Microsoft Office 2003 Updates in 2010 and Beyond
Introduction
At one point, I had installed Microsoft Office Professional 2003, and I wanted to know what updates were available. Once upon a time, that was easy to determine. You would just go to the Microsoft Office Updates webpage and let it take a look at your computer and tell you what you needed. But that webpage was no longer available.
Microsoft was apparently still supporting Office 2003, and it was still possible to get updates from the general-purpose Microsoft Updates webpage. But under various conditions, that would not work either. For instance, Microsoft might decide to cut off that source of automated updates for Office 2003, just as it had cut off its Office Updates automatic detector. Or you might not be able to go online when you were doing your installation. Or if you did go online, as I had sometimes experienced, that webpage might not be willing or able to detect the condition of your computer and figure out which updates you needed. Or you might be trying to install all available updates at once -- that is, you might not be willing to wait around until the webpage did detect all of the updates you might need. That was the situation at present. I was trying to convert Office 2003 into a set of portable applications, and for that purpose I needed to do all of my updates at once if they were to be included in the portable executable package.
To figure out what updates I needed, I went to the general-purpose Microsoft Office Downloads webpage and glanced at its hundreds of downloads, including many that were unnecessary and even obsolete. Then, taking a different approach, I looked at another computer, where Office 2003 had been installed in March 2009. (On that machine, all Office programs were installed except InfoPath, and Outlook 2007 had been installed in lieu of Outlook 2003.) On that machine, I went into Start > Settings > Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs > Show Updates. Under Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003, it listed a number of updates. Those updates had been installed automatically by Office Update between March 12, 2009 and March 10, 2010. With one exception, all of the updates listed there were newer than Office Pro Service Pack 3 (SP3). That one exception had not been included in SP3, so apparently Office Update knew that it still had to install it separately.
Armed with that information, I went back to the full list of Office updates. At this writing, there were 3,204 items on that list. I sorted them by Release Date and skipped ahead to the page for September 2007, when SP3 was released. I noticed that there were other SP3 packages released at about that same time, for a variety of Microsoft products, including some that were related to Office 2003 tools or capabilities (e.g., Office 2003 Proofing Tools) that I had not installed and/or had not been using on that other computer, and that therefore had not been updated. So the list that I was developing in this post would probably not be sufficient for all purposes and all users of Office 2003.
I decided to assume that the automatic Office updating feature had been giving me what I needed, for my Office 2003 installation, up through that last update on March 10, 2010. Therefore, I skipped ahead again, in the Microsoft webpage list, to the page showing updates released on or after that date. That page was very near the end of the list. (I tried, here in this post, to provide links to these points in the list, so that other users would not have to page through the list manually, but I found that Microsoft had structured the pages so that the links invariably led to the start of the list. Microsoft did not itself bother to provide a button leading to the end of the list.) From that point forward in the list, starting in March 2010, there were not any other updates pertaining to Office 2003. So it seemed that the March 2010 updates were the state of the art.
But that could hardly be correct. After thinking a moment, I remembered that, because of a broken installer or some other problem that I had been unable to fix, that other computer had ceased to install updates from the regular Microsoft Update webpage. So now I asked that webpage to examine that computer and indicate what other updates it needed. It came back with a list that included several more updates specifically related to Office 2003. I did not know why these additional updates had not appeared in that list of 3,204 updates on the Microsoft Office webpage.
The List of Updates Generally
I combined that list of uninstalled updates, from the Microsoft Update webpage, with the list of updates that had been installed successfully. Here is that combined list, with links to the relevant KnowledgeBase pages:
Release Date | Programs Affected | KB Number |
11/08/05 | Excel, Word | |
09/17/07 | All Office 2003 (SP3) | |
12/08/07 | Outlook | |
02/11/08 | All Office 2003 | |
| 02/12/08 | Works File Converter | |
05/12/08 | Publisher | |
08/08/08 | Access Snapshot Viewer | |
08/08/08 | All Office 2003 | |
09/08/08 | All Office 2003 | |
11/07/08 | All Office 2003 | |
10/09/09 | Outlook | |
10/09/09 | Outlook | |
10/13/09 | All Office 2003 | |
10/22/09 | Web Components | |
11/09/09 | All Office 2003 | |
12/07/09 | All Office 2003 | |
12/17/09 | All Office 2003 | |
02/04/10 | PowerPoint | |
03/05/10 | Outlook | |
03/05/10 | Excel | |
05/10/10 | All Office 2003 | |
06/04/10 | PowerPoint | |
06/04/10 | Publisher | |
06/04/10 | All Office 2003 | |
06/04/10 | InfoPath | |
07/07/10 | Access | |
07/08/10 | Outlook | |
08/05/10 | Word | |
08/04/10 | Outlook | |
08/04/10 | Excel |
Again, this list would vary if one were to install other components from Office 2003. My purpose here is primarily just to sketch out what seems to be one way of determining what updates are needed for one Office 2003 configuration.
The List of Updates for Word 2003 Specifically
This list of updates, and the other information provided above, seemed to provide a straightforward guide to the updates that would be needed for individual components within Office 2003. I tested that assumption, starting with Word 2003. That is, I installed only Word 2003, without any other Office 2003 components beyond those that were automatically installed for any Office configuration.
I expected, from the foregoing information, that the Microsoft Update webpage would detect and install all of the items from the foregoing list that pertained either to Word specifically or to Office generally, I expected, in other words, that when the dust settled and all the updates were installed, Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs would show me just the following updates under Microsoft Office 2003:
Release Date | Programs Affected | KB Number |
11/08/05 | Excel, Word | KB907417 |
09/17/07 | All Office 2003 (SP3) | KB923618 |
02/11/08 | All Office 2003 | KB945185 |
08/08/08 | All Office 2003 | KB921598 |
09/08/08 | All Office 2003 | KB953404 |
11/07/08 | All Office 2003 | KB951535 |
10/13/09 | All Office 2003 | KB972580 |
10/22/09 | Web Components | KB947319 |
11/09/09 | All Office 2003 | KB973443 |
12/07/09 | All Office 2003 | KB975051 |
12/17/09 | All Office 2003 | KB978551 |
05/10/10 | All Office 2003 | KB976382 |
06/04/10 | All Office 2003 | KB982311 |
08/05/10 | Word | KB2251399 |
I wasn't sure what that meant. Was the Windows Update webpage never going to detect that updates were needed? Or did I just have to use Word for a while, triggering some unknown functions, before it would become aware of its desperate need for an update? Did it matter that I was doing this inside a VMware virtual machine (VM), rather than in a native WinXP installation?
The alternative to the automated online update, of course, was to just go ahead and install that list of Word-specific updates manually. So I did that. I uninstalled and reinstalled Word; and when it ended, I accepted its offer to go online and check for updates. Without the old Office Update webpage, however, that option just delivered me to the general-purpose webpage mentioned above. I killed that and started down the list of updates, installing them one by one, beginning with SP3 (KB923618).
After doing that, I went into Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs > Show Updates and verified that those updates were all listed under Microsoft Office 2003. They weren't. KB945185 wasn't listed. I ran it again, and it said, "This update has already been applied or is included in an update that has already been applied." That puzzled me: how would I have gotten its number in the first place, if it hadn't been listed previously? Same thing with KB953404. Anyway, then I went to the Windows Update website to double-check that there were no others. There weren't.
Conclusion
I could have continued with the same approach for Excel 2003 and other components of Office 2003. In the meantime, however, it had developed that the underlying goal of creating a portable version of Office 2003 was not feasible with existing programs and resources. So I did not continue on to explore what updates would be needed for those other Office components.
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