Microsoft Office 2003 

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Office 2003 is the successor to Microsoft Office XP. Office 2003 makes is easier for people to produce results and collaborate through innovations such as Information Rights Management, Extensible Markup Language (XML) and integration with SharePoint services.

The software has slowly evolved from a suite of personal productivity products to a comprehensive and integrated business solution. Building on the familiar tools that many people already know, the Microsoft Office System includes servers, services, and desktop programs designed to work together to help address a broad array of business problems.

Improved Outlook

Outlook 2003 is the Microsoft Office personal information manager (PIM) and communication program. Outlook 2003 provides a unified place to manage e-mail, calendars, contacts, and other personal and team information.

  • You can now group messages and replies in a long back-and-forth exchange so that you can easily see the most recent message or reply to any message in the thread.

  • The ability to flag messages with a single click (something Outlook Express already does) makes it easy to mark important messages.

  • You can customize Outlook's Search Folders to create new views, such as Last Week's Mail or Mail Today, that cut through the clutter by showing you only messages with certain attributes, such as flags.

  • In addition, Outlook's new Reading Pane gives you more room to read messages than previous Outlook versions did. If the three vertical panes feel a bit cramped, you can customize Outlook's interface to put the Reading Pane on the bottom, as in Outlook 2002.

  • Outlook incorporates antispam measures, including a built-in filter and the ability to build or even import lists of accepted (whitelist) and junk mail (blacklist) domains.

  • In version 2003, Outlook not only identifies mail as junk mail, it automatically tosses that junk into a new Junk E-mail folder (or, if you want, Outlook will automatically delete it).

Word 2003

With this new release, the software allows documents to be saved in XML and supports the creation of templates based on customer-defined schemas. Users can use Microsoft Word to create long documents with large areas of text and extensive formatting, such as a customer letter or marketing plan, and retain all of that rich formatting when saving in XML format. In addition, a collection of XML documents can be searched as readily as a database, enabling businesses to unlock the information stored in documents across the organization.

Word also extends the functionality of smart tags to apply to XML elements directly, so actions can be provided for entire sections of documents rather than just a few words, and actions can work on “types” or collections of data rather than relying on recognition of a piece of text. For example, a custom smart tag can be written that appears on fields requiring the user to enter data and offer to pre-populate the data. A smart tag action can also be provided that applies different transforms or views on XML data retrieved via the Research Task Pane.

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Word now includes a format-locking feature so that you can lock down any document's formatting and style or restrict the number of formatting styles others can apply--creating, in essence, a template. This should appeal to companies that want all official documents to have the same look and feel.

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To make digital documents easier to read, Reading Mode (activated by the Start Reading toolbar button) attempts to reformat your documents to look like printed pages--sort of like Adobe Acrobat. But in Reading Mode, unlike in Acrobat Reader or the former Print Preview, your documents remain editable. On an LCD, the text looks as clear as can be--great for browsing long documents.

PowerPoint 2003

With improvements to the user interface and support for Smart tags, PowerPoint 2003 makes it easier to view and create presentations.

Multimedia support in PowerPoint 2003 is also improved:

  • You can easily save PowerPoint 2003 files to a CD

  • Integration with Microsoft Windows Media Player allows you to play streaming audio and video within a slide show.  

  • PowerPoint viewer is included to make sure that computers without PowerPoint can be used to show presentations.

In addition two brand-new programs, have entered the Microsoft toolkit.

  • OneNote, a potentially indispensable note-taking and recording program, will appeal to all manner of note takers, from students to personal assistants.

  • InfoPath, formerly known as X-Docs, enhances individual Office applications' ability to collect and share data via compatible servers.

References:

Zdnet
OneNote
Office 2003
Microsoft Office 2003 - Ordering and Information

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