End of support for Office 2003 - what to do?
On April 8, 2014, Microsoft ended support for Office 2003. Microsoft generally discontinued support for its products after 10 years. We'll tell you exactly what that means for you.
Impact of Office 2003 end of support
- As of April 2014, Microsoft will no longer offer security updates and support for Office 2003.
- This is generally not particularly dangerous for your system if you only use Word, Powerpoint or Excel and only open files from sources that you consider safe.
- However, if you use the Outlook mail program, you will not receive any further updates for the junk mail filter. It can happen that virus-infected e-mails are no longer intercepted by Outlook, but reach your system. This is a significant risk factor.
- However, the discontinued support should cause fewer problems. You will not receive any further help from Microsoft employees, but you can also ask other service providers for help or search for help in forums.
What you should do
- As long as you do not need direct support from Microsoft and work offline with the Office products, little can happen to you.
- Programs such as Word, Powerpoint and Excel that do not connect to the Internet are still relatively safe as long as you do not open any foreign files. You can continue to work with these as usual.
- Programs like Outlook can, however, become a security vulnerability for your system in online mode.
- If you don't want to take any chances, you should consider buying a new version of Office like Office 2013. This now offers you not only 10 years of additional support, but also numerous new functions.
If you have any other questions about using Office, you will find further useful tips here.