I have been using Office 2003 for almost a decade. I was very reluctant to upgrade to Office 2007 when it first released, partly because I am too old to adapt to a radically renewed GUI. But Office 2003 is decent and I don’t any reason I should abandon it in the next two or three years.
Among several annoying features of Office 2003, that have been improved in later version, is that normally you can not just open two Excel spreadsheets in two excel windows side by side. This problem becomes particularly annoying when now we have large dual screen and high resolution.
I recently come across a trick for this issue. After you open you spreadsheet, you hold the SHIFT key to double click (or single click if in the Program Memu) to open another Excel program. This should open a new separate window. Then you can load another excel file into that new window. Please don’t try to hold SHIFT and open another xls file directly, it won’t work. You have to open another empty Excel window first.
This only works for Excel in Office 2003. I tried PowerPoint without any luck succeeding.