Excel. Do not forget to compliment this package with Microsoft Office OneNote 2003.
Rating:
Summary: Get StarOffice from SUN its better and much less
Review: The new Office Professional has virtually no improvements over office 2000. I am tired of making the rich richer. StarOffice does all I need and is easier to use. I don't like the locked binary files which is just part of the monopoly this product promotes.
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