4228c01.qxd 12/10/03 11:38 AM Page 1 Chapter 1 What’s New in Office 2003 If you’ve used previous versions of Office, and your office is upgrading or thinking of upgrading to Office 2003, one of your first concerns is probably, “What’s the difference between the newest version and the version I’ve been using?”The purpose of this chapter is to try to answer that question. We say “try” because the answer depends on which previous version of Office we’re talking about. If you’ve been using Office 97, you’ll find that the differences between it and Office 2003 are major and number in the hundreds. If you’ve been using Office XP, you’ll discover the differences are not extensive and are more on the order of evolutions. Nevertheless, the information in this chapter is intended to point you to areas of change and improvement and give you a running jump as you start to use this latest version of the Office suite of applications. ◆ Editions of Office 2003 ◆ New features that span applications ◆ What’s new in Word 2003 ◆ What’s new in Excel 2003 ◆ What’s new in PowerPoint 2003 ◆ What’s new in Access 2003 ◆ What’s new in Outlook 2003 COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL Editions of Office 2003 Office 2003 is available in several editions. Which edition you use or purchase depends on your working environment and your business needs. 4228c01.qxd 12/10/03 11:38 AM Page 2 2 Chapter 1 WHAT’S NEW IN OFFICE 2003 Professional Edition 2003 This edition of Office 2003 is available in retail stores, can be purchased online, and comes prein- stalled on some new computers. It includes the following applications: ◆ Word 2003 ◆ Excel 2003 ◆ Outlook 2003 ◆ Outlook 2003 with Business Contact Manager ◆ PowerPoint 2003 ◆ Access 2003 ◆ Publisher 2003 Small Business Edition 2003 This edition of Office 2003 is available in retail stores, can be purchased online, comes preinstalled on some new computers, and is available through volume and academic licensing. It includes all the applications available in the Professional Edition except Access 2003. Note For information about licensing, go to www.microsoft.com/office/preview/choosing/default.asp, click the Volume-License Editions or Academic-License Editions link, and then click the appropriate Licensing Programs link. Professional Enterprise Edition 2003 This edition of Office 2003 is available only through Microsoft volume-licensing programs. It includes all the applications available in the Professional Edition plus InfoPath 2003, the first totally new Office application in a long time. The last was Outlook, introduced in Office 97. You use InfoPath to design and fill out all those forms that have become ubiquitous in today’s businesses. Standard Edition 2003 This edition of Office 2003 is available in retail stores, can be purchased online, and is available through volume-licensing and academic-licensing programs. It includes the following applications: ◆ Word 2003 ◆ Excel 2003 ◆ Outlook 2003 ◆ PowerPoint 2003 4228c01.qxd 12/10/03 11:38 AM Page 3 EDITIONS OF OFFICE 2003 3 Basic Edition 2003 This edition of Office 2003 is available only as a preinstallation on some new computers. It includes the following applications: ◆ Word 2003 ◆ Excel 2003 ◆ Outlook 2003 Student and Teacher Edition 2003 This edition of Office 2003 is available only for retail or online purchase. It includes the following applications: ◆ Word 2003 ◆ Excel 2003 ◆ Outlook 2003 ◆ PowerPoint 2003 Stand-alone Products In addition, Microsoft makes the following Office 2003 editions available as stand-alone products. In other words, you can purchase the following applications separately: ◆ Word 2003 ◆ Excel 2003 ◆ Outlook 2003 ◆ PowerPoint 2003 ◆ Access 2003 ◆ FrontPage 2003 ◆ OneNote 2003 ◆ Publisher 2003 ◆ Publisher 2003 with Digital Imaging ◆ Project Standard 2003 ◆ Project Professional 2003 ◆ Visio Standard 2003 ◆ Visio Professional 2003 ◆ InfoPath 2003 ◆ SharePoint Portal Server 2003 4228c01.qxd 12/10/03 11:38 AM Page 4 4 Chapter 1 WHAT’S NEW IN OFFICE 2003 New Features That Span Applications Many of the new features in Office 2003 are specific to individual applications, and we’ll discuss those in detail in the latter sections of this chapter. In this section, let’s take a look at new features common to all applications in Office 2003. New Look and Feel If you’ve been using Windows XP, the new colors and the fresh design of the applications in Office 2003 will seem familiar. Not only has Microsoft continued its practice of integrating functionality, it has also integrated the look and the feel, which is evident in a better use of screen space and more efficient ways to move between tasks. Support for Tablet PCs Even if you don’t own one, you’ve no doubt seen tablet PCs if you’ve signed for a UPS package. A tablet PC is a computer that runs Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, and you can write directly on the screen using a tablet pen. You can run Word 2003, PowerPoint 2003, and Excel 2003 on a tablet PC, and if you are using Word 2003 as your e-mail editor, you can run Outlook 2003. Using a tablet pen, you can now compose e-mail messages, make notes on a slide, edit a document, draft slides, and so on—in your own handwriting. The Research Pane Often when you are creating or modifying a document, you need to verify information, get additional information, find specific facts, and so on. Nowadays, this is often as simple and quick as connecting to the Internet and your favorite search tool. With Word 2003, Excel 2003, PowerPoint 2003, and Outlook 2003, you can do this research even quicker. Using the new Research Pane, you can access an encyclopedia, a search tool, a dictionary, a thesaurus, a data bank, and on and on without leaving the application. To display the Research Pane, as shown in Figure 1.1, choose Tools ➢ Research. By default, you can search several thesauruses in several languages and translate between English, French, and Spanish. Figure 1.1 The Research Pane 4228c01.qxd 12/10/03 11:38 AM Page 5 NEW FEATURES THAT SPAN APPLICATIONS 5 To add research tools, follow these steps: 1. Click Research Options to open the Research Options dialog box (see Figure 1.2) Figure 1.2 Adding research services 2. Click Add Services to open the Add Services dialog box. 3. In the Address field, enter the URL of the service, and click OK. 4. Click OK again in the Research Options dialog box. Now, when you want to do research, simply open the Research Pane, enter your criteria in the Search For box, and press Enter. Windows SharePoint Services Windows SharePoint Services is a site on which you can create a Document Workspace site and use it to collaborate on documents using Word 2003, Excel 2003, PowerPoint 2003, or Visio 2003. When you open a document locally, the Office application gets updates from the Document Workspace site. You can then decide whether to incorporate those updates. For detailed information about SharePoint Services and how to use it, see Chapter 8, “Collaborating on Documents.” Support for XML Extracting information from a document that was created for one purpose and using it for another purpose is a necessary task in today’s fast-paced business environment. What you are actually doing in this process is separating a document’s content from its format. In Word 2003, Excel 2003, and Access 2003, you can do this by saving the document in XML (Extensible Markup Language). Originally developed for the Web, XML is now used for myriad business purposes ranging from page layout applications to messaging systems to business-to-business data exchanges. Excel 2003, Access 2003, and Word 2003 all contain vast improvements in XML support. How- ever, many of these improvements are available only in Microsoft Office 2003 Professional Edition 4228c01.qxd 12/10/03 11:38 AM Page 6 6 Chapter 1 WHAT’S NEW IN OFFICE 2003 or the stand-alone version of Word 2003. In the “What’s New in Word 2003” section of this chap- ter, we’ll look at how to save Word documents in XML, one of the improvements available in all ver- sions of Word 2003. Information Rights Management In Office 2003, Information Rights Management (IRM) is a feature that you can use to protect documents. You can assign levels of access and expiration dates, create permission policies, remove restricted permissions, and so on. For details about how to use this feature to prevent documents of all kinds from falling into unauthorized hands, see Chapter 12, “Securing and Organizing Documents.” What’s New in Word 2003 Even if you frequently work in Word all day long, you probably will never use every single feature that Word provides. If you’re like most of us, though, you do use certain features repeatedly, and you’ve even occasionally wished for a feature that wasn’t available. Perhaps you’ll find it among the new technologies in Word 2003. Reading Layout View Increasingly, we get most of our information by reading it on the computer screen—e-mail messages, e-mail attachments, documents of all sorts, web pages, e-books, and so on. A new view in Word 2003 is designed expressly for the purpose of reading on-screen. Figure 1.3 shows a couple of pages from this book in Reading Layout view. Just above the docu- ment window is the Reading Layout toolbar. To view two screens at a time, click the Allow Multiple Pages button. To display a panel of thumbnails of the document screens, click the Thumbnails button.