Outlook 2003

Outlook 2003 is the Microsoft Office personal information manager (PIM) and communication program. Outlook 2003 provides a unified place to manage e-mail, calendars, contacts, and other personal and team information. Several key enhancements have been made in Outlook 2003—such as the new cached mode, automatic grouping of messages, junk mail handling, and improved reading views—dramatically improve the way users organize and manage information.

If there is an application that was really revamped from head to toe, it must be Outlook. A junk mail filter has finally been included in the application. Users can choose between four options:

• No Protection

• Low

• High

• Trusted Sites

The technology involved is in no way prefect, but after several days of filtering and re-filtering, the spam filtering does its work better now. Unfortunately, it does not work with my Hotmail account, a feature I hope Microsoft can include the next time round.

Access 2003

Access 2003 is Microsoft’s desktop database solution. For users who want to extract data from one or more tables in a database, the new release of Microsoft Access is the most appropriate Office tool. With Access 2003, users can browse related tables in a database and choose how to export data by defining the structure of a customer-defined XSD.

Access 2003 developers can easily embed smart tags into any Access field.  Any control on a form, report or data page will have a property for specifying smart tags. Any field or column on a table will also have this property. The columns in a query will inherit this property from the table the query is based on.

I noticed that the new version includes MSDE 2000 Service Pack 3, enabling users to create SQL Server-based database projects. Importing and exporting XML files is also far more flexible with Access 2003. The application allowed me to work with XML files of any schema and import them into the existing structure of an Access database.