Extract From Byte Magazine - Dec 03 - Office 2003

[Steve Bildermann]

As Byte is now a subscription service I thought some people might enjoy reading some extracts.

The official rollout of Office 2003 was held several days before Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference, but many of us couldn't make the rollout, so PDC was our introduction. I installed Office 2003 during PDC, which was taking a chance, but in fact I have no regrets.

There are two major lines of improvements in Office 2003. One, better conferencing and sharing and collaboration software, seems useful but I haven't enough experience with it to have any right to an opinion. It all works smoothly enough, and appears to be useful, and people I respect like it a lot; but I'll have to work with it more before I have anything to say. <continued>

[Steve Bildermann]

The other improvement is a nearly complete overhaul of Outlook, and on that one I am an enthusiast. If you use Outlook, go out and upgrade to Outlook 2003. You will be very glad you did.

Some of the improvements are cosmetic. There's an entirely different screen layout. Curmudgeon that I am I thought I wouldn't like it, but in fact it took me less than an hour to get used to it, and in a couple of hours I wondered how I ever got along without it. I find navigation easier, contact management simpler and better, and the whole thing subtly but definitely easier to work with.

The most noticeable improvement, though, is that Outlook 2003 isn't a hog: When it goes out to download mail, it doesn't eat up all the machine's resources. Things don't lock up for several minutes at a time while Outlook tries to make connections and times out. Now it just works. Now I know: There are a lot of alternatives to Outlook. There are other mail handlers. There's Mozilla, which many people I respect think is superior to Outlook as both mail reader and Web browser (more below). There are mail handlers combined with Franklin Covey's calendar/task management system.

I've not only tried them all, I was ready to change to any of them. Outlook was annoying and sometimes infuriating, and I stuck with it only because of the promise that Outlook 2003 would be far better. I was prepared for it not to be better, at which point I was ready to see what else I could use; but in fact Outlook 2003 really is better, and most of the annoyances I had are fixed.

Of the PDA systems I have used, one stands out: Franklin Ascend, about version 4 I believe. It was splendid. I could have lived with that and a decent mail handler and never wanted improvements. Unfortunately, the version of Franklin that I liked has a severe Y2K bug that makes it unusable; and the later versions have been overhauled and improved to the point that I don't like them. I keep running away from Outlook only to come back.

Installation Oddities

I uninstalled Office 2000 before installing Office 2003. On one machine the entire installation went very smoothly, not the faintest hint of a problem. I keep the enormous Outlook.pst file, which tells Outlook almost everything, in a C:OUTLOOK directory so that it's easy to find, because Outlook usually buries it way deep in some obscure place. Having uninstalled the Office Suite including Outlook, I was prepared to have Outlook 2003 create its own Outlook.PST file deep down where Outlook likes to work, then import all my folders and files and letters and contacts from C:Outlookoutlook.pst; but when Outlook 2003 came up, it automatically found the old .pst file and used it this despite my having uninstalled Office 2000 including Outlook 2000 before I began the Office 2003 install.

After you install Outlook 2003, the first time you open a folder with a lot of items in it, there pops up a message to the effect that Outlook is preparing the view for that folder. If it's a big folder with many items this can take up to a minute; but once it has done that once it opens the folder instantly in future. Moreover, Outlook 2003 found all my rules, and my accounts, so that transition from Outlook 2000 to Outlook 2003 was nearly painless.

A Compatibility Problem

After I installed Office 2003, a colleague sent me a PowerPoint presentation. It was a standard vanilla .ppt file, nothing special about it, except that it had been created on a Mac using Office X for Macintosh.

PowerPoint 2003 would not open that file. This was more than annoying. I copied that .ppt file to Sable, which still runs Office XP aka Office 2002. That had no problem opening the .ppt created on the Mac. I then saved the file using Save As.

PowerPoint 2003 had no problems at all opening the saved file.

I have seen no other reports of this problem, but it's quite real and repeatable. I'm going to tell Microsoft about it, and it's very likely that they'll find a fix for it, possibly by the time you read this; but meanwhile, if you have a lot of PowerPoint presentations created in Office X for the Mac, be sure you keep Office 2000 or Office XP on at least one system in your office.

Office 2003 Installation Annoyance

After I got the Office 2003 suite up on Principessa, the main communications machine here, it was time to install everything on Lisabetta, the Compaq Tablet PC I am having a rather stormy love affair with. The storms have almost all involved Outlook XP, which is a hog and slow and eats poor Lisabetta alive when it goes out to download mail.

I keep Outlook.pst in C:Outlook on Lisabetta. I made sure that was up to date, then uninstalled the Office XP suite and began the installation of the Office 2003 suite. (Note that my previous installation was on Principessa, where I had been running Office 2000. Since I uninstalled the previous version of Office in both cases I can't see why that matters, but read on.)

I was logged in to the Chaos Manor domain as a user who has administrative privileges, exactly as I had been on Principessa when I performed the installation there. I was using the exact same installation disk I had used on Principessa, since the Outlook 2003 License Agreement specifies that I can put a copy on a desk top and another on a laptop.

At first there were no surprises. I entered the cumbersome installation code and the system trundled away, and I returned to discussing PDC with my son Alex. About five minutes into the installation there was a warning sound. I turned to Lisabetta to find a message.

Insufficient User Privilege. CANNOT OPEN Registry Key UNKNOWN. OK?

Clicking OK got the message "Rolling Back Installation", whereupon it did just that: it uninstalled every trace of Office 2003.

Error Report

I logged off as Superuser in the Chaos Manor domain, and logged in as Administrator of the local machine. When I did, I got a Microsoft message: the system had recovered from a serious error, would I like to report it?

I reported it, and indicated I wanted to see the fault analysis. After a moment Microsoft reported: My problem was a third party device driver and had nothing to do with Microsoft. Of course that isn't true. The error was in the Microsoft Installer, which chose not to work properly on Lisabetta when I was logged in as Superuser in the Chaos Manor domain, although it had worked splendidly on Principessa the day before.

I have no explanation of this. I merely report it. Microsoft vs. Microsoft: User Loses.

Administrator Wins

Now I was logged in as local machine administrator and proceeded exactly as before to install Office 2003: and it worked perfectly. The installation went smoothly and quickly, and all was well.

The Good News

The good news is that Microsoft has fixed the Office installer (except for whatever caused the user privilege glitch and stupid error message).

You will recall that with Office 2000 and Office XP, if you do a "complete installation" it really isn't: When you later want to update any part of Office, the installer demands that you have the original Office installation disk, and if you don't have it, it won't do the updates and upgrades.

This can be infuriating if you are on the road with a laptop, and what you want to install is a critical security update to protect you from SoBig or some other Microsoft vulnerability that can destroy your system's usefulness.

Over the years I found I didn't actually need the original installation disk: All you really must have is an image copy of that disk in any directory of any drive accessible, including network drives. I long ago copied all four Office 2000 Professional installation disks to a machine in the server room, and I browse to it when I want to update Office 2000 on any of the machines here. It works the same with the Office XP suite, except that XP doesn't always demand the original installation disk (but does warn you that it might).

Shout Hallelujah! When Office 2003 finishes the installation, it tells you that there are around 250 MB of installation files on your disk: you can choose to remove them to save space, in which case you will need the installation disk in order to upgrade your Office 2003; or you can leave them on the disk. Naturally I chose to leave them in place.

Think about this. For years we have been cursing Microsoft for using a kind of copy protection, requiring the original installation disks to upgrade your Office 2000; when in fact that wasn't the intention at all. Office 2000 grew out of Office 97. When Office 97 came out, it needed about 400 MB of disk space, and in those days that was a significant fraction of your disk. It was large enough that I called Office 97 "bloatware." But, as usual, Moore's Law prevailed (at least, the version of Moore's Law that deals with disk capacity), and in a year or so everyone had 10 and 20 gigabyte disks. The Microsoft Installer, though, continued to think 100 MB or so was significant, and removed the installation files without asking you about them: and this has been the source of endless frustration and anger as we scrambled to find our installation disks every time we needed to upgrade Office 2000 or Office XP. So it goes. At least we won't have that problem again. Shout Hallelujah!

FrontPage 2003

FrontPage 2000 came with my Office 2000 Professional suite. FrontPage 2003 is a separate program. I could have left FrontPage 2000 on Principessa and Lisabetta, the two machines I do FrontPage work on (Lisabetta is a Tablet; the User Agreement allows me to have FrontPage on one desktop and one laptop), but I decided to install FrontPage 2003 on both.

It works. There are features like page tabs I like better than 2000, and the HTML code written by FrontPage 2003 is a lot cleaner. Mostly, though, I don't really notice the differences. If you like FrontPage of any flavor I do, a lot you will like FrontPage 2003, but if you're not upgrading to Office 2003 there's no strong reason to change from FrontPage 2000 or FrontPage XP.

OneNote 2003

OneNote 2003 doesn't come with Office 2003, but the installer thinks it's part of the Office Suite and groups it there, and that's logical, because once you begin using it with Office you won't want to be without it.

OneNote is a sort of combination of WordPad and Journal, with some extra features. What you do is open a OneNote file and make free form entries: Put the cursor anywhere, and type. Paste in pictures. Record a sound file. If you're working with a Tablet PC, make notes and diagrams in handwriting.

It takes a while to get used to OneNote, but I like it a lot. One reason I like it was that I watched a number of Microsoft gurus at PDC using it on both Tablet PCs and laptops: They not only used it, they loved it, and I could see they were keeping better notes than I usually manage. I installed OneNote in both Lisabetta the Tablet PC (where it gets the most use) and on my main machine (where I tend to edit and file such notes).

I expect to have more on this in future, but for now, I have it, I like it, and I think you'll like it too. If you upgrade to Office Suite 2003, get OneNote as well. Learn to use it and you'll love it. Recommended.

Tablet PC Goodies

One PDC demonstration was a number of programs for the Tablet PC. OneNote was one of them. The most impressive, though, was a demonstration of a program called MathPad for Tablet PC. There are several programs associated with Brown University and called MathPad, but I think this is a special one for Tablets, and it's not yet available. I can't wait until I can get a copy.

Imagine being able to write mathematical formulas, for, say, pendulum motion; sketch and label the pendulum system using the Tablet's pen; and activate it so that you see the pendulum swing. Change the constants in the formula and watch the effect. Same for impulse and momentum, trajectories, and other simple physics. Draw a cannon, write the equations, and watch the shot trajectory.

Solve algebra equations which you wrote by hand. Do arithmetic. And so forth.

A lot more on all this when I have the programs, but these are another good reason to get a Tablet PC as your next laptop. Once you get used to using electronic ink you'll hate being without it. The first generation of Tablet PCs had a few problems. I love my Compaq/HP Tablet, but I have been known to mutter that I wished it had an Intel rather than a TransMeta chip. And so forth.

The next generation of Tablets coming out now has solved most of those problems. I am looking forward to upgrading to the next Compaq/HP Tablet, although given the way I fall in love with machines I like, I'll be reluctant to let Lisabetta go: Outlook 2003 solved her most pressing problem, and the only thing she won't do now is play EverQuest or Dark Age of Camelot online: The graphic chip power just isn't there. But as a machine to carry on the road, and use in airplanes, and edit books with either pen or keyboard, or just read a book, she's been wonderful. Add some of the new Tablet PC software we saw at PDC and she'd be even better, but she really does need a faster CPU.

I took 35 pages of handwritten notes, interspersed with diagrams and some voice recordings and pasted in copies of slides and PowerPoint presentations at PDC. I took many of those notes holding the machine in my lap in a darkened room. I'd never have been able to do all that with the keyboard.

MultiTech Systems RF600VPN Router

I mentioned the MultiTech RF600VPN last month expecting to have it in this month's column. I didn't get to it for a number of reasons, but I remain impressed with this device. The RF600 is more than a simple router and security device. It's most useful for those with a fixed IP address, which I don't have yet; one reason other things got moved into the queue ahead of the RF600.

If you are setting up a small office networking system and expect to do your own mail server, spam filter, Web hosting, and VPN connections, look into the MultiTech RF600VPN. Clearly I never recommend anything I haven't used a lot, but this looks to be very good, a lot of bang for the buck, and I do draw your attention to it.

[Cubed]

The lack of backwards compatibility I feel is quite deliberate. Don't get me wrong - I realise from the review that there is real value in this product, but is it right to shaft customers who bought Office 200x a couple of years previously?

And the price of Office 2003? More than you can afford unless it's in your department's budget this year.

Does the new Outlook version have Bayesian spam-filtering built-in like it's free rivals?

I'm glad Microsoft has woken up to the value of XML-based office documents - it means that true document interchange is a possibility, and allows an escape from Microsoft's dependence on locking in customers to binary formats. OpenOffice has used XML docs for at least three years now. Does Office 2003 have PDF export built in?

OpenOffice has had that for a while too.

In conclusion:

Product: Microsoft Office 2003
Price: around 80,000 Yen

Product: OpenOffice.org
Price: Free

Nuff said.

On the subject of tablet PCs, the future is not any offering from Microsoft. Don't get me wrong, I use Microsoft products every day, and make .NET software but I have to wonder whether the market can really sustain a product which quite soon will become more expensive than the hardware it's running on !

[Caustic Saint]

80,000 yen must include one hell of a "localization tax." MSRP is $500 in the US and you can get copies from Amazon for as low as $215.

[Big Booger]

Academic Licensing and Pricing

Students and educators are eligible to obtain Office Professional Edition 2003 for only $199 US from authorized education resellers.


http://www.microsoft.com/education/default.asp?id=aerfind



Are we all not students of the thing called life?