The Clip Art Gallery has a new appearance in Office 2003.

Office 2003 stores multiple Clipboard entries. A user can press CTRL+C twice to see a new task pane with the Clipboard entries that accumulated during the current editing session. Users can access previously selected material through this task pane, instead of selecting the material again.

Important folder locations are different than they were in Office XP. For example, the STARTUP and XLSTART folders appear with a versioned folder structure, such as:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office11\STARTUP

You should consider these changes before you deploy Office 2003 to users who are using custom macro solutions.

Programming calls to methods in the IDesignTimeControl interface are not supported for DTC.

If you have custom Help solutions, you may need to adjust a few settings to make the settings compatible with Office 2003. Verify that registry settings point to the locations of customer Help files.

The following information lists the most obvious differences in the setup options for Office 2000 and Office 2003. Some of the setup options that were available in Office 2000 and Office XP are integrated into Office 2003 applications.

The Microsoft Office Shortcut Bar is no longer an installable feature. It is replaced by the New and Open Office Documents Shortcuts feature. This feature conflicts with the Microsoft Office Shortcut Bar due to differences in the installed applications that are available for each version of Office after Office 97. A potential problem arises when Office 2003 is installed on a computer where a previous version of Office is installed.

The New and Open Office Documents shortcuts are now optional. These shortcuts will probably not be available in future releases of Office. The shortcuts replace the previous Microsoft Office Shortcut Bar.

To avoid potential problems, remove previous versions of Office before you install Office 2003. If the New and Open Office Documents shortcuts feature is not installed, the Microsoft Office Shortcut Bar remains on the computer if previous versions of Office are not removed. The symptom of this issue is an empty template list in the Microsoft Office Shortcut Bar tab windows for the respective application, if the application was removed.

The problem does not occur if the New and Open Office Documents Shortcuts feature option is installed with Office 2003. The New and Open Office Documents Shortcuts feature replaces the Microsoft Office Shortcut Bar program. Users will no longer see an empty templates list.

Due to differences in language settings, we recommend that you use the Normal.dot file that was created by Office Word 2003. Change the previous Normal.dot into a global template to retain macros that were created in Normal.dot in previous versions of Office Word.

You can use the same Normal.dot file if you are upgrading from Office Word 2000 to Office Word 2003. The settings are upgraded in the template file. However, you might experience problems if you copy an Office Word XP Normal.dot file from one computer to another computer that is running Office Word 2003.

The Office Assistant (Clippy and friends) are being deprecated. The Office Assistant is still available with Office 2003, but users must choose to activate it. Users can continue to ask natural language questions in Help, but the Office Assistant is no longer required.

Office Outlook 2003 inherits the Office Outlook 2002 Object Model Guard behavior, to enhance a user's ability to determine if the Body or HTMLBody of an e-mail is trustworthy before the user opens the e-mail. This change forces a display of security warnings in existing COM add-ins that attempt to access the Body or HTMLBody properties of items. You can avoid displaying a security warning from a COM add-in by deriving all objects, properties, and methods from the Application object that are passed to the OnConnection procedure of the add-in.

The following properties are blocked by Office Outlook 2003:

• ContactItem.IMAddress

• MailItem.HTMLBody

• ContactItem.Body

• MailItem.Body

• PostItem.Body

• AppointmentItem.Body

• TaskItem.Body

• TaskRequestItem.Body

• TaskRequestAcceptItem.Body

• TaskRequestDeclineItem.Body

• TaskRequestUpdateItem.Body

• DistListItem.Body

• JournalItem.Body

• MeetingItem.Body

• ReportItem.Body

• RemoteItem.Body

• NoteItem.Body

• DocumentItem.body

Office shortcuts appear on the Start | Programs menu on computers that are running Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows 2000, and versions of Office that are prior to Office 2003. The shortcuts appear on the Start | All Programs menu on computers that are running Windows XP and versions of Office that are prior to Office 2003.

Shortcuts appear in the Microsoft Office folder for Office 2003. The folder installs by default to the Start | Programs menu on Windows 2000 and the Start | All Programs menu on Windows XP.

Shortcuts that were placed in non-default locations might not be removed during an upgrade.

Office XP and Office 2003 contain the smart quotes feature. Users may experience similar issues with both versions. Plain text editing programs might not convert smart quotes to straight quotes if the programs do not include the necessary conditional code. In such cases, we recommend that you either modify all custom solutions that may encounter smart quotes, or disable smart quotes in the Office application if the text will be processed by a program that expects standard quotes.

The Styles and Formatting task pane is new in Office Word 2003.

Office 2003 uses task panes instead of dialog boxes to display options or procedural steps for some menu options. For example, Word 2003 provides task panes when the user selects File | New…, File | Search…, Edit | Office Clipboard…, Format | Styles and Formatting…, Format | Reveal Formatting…, and others.

Office 2003 contains tools that are new to Office XP users, including:

• Digital Certificate for VBA Projects

• Microsoft Office 2003 Save My Settings Wizard

• Microsoft Clip Organizer

• Microsoft Office Application Recovery

• Microsoft Office Document Imaging

• Microsoft Office Document Scanning

• Microsoft Office Picture Manager

Office Word 2003 can emulate the change tracking methods that are used in previous versions of Office Word. We recommend use of the new default settings. If necessary, you can demote the configuration to be the same as Office Word 97, Office Word 2000, or Office Word 2002.

When a user views a document in Print Layout in Word 2003, the document displays in the Final Showing Markup view. Comments and change tracking information displays in the right margin in this view. To hide the balloons and see the document margins, change the Display for Review setting to Final before you print a document.

The Comment pane no longer includes a button to close the pane. Instead, users must click the Reviewing Pane toolbar button on the Reviewing toolbar to close and open the Reviewing pane. Because there is no longer a Comments option on the View menu, users must use the Reviewing pane or Print Layout to see changes and comments.

A UNC-based link can become problematic if the linked file moves from one server to another. There are no tools that currently support the redirection of UNC-based links.

We recommend that you do not move files after you create a link. If a file is moved due to a server replacement, use the same server name for the new server and include the same folder structure and share name. A mirror image of the original server eliminates broken links.