- Average user rating: 3.0 stars out of 5 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
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1 out of 1 people found this review helpful
1.5 stars
"Less than the sum of its parts."
Pros: Ubiquitous
Cons: Cost, lousy interface, lousy formatting tools, lousy comments, lousy footnotes, lousy spreadsheet tools, lousy presentations tools, lousy integration, lousy...
Summary: If you want a package for your 5th grader, MS Office - any version - will do fine. If you want to make professional documents, spreadhseets, or presentations, almost anything is better. And even Microsoft appears to acknowledge that Access is hopeless.
You'll waste time trying to format documents, from simple hanging indents to outlining to footnotes you can't get it to do what you need, only what it wants to do. And forget about comments, revisions, or God forbid hidden codes [that show where you have 17 consecutive nested font settings]. If you want graphics, large documents, or sophisticated formatting, you want something else.
Excel tools are hardly better. It limits the size of files, it limits the number of variables to sort, it makes you install all sorts of extra files just to access formulas! And creating attractive, easy to read graphs is simply onerous.
Powerpoint is a joke. Even it's bullet charts are unsophisticated. You can't edit any meaningful grahics, it's charts are even worse than Excel's, and you'll be deafened by the groans when you use one of the canned designs for a meeting. If you ever want to ruin your career, build a large, critical presentation in a single file. By the time you recover what's left after it crashes you'll be asking, "You want fries with that?"
Microsoft Office does nothing as well or better than anyone else, except marketing.
Where to buy
Office 2003 Standard Edition:
$159.87 - $397.25
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$289.12 | Yes |
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$159.87 | Yes |
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$289.18 | Yes |
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$397.25 | Yes |
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