Two weeks after launching Office 2003, Microsoft has released its first update to the productivity suite. The Office 2003 Critical Update, dated Tuesday, Nov. 4, on the companys support site, fixes a problem that can cause the loss of graphic content in certain Word 2003, PowerPoint 2003 and Excel 2003 documents.
According to the warning, the problem with Office 2003 occurs when a Word, PowerPoint or Excel document includes an OfficeArt shape that was previously modified or saved in an earlier version of those Office applications. When a user attempts to open or save such a file in Office 2003, the document may open incompletely, become corrupted, open but have some content missing or lead to an error message, according to a Microsoft description of the update.