Minimum system requirements for Microsoft Office 2003 Professional
Processor: 233 MHz or higher; Pentium III is recommended.
Operating System: Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 or later, or Windows XP or later.
RAM: 64MB (minimum); 128MB (recommended)
Hard disk space: 450 MB.
Note: Hard drive space usage varies by configuration; Custom installation options may require more or less hard drive space; selecting the ‘Full’ installation option will require more hard drive space. The requirement mentioned above is for the default configuration.
Additional information about system requirements for Microsoft Office 2003 Professional and specific items and services can be found on the Microsoft Help and Support Web site.
The installation process
Insert the Office 2003 installation CD into your CD drive. After a few seconds of copying the installation files to your computer, the installation will begin. If the installation does not start automatically, open ‘My Computer’, then open the OFFICE11 CD and double-click SETUPPRO.EXE.
You will be prompted for the Office 2003 product key.
Write down the product key found on the back of the CD. Use only five characters per field box, and make sure there are a total of 25 characters. When you are finished, click ‘Next’. If you can’t locate your product key, click the Windows help icon on the product key page to open the Microsoft help topic page.
The next screen of the Office 2003 installer will ask for your username, initials, and organization. Click ‘Next’ once this information has been entered correctly.
The next window displays the End User License Agreement (EULA). Click the checkbox at the bottom corresponding to ‘I accept the terms of the License Agreement’. It is recommended that you go through this once. Then click ‘Next’.
The next window displays the installation options for Office 2003. If you just want to install everything Office offers, click the ‘Complete’ radio button under the ‘or choose an installation type’ option. Then click ‘Next’ at the bottom of the window. The other options are as follows:
Typical installation: As the name suggests, this option installs the most commonly used programs and options by the masses. Complete installation: installs all the programs and all the options offered by your edition on the hard drive.
Minimum installation: This is a basic installation that is a viable option if you are low on hard drive space.
Custom installation: This is where you will find maximum configurability. If you have a good idea of how you will use Office and its individual applications, this selection will allow you to tailor your installation more closely to your specific needs. If you don’t do a full install, later on, you can always install any component you want. Of course, you’ll need the Office CD to do this. With today’s large hard drives, if you have storage space to spare, we recommend the ‘Full Install’ option, especially if you will be using the software to produce jobs with time constraints. Limited or partial installations of Office can create problems at the most inopportune times. You might call what you’d expect to be a routine function in Word, for example, and find that the function was never installed in the first place. When that happens, the program will run an installation routine that requires the installation CD to be placed in the original CD drive that was used during the installation.
If you don’t have the CD handy, it’s easy enough to cancel the routine and continue working without that feature, but as you’d expect, this doesn’t always work smoothly. you’ve probably seen
Word, or another Office component, would crash, more than once, when the program tried to install a requested feature and the original installation CD was not available.
Once you have finished choosing which type of installation to do, the ‘Begin Installation’ window will appear. Click the ‘Install’ button at the bottom of the window. This will start the installation process of Microsoft Office 2003 on your computer. After the installation begins, a progress bar will be displayed indicating that Microsoft Office 2003 is currently being installed on your computer. The time to complete the installation will vary depending on the speed of your computer.
The installer will inform you when the installation is complete. You will have the option to check for Microsoft Office updates and remove its installation files. Make sure ‘Check the web for updates and additional downloads’ is checked and ‘Remove installation files’ is not checked. This is to ensure that if Office later finds that a file is missing, or if a file becomes corrupted, it can be recovered from these setup files. Click the ‘Finish’ button.
The installer will close. Internet Explorer should appear and take you to the Microsoft support website for installing Office updates (http://office.microsoft.com/officeupdate/). If the web browser does not appear, open Internet Explorer and go to the Microsoft support website yourself. Click on the ‘Check for updates’ link.
You will be prompted to install and run the ‘Office Update Installation Engine’. This engine will allow Microsoft to scan and update Office 2003 over the Web. Click ‘Yes’ to install it.
The Windows support site will display the necessary updates. If there are updates listed, follow the instructions on the screen to download and install them. Otherwise, close Internet Explorer.