With remarkable restraint (for them), Microsoft released a new version of its immensely popular suite of office productivity programs - Office 2003 on October 21st. This new version came only a year after the previous version - Office XP, that is unusually fast for Microsoft. But the real question: is it worth the upgrade? My answer: a definite maybe. But consider this: Office 2003 only works with Windows 2000 or Windows XP; Windows 98 or Windows Me users need not apply. That may be all you need to know. Let's look at some of the new features of Office 2003.

As usual, there are several versions of the suite. The Standard Edition ($400; $240 upgrade from a previous edition) includes the Word word processor, the Excel spreadsheet, the PowerPoint presentation program, and the Outlook e- mail, calendar, contact manager, and task manager program. A Small Business Edition ($450; $280 upgrade) adds a Business Contact Manager and Publisher, a desktop publishing program. Finally, a Professional Edition ($500; $330 upgrade) adds the Access relational database to the suite. There is also a Student & Teacher Edition, which is identical to the Standard Edition, but is priced at $150 for students (including home schooled students), teachers, or family members of a student or teacher. I bought this edition, since my wife is a teacher in the San Antonio School District. There was no effort to verify my qualifications for the educational edition, either at the store, or during registration. The Student & Teacher Edition license allows you to install the suite on up to three computers, legally.

Installation was about as easy as one could hope for. I installed the suite on my ancient Dell computer over my existing Office XP setup. I told the installation program to install all components of Office onto the hard drive, so I wouldn't ever need to pop the CD back into the drive to install a new feature or clip art. The program required a total space of 410 MB, which is nothing in this day of 100 GB drives. The installation program detected all of my previous settings, including customization of program toolbars, and carried them forward to the new programs. It picked up and preserved my e-mail collection in Outlook, and also my contact list and the special folders I had created. The only change the installation program made was to revert Word, Excel, and PowerPoint back to a single- line toolbar; but it offered a control that allowed me to convert back to two toolbars if I wanted.

Activation, Microsoft's copy-protection scheme, requires the insertion of a 50-digit alphanumeric code in order for Office 2003 to work more than 48 hours. If you're online, the activation process is automatic. Unlike Office XP, when you install Office 2003 on a second computer, the activation process doesn't require you to call Microsoft and explain why you want to activate a copy that had already been activated once; instead, installation of the second copy is just like the first.

All Office 2003 programs have a new look about their interface. Menu bars and toolbars now follow the same color scheme as your Windows setting, so if you find, as I did, that the Office 2003 toolbars were hard to read with the standard Windows XP scheme, experiment with the styles setting in the Display Properties dialog box for your desktop settings.

Office 2003 programs include better Help, which now looks up more information online for more extensive content. All Office releases I remember have claimed improvements in the help system; but I noted definite improvements when I sought help for Office 2003. It even lets you ask for help from other users online, or query the extensive online Microsoft Knowledge Base (the database used by Microsoft tech support) to answer your questions. I still find a good book provides much better help than the built-in version, and recommend the Que Special Edition Using (Program Name) books for that purpose.

Another new feature, which will be transparent to most of us, is the use of Extensible Markup Language (XML) throughout the suite. XML make collaboration among several workers easier, and was used to write certain features of the Office 2003 programs. For the developer, XML offers the ability to customize the Office 2003 programs by writing custom task panes, for example. That's several steps above my capabilities, so I was not able to evaluate XML customization.

File recovery is also better. Already pretty good, Office 2003's file recovery now analyzes a file that has crashed or become corrupt, detects errors, and saves as much as possible for recovery when you restart the program. I got to try that feature inadvertently, and can attest that it works quite well.

Have you ever suspected that you were using only a small set of Office features, and wished you knew what other features you were missing out on? Microsoft answered that concern in Office XP by creating Smart Tags, which are small, context-sensitive menus that pop up when you are performing common operations an tell you what features are available. Office 2003 expands on the use of Smart Tags, especially in Excel and PowerPoint.

Office 2003 programs now have a research task pane to help find information. The research task pane lets you search for information in the Encarta encyclopedia, thesauri, and other info sources on your computer or online. You can either type in the words you want to research, or press Alt and click a word on the screen to start a search. That's a handy way to find information while you're composing a document, spreadsheet, or presentation.

Office 2003 also provides software to drive your scanner, and scan either pictures or text into a document. The text is editable, so you can edit it in Word. Unfortunately, the interface is clumsy, and it did not work with my scanner. Maybe in the next version of Office, it will work better.

Of the new programs in Office 2003, Outlook was changed the most. Probably the first change you'll notice is that the icon for Outlook 2003 has changed, and is now a gold color. The actual graphic for the icon is the same; only the color changed. If you're like me, and use colors as your first discriminator for distinguishing among icons, this change will be welcome.

The Outlook 2003 screen, which now has three panes instead of two. The left pane shows (at the bottom) the four main features of Outlook: mail, calendar, contacts, and tasks. When you select one of those features, the remainder of the left pane shows details about that feature. In Figure 1, I have selected the mail function, and the left column shows Favorite Folders and all folders. Notice the Favorite Folder listing called Unread Mail; this isn't really a folder, but does show all the e-mails you haven't read. That's neat when a message comes in with a date that's not current, and which can be hard to find.

Outlook's center pane shows a list of the e-mails in my Inbox, stratified by those I received today, yesterday, two days ago, or earlier. Each E-mail shows the sender, date sent, and subject of the e-mail. When I select one of the e- mail messages, the right pane displays a preview of the message, including graphics. If the message word wraps, you may not even need to click on it to see the text. If the message contains graphics, you may still need to click on it to view it in its own window. When a new message arrives, Outlook displays a short preview from the Windows tray area, showing the sender and the first line of the message. You may not even need to view the actual message in Outlook.

Arguably, Outlook 2003's most useful feature is a serious spam filter. Using a secret algorithm, Outlook scans incoming e-mail and routes those it suspects of being spam into a Junk Mail folder. Since it's not foolproof, Outlook invites you to check out the messages it has sent to the Junk Mail folder periodically, since it may have sent valid e- mail there. You can set the spam filter for four levels of aggressiveness: off, low, high (which will probably send some valid e-mails to the Junk Mail folder), and safe senders only (which allows e-mails from trusted sources only). In practice, I found that the high setting was fairly accurate, sending only a very few desired messages to the Junk Mail folder. It missed several undesired e-mails, however, including several with viruses attached (which Norton AntiVirus caught handily, thank goodness).

After Outlook, Word is the program with the most changes in Office 2003. It adds a Reading Layout view of a document, which puts text into a two-column format that makes it easier to proofread. The actual document layout is not changed, only the on-screen display. Reading Layout shows graphics, but not in the actual layout. It also shows all the changes that have been made by others during a collaborative creation process. Figure 2 shows this article in the Reading Layout view. I'm not sure how useful the Reading Layout actually is; I'll need more time with it to say for sure.

One of the justifications for Office 2003 is improved collaboration among a workgroup. After an author creates a document, others can comment on it or edit it; but now the author can lock the format to keep others from changing the layout of the document.

A Line Spacing icon now appears in Word's formatting toolbar, making it easier to change spacing between lines of text. That function is not new, but the icon has not been installed on previous versions' toolbars.

Excel 2003 is Microsoft's latest spreadsheet, but it offers few changes from Excel XP. Perhaps the most noteworthy is its improved list creation feature. In Excel, the term list means a database. Excel lists have been around a long time, but Office 2003 adds new features for creating lists, including a List toolbar. This toolbar makes it easier to manipulate lists, including adding totals, adding columns and rows, and importing other lists. I had to consult several other sources to find that feature; it's not one I use, which shows how hard it was to find any new Excel features.

PowerPoint 2003 doesn't have many new features, either. A useful, if not earth-shaking, new feature is an improved PowerPoint viewer, which lets you view a PowerPoint presentation without even having PowerPoint, a neat way to share PowerPoint presentations with others. The viewer can be freely shared with others. In fact, you can package your presentation, together with all its linked files, onto a CD in one easy step. Open your PowerPoint presentation, click on File, then Package for CD, and a couple of dialog boxes step you through a process of burning the presentation, linked files, embedded fonts (optional), and the free PowerPoint viewer onto a CD via your CD burner. I loaded the presentation on Backing Up Your PC Randy Waters and I gave at one of the general meetings this summer, burned it to a CD, then ran the PowerPoint viewer to display the presentation onscreen. I don't see how it could be easier.

Now that we've skimmed the new features in Office 2003, let's readdress the burning question: should you invest in the new office suite? If you are not using any version of Office, or Office 97 or earlier, Office 2003 is a worthwhile upgrade. It has many new features, and is easier to use. If you have Office 2000, it's still useful to upgrade, due mostly to ease-of-use features. If you have Office XP, there are few new features that would justify an upgrade.