Although Microsofts first Service Pack for Office 2003 bolsters core Office applications such as Excel and Word with security fixes, the most significant enhancements are found in OneNote and Outlook.
Released last month, SP1 is available for download from Microsofts Web site. Unlike previous Office updates, SP1 does not require the original Office CD to install, which will make it easier to deploy centrally.
SP1 gives Outlook 2003 a sharp e-mail filter. As a recipient of a lot of Korean-language spam, I used this enhancement to filter messages by moving e-mail based on the senders country suffix and/or the character encoding of a message.
SP1s biggest improvements are in OneNote, which integrates better with Office 2003, allowing users to insert Office documents into OneNote. And just as audio could be inserted in the initial release, video can now be fed into OneNote and annotated with handwriting and text.
More information is available at office.microsoft.com.
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