Should I move to Office 2003 from 2000?

[Alex]

Hi all,

I received a full copy of Office 2003 Pro from a Microsoft seminar several weeks ago, and I'm not
sure whether I should upgrade my Office 2K Pro or not. I do lots of work in Word, Excel, and
Access, plus I share documents with others who use Office 2000 -- which is our corporate standard
right now. Since I work in IT and I'm generally the guy who supports this type of application, I
generally try to run the latest and greatest to learn the caveats before moving to a newer version
corporate-wide... but will my being on 2003 impact sharing documents and databases with 2000 users?
I know Office XP could read and write to Access 2000 databases just fine, but I'm not sure if this
is still the case with 2003. Also we still use Exchange 5.5... any issues with Outlook 2003
connecting to Exchange 5.5?

Finally I heard Office 2000/XP can now co-exist with Office 2003. Is this possible? If so, I'd
love to leave my current install of Office 2000 intact and run Office 2003 from a different directory.

Thanks for your help and time.

Alex.

 

[Rob Schneider]

Doesn't sound to me as if you have any compelling reasons to change.
2003 not really that much different (except for Outlook which has a
different UI and better spam filters ... but you didn't mention Outlook).

Hope this is useful to you. Let us know.

rms

 

[Alex]

Hi Rob,

I was interested in seeing the new Outlook 2003 interface, but for me Email is Email... I'd be just
as happy with Eudora or Pine for that matter, but since we use Exchange, Outlook is a must.

I did go ahead and install 2003 but I left all my 2000 components intact (except Outlook 2000 which
it forced to remove). Thus far I'm happy with it. The new Outlook UI is different, but I think I
have it customized to where I like it. Some neat features.

You're right on Word, Excel, etc... those are almost identical to 2000/XP, so nothing new there. I
did like the fact that Access still defaults to Access 2000 format, which is what we use around here.

Thanks for the reply, and take care,

Alex.

 

[Rob Schneider]

I figured you couldn't resist....

Hope this is useful to you. Let us know.

rms

 

[James Silverton]

I figured you couldn't resist....

Hope this is useful to you. Let us know.

rms

There were sloppy errors in the original release of Excel 2003 but I
gather they have been fixed and the arithmetic functions are now more
accurate than they have ever been.