Meet the new office: same as the old office, but with prettier outfits.

Whatever size your business is, now is the time to bite the bullet and upgrade to Server 2008

Useful new features and a total interface overhaul make this the best Office ever.

A disappointingly modest number of improvements, although they’re well integrated into the complete suite.

This version sees a new maturity, with more server integration and easier-to-use controls online forms.

A worthy update to the most underrated of the Office applications — OneNote is now a must-have.

Improvements all round keep PowerPoint well ahead of the competition.

Still a competent tool for marketing material, although it would have benefited from an interface overhaul.

Now pitched at less experienced database users, this refresh is a mixed blessing.

Behind-the-scenes changes make a huge difference, even if the interface is inconsistent.

A rewritten front end makes Excel’s significant power far more accessible than before.

Not many new features, but the new interface breathes fresh life into an already great product.

The arrival of Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 (ES2K3) is a significant event in the history of this product. First, it brings to a close the second era of the codebase. Released back in 1996 on the NT 4 wave, ES4 (there was no 1, 2 or 3) brought enterprise-level email, contact management, diary management and so forth to the Windows Server platform in a new and comprehensive BackOffice application.

Again, SharePoint and XML support separate Access 2003 from its predecessors, and Access can now import and export XML data using custom Schemas. Exports can employ XSLT transforms to match data formats to other custom Schemas, and you may include related data such as look-up tables so you export structured data.

It has been over two years since we previewed Office XP, but Microsoft has finally given us a glimpse of Office 2003. The finished version should be on the shelves by the end of July, but will it be worth the upgrade? The answer could be an emphatic 'yes' if you're a Tablet PC user, as Microsoft has just launched OneNote (see page 59), making full use of electronic ink. The company is also introducing InfoPath (see page 59) for designing electronic forms, with the flexibility of XML. The classic apps have also had their seen refurbishment, with Outlook (page 56) getting the most attention, and FrontPage and Publisher (page 58) a bit of a revamp.

Office 2003 has undergone a lot of tweaking, but the most obvious changes are in the new and improved Outlook 2003. The differences will be obvious as soon as you fire it up.

With its cosmetically enhanced menus and toolbars, Word 2003 is now smoother and prettier, but the bulk of Microsoft's efforts are hidden under the surface. There are a quite a number of enhancements that will appeal to everyone, but the majority of Word's new features are aimed at the corporate market, with support for XML, Smart documents and IRM (Information Rights Management).

OneNote is one of those rare apps you'll wonder how you ever managed without it. It's basically a note-taking application where you work on sheets of electronic paper, putting down your ideas and rearranging them.

PowerPoint was already the class leader, and it just got better, most notably because you can now embed video playback in full-screen mode while still in slide show view.

The buzzword in Excel 2003 is XML, best illustrated by the new mapping feature. This lets you map cells, columns and ranges to data held in XML data sources, so you can create Excel workbooks showing data from Web Services or other back-end data stores. The XML data is validated on input into Excel against a custom XML Schema under your control. Excel can also save your work in a native XML workbook format, which keeps any formatting but avoids the proprietary XLS file format. You may also, however, save data as a pure XML data file, leaving any formatting in the template. This XML data file can be put through BizTalk or imported into a back-end database.