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Microsoft's Office 2003 released late this fall offers great improvements in e-mail management and great new tools for workgroup collaboration. However, these many improvements may not be reason enough to upgrade if Office 2000 or Office XP is already satisfying your needs.
Main changes to basic applications in Office 2003
Some interesting new features and add-on applications target the most problematic challenges of day-to-day work.
Word
* Offers ability to view and work on two documents in the same side-by-side screen.
* Ability to protect portions of text or whole paragraphs from copying.
* Improved task pane functionality for research and searching.
Excel
* Users can select a range of data within a sheet to work on separately.
* Ability to protect individual cells from copying.
* Improved task pane functionality for research and searching.
PowerPoint
* CD packager utility allows userto burn a presentation and also includes a viewer for easy distribution.
* Now plays embedded movies full screen.
While most of these changes are basic improvements in usability of everyday applications, the real work seems to have gone into better integration of XML and Microsoft Server components. Examples of this are SharePoint Services and intelligent document management which significantly benefits the larger office environment.
For the larger office environment, Office 2003 also offers the following:
Improved support for XML (Extensible Markup Language) defined data and information.
With the addition of .xml to the Save As options in both...