It would appear that many of the people at Microsoft have had a very easy 2 years. Apart from Outlook & Access, the rest of the Suite remains virtually unchanged. Basically, the only major new suite-wide features and/or improvements relate to XML & (the controversial) Digital Rights Management. There are some improvements in Access, and Outlook has had a major overhaul, but Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are virtually unchanged.
Access has an excellent new feature: Object Dependencies-this feature allows you to see what forms, queries, and tables depend on each other. Another new feature allows you to add Smart Tags to your Forms and Tables.
Outlook is the only program in the entire Office Suite that looks like it's had a lot of development. It's been redesigned and streamlined, and it has a new Anti-SPAM feature that blocks external 'tracking codes' so that even if you accidentally open a SPAM E-mail, the SPAM Sender doesn't know and therefore can't confirm that your E-mail address is legitimate.
On the whole, if you have money to spare, you may like Office 2003 for the new look, but don't buy it because you think there are loads of new features-you may be better off buying Outlook on its own.
If you're a company, you may benefit from the XML features or from Digital Rights Management, but if you don't plan on using these features, you may just give this version a miss and, again, just buy Outlook 2003 for your office.