Microsoft is making the third service pack for Office 2003 available for free download Sept. 18, which the company says strengthens the product's defenses against malicious software. "While SP3 will be available as a free download on Sept. 18, customers will also begin to get notified of its availability via Microsoft's AutoUpdate over the next few weeks," a Microsoft spokesperson told eWEEK.
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Clippy and the rest of the animated office assistants are still in Office XP (just checked), and I'm pretty sure they're still in Office 2003, although I'd have to check at work.
Forget Clippy ... it's the whole "delete a space in the middle of a paragraph and watch the whole document reformat itself" issue that made me drop MS Office after Office 97.
WordPerfect is the only wordprocessor worth using.
Member since:2005-07-06
Clippy and the rest of the animated office assistants are still in Office XP (just checked), and I'm pretty sure they're still in Office 2003
They are still there in versions XP and 2003, but they are not enabled by default. In Office 2003 it is not included in the default install.
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hear, hear.
While how often their 'agent' (Clippy, etc.) came up was really annoying...the premise was a pretty good one. And in fact, you can find their agent - Microsoft Bob - in recent versions of Windows too - just do a search for a file, computer, or anything else in Windows Explorer.
The problem was not Clippy or what Clippy did...just how intrusive Clippy and the other agents were in Office. They really should have tried to find a better balance.
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2007-06-26
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This is just to make sure .docx can be opened by default, and they (hope they) will stop getting complaints about being incompatible with their own largest installed product.
Not that thats a bad thing. Now they will just be incompatible with every other product on the market (which is what they want), and Office XP, which is, again, what they want.
Member since:2005-10-11
SP3 doesn't add compatibility for docx.
You need this: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=941b3470-3...
to do that.
Member since:2005-07-06
Can you confirm that? That would be interesting because one of the new security features in SP3 depends on the 2007 file format converters - they clean up a file by converting it to .docx (I don't know if it is converted back). It wouldn't make sense for them to not include support for the file formats when they need the converters anyways.
Member since:2006-03-13
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That refers to the "File Block" feature. The "Legacy file formats" in question that are disabled by default if you enable File Block are those of Office 97 and earlier. You can use File Block to disable OOXML files too, if you set it that way.
The MOICE security feature depends on the Office 2007 compatibility pack being installed separately, and will not work if the compatibility pack is not installed. File Block may also not work, as it might require MOICE.
Office 2007 file format compatibility is not installed with Office 2003 SP3 - I have confirmed this myself.
Edited 2007-09-20 23:05
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2007-07-14
Sorry 'bout the language...
let me clarify. until recently I worked for a major oem doing tech support. MS loves to give away MSWorks along with a trial version of Office 2k7.
The two complaints I got most were
1) "I can't access any of the files I created over the last month" and
2) "I sent a document to my <teacher friend coworker> and he/she can't open it.
in case of 1) laugh like a pirate, point them to wordviewer and in many cases sell the angry customer a copy of Office (but that is another topic)
in case of 2) we would tell them that they needed to tell the person they sent the document to that THEY needed to find and download the compatibility pack from Microsoft. or save using the older format. They would inevitibly save using the older format rather than have that kind of conversation.
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2006-05-13
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This is all about forcing people over to OOXML, which is not being taken up very quickly voluntarily. Several business associates of mine with Office 2007 are actually still saving in doc and xls formats because people they interact with can't read the OOXML formats, and their companies won't let them install the converters.
So the strategy becomes, force legacy users of office into the switch, perhaps even unknowingly under the guise of a security upgrade that scrubs your binary files of offending code. Who could be against that? Security is becoming to Microsoft what children are to politicians.
Edited 2007-09-20 02:55
