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 Software : Microsoft Office Professional 2003 [OLD VERSION] |
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Rating:  - It's been some time since '97...
Office 97 was a pretty good product. The programs were powerful, had a decent interface (maybe not as good as the Claris products of the early 1990s, but not bad), and came with a ton of features all on one disc. The Office 98 release for Mac was pretty much the same thing. The only thing that really got annoying for me was the office assistant (paperclip) but it is easy enough to turn off.
Office 2000 was a bit of a disappointment for me. I felt that the improvements were minimal (aside from a bit more stability in Word--anyone who has ever used Word 97 on a regular basis knows it's prone to crashing) and in fact detracted from the ease of use. One example is the clip gallery, which went from being one of the best organizers ever created to becoming a program that wouldn't have received decent reviews in 1988. Another is PowerPoint's outline feature. I always turned this off because it ate up monitor space and therefore made the actual slide smaller. When you use smaller displays like I often do this is a problem. The menus, which hide some functions until you go to the bottom of them, were also an annoyance. The manual went from being a nice thick book to one half the size.
Office 2003 continues making the program uglier. Now there are many tasks crammed onto one little panel on the right of the screen. Again, this eats into the workspace. The clip art system is even more cumbersome, and many of the clips are online only now. The help feature tries to point too much in the online direction as well. Now some people may not complain, but what if you're using a laptop in the middle of the country?
I feel that the program is basically an uglier version of the same thing that was first seen in 1997. In fact, the 1997 version was more pleasant to work with and almost as powerful. On my Macs, I've switched to Keynote for presentations and Pages for some of my word processing because the new Office versions on that platform are similar.
Some of the templates also look very 1997. Apple's programs are updated on a regular basis, and their templates look very modern. Now I know Microsoft adds some new ones now and then, but they should consider redesigning many of them--such as replacing the overused Arial and Times New Roman fonts with something a little more classy.
The program is bloated way too heavily. I can run Office 2000 comfortably on a 486 with sub-1GB hard drive, but can't even get 2003 on it.
A final gripe is that Access is not user friendly at all. File Maker is a better alternative, as it is easier to use and friendlier.
Rating:  - Pro OFFICE PRO
I've been using Word for more than 20 years,
and Office for as long as it has been around.
It just gets better and better.
All of modules integrate nicely.
Excel spreadsheet is created easily from Access database,
and sending mailmerge letters to a selected Access group
is a piece of cake. Mail merge even works with Publisher.
This is not a political view of Microsoft; I just like this product.
BNB ><>
Rating:  - Great Product but...
Microsoft makes the best office suite - period. However, I still do believe that the price is a bit of a rip-off. I have been using Open Office (...) which is developed by Sun Microsystems and is FREE. It is also compatible with MS Office - you can save the files in Word, PowerPoint etc. format. The more I use it, the more I wish I had it during my undergrad days. If money is not your concern - MS Office is definitely the best productivity suite out there. However, if you are a student and wish to make presentations or documents for school/university work I would definitely recommend Open Office as you simply cannot get anything better for free and it shall suit all your needs. I mean at the end of the day - you are graded on your work now how the slides come flying in. But Open has the flying slides too - thought the MS ones still look cooler:) I particularly liked exporting Word Files to PDF format within Open Office. For the record I am not anti-Microsoft - they have some good products - I just wish they would make them more affordable. I hope this helps.
Rating: - Open Office is better and it's free!
Microsoft is simply sloppy with their programming!
"Open Office" is a better program, is open-source (meaning if you don't want some paperclip's help, you simply don't download that part of it) AND OPEN OFFICE is FREE! It is also compatible with most of the functions that MS Office uses (and is upgraded with new features faster than MS's product, which is a rip-off!)
MS's Office 97 was the best of the Office suites, even though it did have it's problems, Spending the money to supposedly "upgrade" to this (or any other Microsoft product for that matter) is simply burning your money!)
OPen-source software is FREE, it's perfectly legal, it is open t anyone decompiling it, so if you want to make your own custom goodies, you can, but then there are so many written by so many people willing to share, you don't have to develop your own, as there are already *SO* many freebie ones (and some low-cost additions by some places, but most are free) that if you want whistles and bells, or even a Christmas theme in February, you can get it for OPEN OFFICE! (Not so with this or ANY Microsoft product for that matter)
Simply sloppy programming - nothing more, AND you can get a fully functioning and compatable office suite for free legally!
Rating: - Good product -- industry standard
I decided to get this office suite after using it recently. I've usually worked on Office 97 and 2000, but the 2003 version has some pretty cool features not found in the older versions. The feature that I really enjoy is the Pivot Report feature in MS Access, which wasn't in MS Access 2000. This is a truly great reporting feature. You can now use Access as a front-end to slice and dice data stored on data warehouses in Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase and other enterprise-type databases. If you're used to creating crosstab reports, you'll definitely like the Pivot Report feature. Crosstabs are limited to 2 dimensions but there's no limitation on the number of dimensions in Pivot Report.
To me, the main drawback is the price. (I did get mine at around $370 at J&R, which is a great price.) I figure I can upgrade this in about 5 years time, which works out to about $70 to $75 per year (assuming that I'll be paying about $370 to upgrade in 5 years time.)
A big positive is that this is the industry standard. So the work you put into learning the multiple new features of Word, Excel, MS Access is not wasted because you can reuse the same skills in another job. Your time will be well spent. Note that the software may seem bloated but the intelligent user is able to choose and pick the most useful and relevant features of each application and ignore the features that are not useful. Different features are useful to different people...
Another positive: Each product in Office Professional is fully programmable using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) which you can use to build custom programs. This very powerful feature is sometimes overlooked when shopping for Office suites.
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