Conclusion

It's usually easy to review the Office updates and state that there is very little new stuff added to the package, but thankfully this year is the exception. There are a lot of new features in Word, PowerPoint, FrontPage and massive improvements in Outlook.

Final Comments

If you held back in upgrading to Office XP, then defiantly go with Office 2003 as there are some major improvements here. But if you already own Office XP, then once again it is hard to fully recommend spending a large amount of cash on the main upgrade simply because only Word and Outlook have had the major changes that most people are likely to make use of. But in saying that, PowerPoint 2003 is also a valuable update for a lot of users. The let downs here are Excel and Access, which don't have the kind of improvements other parts of the package have had, but once again I'll say if you haven't already got the XP versions of them, upgrade.

The reason I have reviewed each component of the pack separately, is so you can get an easy view of which parts you are mostly like to use, and which of them offer the most improvements and new features. The grade here is for the overall package. If you are new to Office and can afford it, you will undoubtedly get a lot of use out of it, especially businesses and students, if you are a home user, I would recommend picking out what you need instead of paying $500 for this package as there is a high chance you won't need all of the programs. But overall, an excellent update this time.