Office 2003 (Public Beta)

[tntoak]

Has anyone gotten the Public Beta of Office 2003 yet? If so, what do you think about it?

[Stryder]

Our outstanding Mod, ThunderRiver, has been beta testing this. I know when he sees this thread he will be more than happy to give you the details. The guy knows MS software inside and out....he's good!!!!

[tntoak]

I just got my copy in the mail myself. I was just wondering if there were any major bugs that I should be wary of before installing it. I'm backing up my system before I install it, but if I can prevent any major malfunctions, I'd be happer than if I have to use the backups.

[Guest ThunderRiver]

The new beta has a slightly new User Interface, and it has added a few features like "Read mode and research feature in Word 2003"The beta is so far so good. You might experience some bugs, and for the most parts, they will be fixed in final code. I have reported many bugs over the past few months, and you should make the best experience out of the beta testing since the final copy should be out in June or July.Like always, I only recommend you to perform clean install, not upgrade. There is a new program called "Microsoft Picture Gallery" Be sure to check it out!The read mode in MS Word 2003 doesn't work that well.l If your document has a picture insert, and if you jump into read mode, the pic will cover some of the text. Anyway, alot of the bugs are cosmetics, nothing really major. I only have crashed Word 2003 2 or 3 times. Microsoft Outlook 2003 now supports minimizing to tray, and it does use an considerable amount of memory. Sometimes if you open up your taskmanager, WINWORD.exe would still be running even after you close all the visible Word window! That's because Word is now part of Outlook as well, but it is a bit pain in the butt because it uese 14 Mb of memory constantly. Feel free to post your comments!And thenk you Stryder for you compliment!

[tntoak]

So far, Office 2003 has worked pretty well. The new One Note software is actually useful, as I find myself writing things onto post-it notes quite often, which means that I can use it instead to write things down (it also makes my desk a little less cluttered).I have also noticed that if you attempt to save a Publisher file from an older version, you get a message stating that if you save it in Pub2003 format, you won't be able to open it in earlier versions. Is this because of the transition to XML, or it there something else going on with Publisher?I actually have two computers here: one running XP and Office 2000, and this one running XP and Office 2003. Some of this stuff I'm going to duplicate on both setups and see what the differences are under the hood. Specifically, I'm interested to see if the HTML coding used in Word and Front Page has been slimmed down from previous versions.

[Guest ThunderRiver]

OT: Are you a beta tester as well? Or you paid for public preview?

[tntoak]

I paid the $20 for the public beta. I wanted to get in earlier, but Microsoft never responsed to my emails to the bets request email.I am hoping to get into the beta program for upcoming releases of MS software, possibly even Longhorn.

[Guest ThunderRiver]

I paid the $20 for the public beta.  I wanted to get in earlier, but Microsoft never responsed to my emails to the bets request email.I am hoping to get into the beta program for upcoming releases of MS software, possibly even Longhorn.

If so, you have to be real active searching for guest id

[Gus K]

I am hoping to get into the beta program for upcoming releases of MS software, possibly even Longhorn.

Why???

[Guest ThunderRiver]

I am hoping to get into the beta program for upcoming releases of MS software, possibly even Longhorn.

Why???

Because that's how you get in Microsoft betas...unless if you have high profiles, Microsoft would not invite you in