Microsoft Office Professional 2003 is rather scary, we wot

Here's a series of screen shots during install that we dared to use, together with some explanations.

First choice. Do you let Microsoft bang away and install the whole lot? No... we've been caught like that before. You might run out of hard drive space, you might overwrite all sorts of stuff you don't want to do, you might, well.. it's almost endless what you might do. You must proceed very very slowly to catchee the monkee..

Because after it asks which Office apps you want to install on the screen above, the next message is that you have to allow it to overwrite your previous version of Outlook. No, we daren't allow it to do that.

If you click the next button on this, you won't have any previous versions of Office to go back to. We went back, and told it don't do that.

So we also made Office 2003 save our previous installs of Microsoft Word, of Excel, of Powerpoint and of Access. The first time you try and use an app you get this message above.

And then you're told you're on the case. Part of this review will consist of how easy Office Professional 2003 is to de-install, which we haven't got to yet.

MICROSOFT WINWORD
I was a beta-tester of Microsoft Word for Windows back in the mid to late 1980s, and liked the way the word processor worked, compared to the DisplayWrite, the Word 4 for DOS and the rest that I had to use then.

The first version didn't have a word count function. Can you believe that?

Microsoft hasn't changed the eyecandy too much on this version of Word, except there's more of a 3D look to the toolbars than before - presumably the word processor is waiting for Longhorn.

When you put the mouse pointer against the toolbar, the options are highlighted.

The menus all look as if Microsoft engineers have been using too many Apple Macs - no wonder they're shipping loads into Seattle these days.

Compare the latest version of Word with version 2.0b of Word, which we still use, below.

The latest version has a much neater experience, and obviously a lot more "3D" given the next version of Longhorn.

Version 2.0b seems a lot more cluttered. But has that much changed in 20 years? Not really. Why, you are probably asking, is Mageek still using Winword 2.0b? The reason is that it had a very nice glossary function, and when Microsoft tried to push us onto the next version, I noticed it wouldn't use the glossary function and therefore I'd have to wave goodbye to glossaries for four books. Sod that for a game of upgrading.

Microsoft used to have the very bad habit of making new versions incompatible with old ones on its software. We noticed that Visual Basic destroyed a heap of code in QuickBASIC, for example, then Visual Basic 2.0 and 3.0 introduced changes that were supposed to be better but involved more programming hours. That's blinking irritating when you're trying to port 10s of thousands of lines of codes. And it's also irritating if Microsoft tries to destroy hours of work by changing glossaries willy nilly.

One irritating "feature" on the last version of Word we used - Office 2000 - was that by default the menus would try and guess which ones you wanted, obviously based on choices you'd made before.

This one doesn't do that - that's a relief. And people that use the previous one noted that if you typed in something like http://www.theinquirer.net/annoying, the word processor would automatically turn it into a link. How annoying! By default this one doesn't seem to do that. [That could be because it's using your stylesheet Mike, and you switched all that stuff and 'smart quotes' off. Ed].

But don't worry - you've got some new options to annoy you. By clicking the "research" menu item, you will automatically go off to the Interweb and Word will try and distil the essence of human civilisation for you and make it helpfully next to your finger prints to plagiarise research as you will.

The new Eyecandy doesn't slow down your typing speed at all, but on older machines you may notice that the screen refresh is slightly slower than on the version you had before. We can assure you that Winword 2.0b works like Jumping Jack Flash on a 2GHz desktop machine. The fonts on the new one look more perfectly formed, however.

So will we be keeping Office Professional Word? We'll leave it on our machine for a week or two yet, and try out Excel and Powerpoint to see how they differ.

We realise that there are heaps of options we haven't tried yet with the Word module - but by and large, as an Interweb hack, most of them we'll never need. No doubt if you need them, you'll find they're there.

We do hope we can de-install this version of Word from our machine - we'll let you know about that later, as well. In the meantime, it seems like our previous .PST files are safe because we just couldn't allow Microsoft to overwrite Outlook 2000, however many bugs it might be attempting to fix. µ

See Also
Open Office for Windows