MS Office 2003 Professional Edition includes these components: Word 2003, Excel 2003, PowerPoint 2003, Outlook 2003, Publisher 2003, and Access 2003. I was very pleased to see that Publisher had been added back into the suite.

The new features I am the most excited about are in Word, Excel, Outlook and Access because I use them the most. When Word is opened, on the left side of the page is a sidebar showing a preview of the page or pages you have in the document. On the right is a sidebar or task pane with sections for Getting Started and links to Microsoft Office Online tutorials and help files. Also, in the right-hand task bar is a section of links to recently opened documents so you can just click on a filename instead of looking for it in My Documents. A new document can be opened from the task pane as well as from the toolbar above the page. Clicking on the Edit drop down menu is an Office Clipboard and selecting it places the Clipboard in the right-hand task bar. The task pane is turned on/off from the View drop-down menu or with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+F1, or it can be closed with the X in the upper right-hand corner.

There are three new features that I haven’t seen before. In addition to the green underline squiggles for suggested changes in grammar and sentence construction and red squiggles for possible spelling errors, there is now a purple dot underline indicating smart tags. Smart tags give a selection of options that can be performed on that particular type of word. Smart tags included with Office 2003 are Address, Date, Financial symbol, Person’s name, Place, Telephone number, and Time. For example, if a telephone number is typed, it’ll be underlined with little purple dots, and putting the mouse pointer on the purple dots gives a symbol like an ”i” in a circle inside a square. Clicking on the square and then the down arrow gives a list of smart tag options to: Add to Contacts (in Outlook), Remove this smart tag, Stop recognizing this set of numbers, and Smart tag Options. The Smart tag options are located by the path Tools—AutoCorrect options—Smart tags tab. Selecting More Smart tags takes you to the web where other tags may be available from Microsoft or other companies.

The other two new things I see are buttons that look like a clipboard and a lightning bolt. The clipboard button gives Paste Options when items are pasted—this is great for pasting stuff from the web that appears in boxes and selecting “Keep text only” gets rid of the text box outlines. The lightning bolt is an AutoCorrect button that appears when the mouse pointer is placed on an autocorrected item; it gives options to Change back, Stop automatically correcting, or takes you to the AutoCorrect Options window.

In Excel, is a right-hand task pane like the one in Word, but the links are of course topics related to Excel. Recently opened workbook links are listed, and the option is present to open a new workbook. A feature I don’t recall seeing before is a Fill Down or Across handle in the lower right-hand corner of each cell. It’s a thin, black plus sign and it can be used to Fill in formulas, or number sequences, or text.

Access, when opened, has a similar right-hand task pane with Microsoft Office Online course topics, recently open workbook files, and the option to Create a new database file. When I was learning to set up a database for my church recently, I spent about eight hours working through the interactive courses, and the nice thing about it is that you can go back and work through any section you wish if you forget what you practiced or you just need a little reinforcement.

The Help menus in all of the components contain links to Microsoft Office Online, Contact us (for help or suggestions, or feedback), and Detect and Repair (automatically find and fix problems in Office files). The interactive courses on the website at Microsoft Office Online are absolutely wonderful. It’s like having a private instructor giving lessons. Some of the courses are auditory and the text is read aloud. A search for help option is available with a box in which to type a question.

In Outlook, your planner and email program, messages can be flagged for Followup from the Actions drop-down menu with red, blue, yellow, green, orange, or purple flags. The number of messages flagged for Followup is shown under the Inbox menu.

Office 2003 supports the universal XML technology that as I understand saves data in a format that can be opened and used in different templates by other XML users without having to worry about program compatibility.

This is a very powerful suite of programs and is designed to make communications easier especially for businesses. Recommended system requirements include: PC with Pentium II 233 MHz or higher, Windows 2000 with Service Pack 3 or Windows XP, minimum 128 MB ram (256MB or more is much better), 400 MB of hard drive space for installation (plus 290 recommended for files cache), and Super VGA (800x600) or higher resolution monitor.