Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 Upgrade Description:

Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 Upgrade review:
5 stars (2003 Upgrade) - For me the upgrade was a great thing.

There had always been things about Office XP that just didn't work right.

After the software was loaded, indeed I had some configuration issues. It worked, but it wasn't slick.

But Microsoft Help stepped in. The software support guy took control of my computer using net-meeting and looked at all the configuration issues. Turned out to be some conflicts with my virus protection (I've had these before, P.N.) and with some Microsoft add-ins. Point is, he made the conflicts go away.

Microsoft "help" has been a sometime thing, in the past.

Today, it rose to the top shelf.

I am quite happy with Office 2003.


1 stars (Don't even think about upgrading) - You need to get out more. Just the fact that you are looking at this page and are thinking of upgrading your Microsoft Office makes it clear that you have a problem. Don't believe the Microsoft advertisement featuring dinosaurs to announce "Microsoft Office Has Evolved." It hasn't. This is a mature product. It doesn't matter if you use Office 1997, 2000 or 2003. They are all the same. The good, the bad and the ugly. It is all still here. Maybe a few bugs have been fixed. Most haven't, and ther are always new bugs. If Microsoft took the time to really improve the software, that would be one thing. But they don't.



Here is an example. You are in Outlook. You call up a contact and want to send that person a letter. You need to print an envelope, but there is no command to do so. There is no button to click. You can't right click anywhere to print an envelope. I am not making this up. Outlook has been out for almost ten years and multiple upgrades, and Microsoft still hasn't gotten around to implementing functionality to print a single envelope. Your only option (the on-line support confirms this) is to perform a mail merge. This is an elaborate process that is designed for printing thousands of envelopes for a bulk mailing. It involves opening multiple windows and setting all sorts of settings. You have to go through the ENTIRE PROCESS just to print a single envelope! What is more, the mail merge feature has bugs in it. It leaves blank lines in addresses that look atrocious, and it drops country names from addresses. It gives you options as to how you want country names treaed in addresses, but these all do nothing. Whatever option you select, Outlook leaves countries out of addresses when it prints envelopes.



I could go on, but I won't. If you are using Office 2000 or even Office 1997, you aren't missing out on anything. There is absolutely no reason to shell out $250 for new software that does all the same things in all the same ways with mostly the same bugs.
5 stars (Great Product) - Well, what can I say bad about this product? Nothing! Great utilities and it would take years to learn them all. I don't use word for web creation because I use dreamweaver. I find that MS writes too much extra code on html pages. The best feature of woed is the styles menu for formatting long documents. A very competent programmer enlightened me about this years ago and I have more efficiently created long documents in word than in word perfect, which I stopped using years ago.