Office 2003

Microsoft Office 2003 is a version of Microsoft Office, which was released to manufacturing on 19 August 2003 and then to consumers two months later on 21 October 2003.^[1]

New features[edit | edit source]

It included a refreshed UI, which changed its color in relation to the selected Windows XP visual style. However, this feature worked with the Luna theme only, because the Classic and custom themes caused the UI to be colored gray. OneNote and Infopath also debuted with this Office version. It is the last version of Office with the Office Assistant included. It needs to be activated manually, since it is disabled by default since Office XP.

It no longer comes with the Microsoft Office Shortcut Bar and it no longer installs shortcuts to create a new or open an existing document on the Start menu by default, as both become hidden under the new two-column Start menu of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. However, the latter option is still available and will be installed if the user installs Office 2003 with the "Complete" install type or if it enables this option after selecting the "Custom" install type.

It is also the last version of Office to include the traditional menu bar and toolbar interface across all programs, as well as the last version to use the "97 - 2003" file format (.doc, .xls, .ppt, ... for documents and .dot, .pot, .xlt, ... for templates) as the default file format.

Compatibility[edit | edit source]

System requirements were raised to Windows 2000 SP3, Windows XP RTM, and Windows XP SP1. This version of Office supports Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 to Windows 7 alongside their server counterparts, although it can unofficially run on Windows 8 and later.