Microsoft Office Professional 2003, which version do i need???

[cameroonmama]

My husband is buying a new laptop to start him out in a new consulting role, we have bought the laptop and are waiting for it to arrive, he wants office 2003 installed and we are not sure what software the laptop will arrive with so are waiting to see.

In the meantime, there seem to be millions of different versions of office professional 2003, how will I know if I need to buy a complete package or upgrade? If the laptop comes with Works, can I just buy the upgrade version or will I still need the complete package?

It's usually much cheaper to buy it with the laptop. A large % of new PCs arrive with a trial version installed on it, which runs for a couple of months, then demands money.

Or you could just use open source OpenOffice which does the same thing for nothing

I've used OpenOffice. Yes, it's free, and quite robust these days, but not as sophisticated by about an order of magnitude.
Then again of course many people don't need the extra.

ok now you have really lost me, what is OpenOffice?

It's a free software suite with a useful chunk of the the features of MS Office.

You don't say what sort of consultancy DH does.
For me the biggest issue is that it doesn't support VBA macros, and is a deal breaker.

But most Office users don't know what these are, and don't need to. But if your part of a large outfit, or doing snazzy modelling in Excel then you can't do without them.