Upgrading Outlook but not the Office suite

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Upgrading Outlook but not the Office Suite

Many sites qualify for a free upgrade to Outlook 2003 and plan to upgrade only Outlook, not the rest of the Office suite. Others got a copy of Outlook with their PDA and want to use it.

Is it a good idea? It depends... on the features you use and rely on and what your are willing to give up. The most noticeable problem is Word cannot be used as your email editor, but even if you never use Word as your editor, there are other issues to consider before installing Outlook.

What you'll lose by upgrading only Outlook:

Word as your email editor. In order to use Word as the editor, you need to use the same version of Word and Outlook. There is no hack you can use to make Outlook 2003 use older versions of Word as it's editor.

Mail merge when initiated from Outlook's Contacts. You can still use mail merge if you begin it in Word and can use Outlook's Contacts in the merge. What do you lose by not starting the merge in Outlook? The ability to use Outlook's more powerful filters to create the mail merge dataset.

Office envelope. This is the email header that's displayed in Word, Excel and other Office programs when you click the envelope button or choose File, Send to, Mail Recipient. You can still send documents as attachments.

New Letter to Contact. You won't be able to select a Contact and choose Actions, New Letter to contact.

WordMail | Workarounds | Other Issues | More Information

Reasons to Upgrade

If you can tolerate the losses, this is some of what you'll gain:

New features, including the Reading pane and Search folders, that make reading and organizing your email a much better experience.

Improved spam filter

Better email security against viruses

Cached Exchange mode.

RPC over HTTP (if using Exchange 2003)

While you don't lose a lot of features and there are simple workarounds for mail merge, we don't recommend upgrading only Outlook, even if you never use Word as your email editor. Outlook and the other Office programs work much better together when all of the applications are at the same version level.

Wordmail

The following Outlook 2003 features are unavailable unless Word is your email editor.

Signatures:

You lose the ability to right click on a signature and choose a different one.

Select a different email account and the signature changes to the one assigned to the new account

Outlook editor has fewer autocorrect features than Word and lacks autotext and other useful tools.

Workarounds

Mail merge:

Open Word and browse to the Tools, Letters and Mailings, Mail Merge menu and follow the wizard to create your merge.

Excel:

You can use these methods to mimic the Office envelope and send worksheets or selections (without using objects):

Mail one worksheet in the body

Mail the selection in the body

Both samples by Ron de Bruin, Microsoft Excel MVP

Other Issues

Upgrading just Outlook means twice as much work when applying patches and service packs, as you need to apply patches for two (or more) versions. You many need to repair Outlook 2003 after installing patches for older Office applications.

There are reports that updates reinstall Outlook 2002 bits. This results in Office XP needing to reconfigure itself each time Outlook 2003 is active.

Detect and Repair may be more difficult and require media for each version of Office.

More Information

"Excel could not start the e-mail program" error message when you use the Send To command in Excel 2002

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Updated Apr 09 2008