Programs being reviewed:
Microsoft Office Word 2003 Beta
Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 Beta
Microsoft Office Powerpoint 2003 Beta
Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Beta
Introduction
Its been a while since the last version of Office, Office
XP, hit the shelves. This new version gets back to the old naming scheme,
calling itself office 2003. It was inadvertantly leaked to MSDN weeks early
but in beta 2 form it is a surprisingly stable product right out of the
gate. I will not be reviewing OneNote as it is extremely buggy at this point,
I can't even use the darn thing without having serious problems. I'm hoping
that it gets fixed completely before RTM (Release to Manufacturing) comes
around. And hopefully before anyone who signed up to test OneNote via the
website gets it. I also will not be reviewing Access because it has no inking
features included.
I'll be focusing on only the inking aspects of the new versions
of these office programs because I feel that the only program worthy of
really reviewing as updated is outlook. Everything else is pretty much the
same over office xp.
Microsoft Office Word 2003 Beta
(click on the screenshots to enlarge)
Microsoft Office Word 2003 is relatively unchanged from the
older versions of word, but the inking features are what everyone was waiting
for. As seen in the second screenshot, you can directly annotate any document.
You hit the pen button on the toolbar, and just start writing. It supports
pen erasing and you can change thickness and change it to any color you
want. If you don't want to see the annotations you click the hide button,
its as simple as that! I can see this feature as being extremely useful
in a buisness environment or even a school environment where teachers or
co-workers can write directly on your document without messing anything
up.
Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 Beta
(click on the screenshots to enlarge)
Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 by far has the coolest and most
radical changes of any of the Office 2003 programs. As you can see in the
first shot (censored for privacy's sake) everything is now much more organized.
In the portrait view it is much easier to have the preview at the bottom,
but in landscape the preview actually sits to the right of the messages,
its a stunning effect and I love the way they've designed it. In the second
shot you see the inking support, and well, its really lame once again. You
have to make a box to write in, but now instead of having it lock up when
you try to resize it, you can actually go back and edit and add to what
you've written. Its an improvement but it isn't a feature worth handwriting
emailing mom about. :)
Microsoft Office Powerpoint 2003 Beta
(click on the screenshots to enlarge)
Not that many changes to speak of in Powerpoint, it still
remains the same ol' presentation software, just a little bit different
here and there. Annotation on slides is shown in the screenshot above, although
there is some wierdness to it that I am willing to say is just beta issues.
You can write but it doesn't show up in a presentation, and you and write
in a presentation and save the ink but it never shows up on the slides again.
Maybe its supposed to be like that but I'm not sure.
Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Beta
(click on the screenshots to enlarge)
Excel hasn't changed much (big surprise there!), the only
thing to speak of is annotation and it works exactly the same way that word's
annotation does.
So thats it, the whole office suite except OneNote and Access.
All in all its a pretty good update for tablet users, I just wish some of
the updates were a little better (outlook and powerpoint). I'll be reviewing
them again when the final version comes out around June.
Any questions? Email me
-jstigall
jstigall@indiana.edu
