Title: Publisher 2003 with Digital Imaging Vendor: Microsoft Price: $209
Requirements: see below
Date Published: November 2005 Reviewer: Steve Costello, BPCA Director/Editor

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System Requirements:

The installation package consists of Publisher 2003 on one CD and Digital Imaging on two CDs. (See Gerry Gerstenberg's review of Digital Imaging Suite 10 in the August 2005 BPCA Newsletter for more information on the Digital Imaging portion. The installation of the Publisher 2003 portion took about ten minutes from start to finish and used approximately 115MB of hard disk space for a typical installation. The Digital Imaging full installation also took approximately ten minutes, but consumed 961MB of hard disk space.

Unlike any other Microsoft product I have installed you are also allowed to install on one portable device, as long as it is for the exclusive use of the licensee. With a great many people having both a desktop and a laptop for when they are away from their regular work place, I think this is a great idea and I hope it extended to the rest of the Microsoft products as well as those of others; $200 a pop is a lot of money. When Publisher is first started it must be activated or many features will become unavailable after it is run 49 more times. Activation via my DSL connection took approximately one minute, with no input necessary unless you want to voluntarily register your copy (Registration is not a required part of the activation).

Now that we have all the technical information squared away, let's delve into my impressions and usage of Publisher 2003. Microsoft Publisher 2003 is an application for production various publications such as brochures, newsletters, postcards, CD or DVD labels, etc. (Note: single page publications can be sent as email using Outlook 2003 or Outlook Express 5.0 or later.) I currently have no need to produce any publications other than the C:\BPCA News, but I did check out the various templates for other types of publications, as listed previously, and I am sure that it would be very easy to adjust an appropriate template to suit my purposes in a very short time, so I am going to confine my further observations to the publication of a multi-page newsletter.

There was no printed manual provided for Publisher 2003 and a very basic printed manual for Digital Imaging, however there is extensive online help and a wealth of information through the Microsoft.com site, as well as the Microsoft Office Online site:http://www.microsoft.com/ http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx You can find templates, clip art, downloads, updates, assistance and training for Publisher 2003 and other Microsoft Office applications through the above sites and there are a lot of good discussion groups available on the web, also various tutorials are available ( http:// snipurl.com/iobe).

When I first took over as the Editor of the B.P.C.A., Inc. newsletter I was using Adobe PageMaker 7.0 with no prior experience with a desktop publishing application and found that I was able to put together an adequate newsletter, at least in my opinion. Once I installed the Publisher 2003, and explored the various provided templates, I found it much easier to work with and for everything to flow much more smoothly into production, so I almost immediately converted to using the Publisher 2003 application to produce our monthly newsletter.

I found the importing of articles, in various formats to be very easy and needing only minor adjustments in styling to look real well. The integration of images into the publication is also greatly facilitated by the Digital Imaging portion, and it also makes it very easy to adjust how the images appear and relate to the text.

Publisher 2003 allows you to use multiple Master Pages and has other tools which give you control over the way your design looks and even has a Design Checker to help you keep everything looking good.The ability to make a template which includes all the boilerplate text and formatting and the ease with which the template can be adjusted or additional pages added to a publication based upon a template, as well as the ability to change the size and flow of textboxes and the formatting of textboxes, are the major reasons I find for preferring Publisher 2003 over PageMaker 7.0.

Though this is a program that is more than the casual user needs, for the purposes of publishing a newsletter or creating marketing materials, in my opinion, Publisher 2003 with Digital Imaging is a very good product and I am sure that as I become more familiar with it, I will appreciate it's capabilities and enhancements even more.

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