Lately, my respect for Microsoft has gone up considerably. In addition to finding out
Windows XP is actually pretty good now that Service Pack 2 has been released, I went and got a copy of
Microsoft Office Student and Teacher Edition 2003. This program, too, works very well. Evidently, competition from "open source" vendors, Linux and Apple has prompted Microsoft to put out some quality products. I am pleasantly surprised at how wonderfully useful (and, problem-free) Microsoft's
Office suite has become.
Of course, I was reluctant to try
Office 2003, considering how much trouble the suite had given me in the past. But, it turned out I needed it. Why? Well, I had a ton of articles I wrote on
News Edit at the newspaper I worked for until last month, and I had a problem -- the newspaper I work for now doesn't have
News Edit. So, I went looking for something to open the old articles. Those represent about six years of work and a ton of research, so I didn't want to lose my archives as a resource.
Anyway, we used
Microsoft Word at the newspaper I write for now, and I discovered I could open my archives with that. I tried using
OpenOffice at home to pop them open, and no dice. So, the purchase of
Word was necessary.
Now, I'm a business writer by trade, and just about every press release I get is in
Word format, almost every spreadsheet I receive is in
Excel, and I've gotten a lot of
PowerPoint presentations, to boot. I've got all of those applications on my Macintosh at work, but I do some freelancing, too, and I figured it would be great to have all those Microsoft applications at home, too. And, indeed, it is nice having them all. I don't have to worry about weird translations errors from
OpenOffice anymore, and it's kind of a good thing to have an office suite which has -- more or less -- become the industry standard.
I used to not care that
Office was standard stuff because it didn't work terribly well and I didn't want that junk on my system. However,
Office 2003 is stable and works extremely well. Furthermore, it is very fast under Windows XP and all components load up in no time (provided you've got halfway decent hardware). So, no complaints from me.
And, the price is right, too. We got the "Student and Teacher" edition of
Office for $150 -- quite a step down from the $399 price tag for the "Standard" edition of the suite. Why did we get a bargain? Quite simply, we've got a couple o' kids here, and one of them is in school. Hence, we get the discount. From my understanding, the "Student and Teacher" edition is identical to the "Standard" edition in that it contains
Word,
Excel,
Power Point and
Outlook.
It is different from the "Small Business" version (which costs $499) because it doesn't contain
Publisher. That's too bad as
Publisher is a decent piece of desktop publishing software. Fortunately, I don't need it because I don't bother with laying out pages -- I just write articles and let other folks handle that end of the process with
Quark Express and whatever tools they use.
Bear in mind, the absence of
Publisher doesn't impact the rest of the programs in the
Office suite. Although these programs cooperate well together,
Word and the rest are all stand-alone products. If, for example, Microsoft was to strip out
PowerPoint, the other componnents would still work just fine. It's important to point that out as some people might be under the impression they're getting a "crippled" version of
Office with this lower-priced suite, but that's not the case at all.
One thing interesting to point out here is that I really didn't have to
prove I had any kids in school in order to take advantage of the "Student" version of
Office. Sure, I'm qualified, but I wonder how they determine who is supposed to be buying this thing.
For those interested in a brief synopsis of what's included in this particular edition of
Office, here you go:
Word -- naturally, this is the word processor, and it works quite well. The grammar checking function, while not perfect, is very useful, as is the spelling checker. The "check as you go" function utilized by both checkers is invaluable, and
Word can save to and read from a variety of formats. The only complaint I really have about
Word is the "word count" feature. In earlier editions of
Word, you could turn on that feature and have it count words as you typed. Now, however, the counter has to be manually refreshed to get a count. This is a bother when I'm doing freelance work because articles are assigned with a set word length, so I have to refresh often. Of course,
Word documents can also be saved as HTML documents, complete with graphics, links to various Internet sites and the like. It's not a terribly powerful Website publisher, but it would do in a pinch.
Excel -- the standard spreadsheet. These things haven't changed much in years, and there's nothing outstanding about
Excel. It's a workhorse of a program which can be used to keep up with all manner of calculations and even spit out a graph or two. At home, one can use it to keep up with, say, expenses and such for a home-based business. This version of
Excel isn't terribly different from what's come before, but it's easy to use and is a very refined program.
PowerPoint -- I hate
PowerPoint simply because it's made presentations so damned boring. While it could be used effectively,
PowerPoint is usually used much as an old-time slide projector was, with some so-and-so who knows something about such-and-such pointing at different frames of a presentation with a stick while lulling audiences to sleep. Regardless, it's easy to put together a decent presentation -- complete with charts, graphs and notes -- with this, so no complaints there. It's certainly not the fault of the software that people have found new and exciting ways to bore us to tears with it.
Outlook -- An e-mail client with scheduler and contacts list built in. Standard stuff in an office suite, and nothing exciting. You always have to be aware of the security risk which
Outlook poses, so I avoid this in favor of my favorite e-mail client,
Mozilla Thunderbird. Still, some people like it.
A couple of other things I should mention is installation and licensing (both issues when it comes to Microsoft). Installation of this package is very fast and automatic. Furthermore, I didn't notice any "lagging" performance after it was installed. Furthermore, you can avoid having to pop in the
Office CD while downloading updates and such if you opt to save the installation files on your hard drive.
Also, there's the issue of licensing. The purchase of this package entitles the user to install it on up to three computers. That makes a lot of sense, really. This is meant for home use, and most people will only need to put it on one system, so the ability to load it on three computers is a bit of luxury (particularly when you're talking about a company that is notoriously stingy about such things).
The only real complaint I have about this suite is that "Clippy" shows up and offers help and tips from time to time. Remember Clippy? He's an obnoxious, animated paperclip which Microsoft programmers thought would be cute. Microsoft customers universally hate Clippy (or, so I understand), but he still pops up from time to time.
Also, updating this can be a pain. I got my copy as an OEM trial when I bought a computer (i.e., the trial version was on my computer when I set it up and got the system running). When I decided to purchase the suite, I simply paid Microsoft $150 and, in return, I got a "registration key" and the DVD-rom containing the suite was sent to me by mail. However, I couldn't install Service Pack 1 because the "update wizard" couldn't find a certain file anywhere on my hard drive or on the DVD. After a little research, I discovered the problem was that the DVD-ROM I was sent containing
Office differed from the OEM version, so I couldn't update because of some built-in protection against piracy. The solution was simple enough -- uninstall
Office and then install again with the new DVD. That took care of the problem and
Office even kept all of my settings and such from the previous installation. A word of caution is necessary here -- make sure you keep up with your registration key if you register an OEM version as you'll have to type it in again if you install off of the DVD-rom you purchase.
But, in the final analysis, if the only bad things I have to say about this package is that Clippy shows up, installing updates can give some people problems and
Outlook is a security risk, that's not too shabby. This is a pretty solid office suite, and I'm glad I bought it. After all,
OpenOffice is very good, but there's little doubt that it was put together as a free substitute to
Office. It's nice to own the real thing.
For those interested in system requirements, here's the stuff from Microsoft's site:
Computer and processor-- Intel Pentium 233-MHz or faster processor (Pentium III recommended)
Memory -- 128 MB or greater (and, I'd hate to run this in only 128 MB under Windows XP)
Hard disk -- 260 MB of available space, an additional 250 MB is you want to keep the installation files on your system (good idea to do this as it avoids your having to find the installation disk when you want to install updates and such)
Operating system -- Windows 2000 with Service Pack 3 or Windows XP
