Should You Upgrade to Microsoft Office 2003? the Answer Depends on How You Use the Office Suite Now and How You Want to Use It in the Future
Each time Microsoft introduces a major product upgrade, users ask whether they should invest the time and money in it. With the launch of Microsoft Office 2003 System last October, the question has taken on more significance than for most earlier upgrades because the company improved some functions and added some new ones. So the decision depends on how important those improved and new features are to the way you use Office--and even more important, how you want to use it in the future. To help you make an informed choice, this article will outline Office 2003's major improvements and new functions. A brief explanation of Microsoft's product-naming and application-bundling conventions is necessary. Traditionally, when you think of Microsoft Office, you think of a suite, or collection, of four core applications: Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint; that hasn't changed. However, as you'll discover, Microsoft has added a number of features to the core group to enhance user productivity. DEFINING TERMS To make sure we're all on the same page, let's take a moment to define what Microsoft means when it uses terms such as version, system and edition. A version is a generational release of a family of products--for example, Office XP and Office 2003 are versions of the Office suite. All the products that make tap a version--the various Office suites and the other individual products and services (from Internet Explorer to Paint, the art application)--together are defined as a system. An edition is a subset of a version--Office 2003 Professional Edition or Office 2003 Small Business Edition, for example. Each edition is targeted to a specific customer group; as a result, in addition to the four core applications, each has a unique combination of additional applications and features. Let's look at what Microsoft is serving up in this latest upgrade. Exhibit 1, above, lists the available editions of Microsoft Office 2003 and their prices, which were obtained from www.microsoft.com/office/howtobuy/default.mspx. Exhibit 2, at right, shows all the other products in the Office 2003 System and their prices. Notice some products have two prices: A higher one for new buyers (the customer's computer never had an Office version installed) and a lower price for a license to upgrade from an older version. To qualify for the upgrade price, you must have an earlier version of Microsoft Office. It need not be the immediate former version, Office 2002. It could be XP, 2000 or back through version 6.0; even Microsoft Works qualifies. The Student and Teacher Edition is sold for noncommercial use only; teachers, students or parents of a student in K-12 or college qualify. Neither exhibit includes prices for the Professional Enterprise Edition, which is available only to customers in the Microsoft Volume license program, and its price depends on the number of licenses acquired. That edition includes all the applications in the Professional Edition plus InfoPath, a new tool used to assemble all sorts of data--from loan-application information to survey results. What makes Microsoft Office unique and relatively user-friendly is that each product is tightly integrated with its generational peers--that is, all the products in Office 2003 work best when used with other Office 2003 products. That is not to say an Office 2003 product such as Word would be incompatible with an Office XP Word, but the likelihood of problems increases as the time span between editions widens--as users of earlier versions of Office can confirm. Compatibility between distant generations is not always easy to achieve, but the good news is that Office 2003 users have reported relatively few compatibility bugs. INTRODUCING XML Office 2003 is the first Office version to feature support for extensible markup language (XML) (for more on XML, see "Finally, Business Talks the Same Language," JofA, Aug. …