Outlook 2003 does have a very nice layout compared to the old. But there seems to be other assumptions/processes that are surprises and not so nice.

I've already written about (in Office forum) how it uses Word 2003 as the default editor and uses the last instanced window size of Word - be it having been used for a message in Outlook or a document in Word itself - as the size to open it next time regardless of context.

This morning I went to use Outlook's Help and one of the things it did all on its own was to overwrite my first writing of THIS MESSAGE as I went back to confirm steps that I had gone through to document my problem here@!#!@#

Anyway, as if that wasn't bad enough, it gets worse...
At least Outlook's Help was in the standard place in the menu bar and its position (first) was as expected. I clicked Help and up popped a new dialogue within the Outlook window and to the far right. That was a little surprise but really OK.
I typed "delegate" into the entry box and hit Enter. After a few (too many, really) seconds a list of topics of possible interest appeared. I clicked on one and instantly a top-of-screen-to bottom narrowish window appear to the right of theOutlook window. This new window had no menu and 4 buttons on it and was otherwise all blank white space. It seemed it wanted me to do something but I couldn't figure what, so I clikced on a couple of the icons for lack of anything else to 'do'. When nothing happened I went towards the x-box to terminate it when suddenly up popped a bunch of text with a pair of Yes/No buttons at the bottom to related the usefulness of the text above.

Obviously all this "help" was coming from the web. To me THIS STINKS! I should at least have been given the option to get my help locally at first, opting to web stuff if I needed/wanted!$@#!$ I did, after all, do a FULL INSTALL of all of Office 2003!

Anyway, when retracing the steps to write this I clicked on a different item that came up, this one having a different icon beside it. When I did my UT reply screen (where I'm writing this now) simply disappeared, becoming the web instance for the icon that I had clicked (which, unintuitively, especially when you don't expect it and it doesn't say) was an 'online course')!%!$@^#$!

So now I have Help that takes seconds to load from item to item and can randomly take over other windows that I have in use for OTHER ACTIVE PURPOSES!

This is progress??? This is good???

Not by me!