Office 2003 Critical Update: KB828041 helps to fix an issue in which, under a specific scenario, graphics content can be lost in Microsoft® Office Word 2003, Microsoft Office Excel 2003 or Microsoft Office PowerPoint® 2003 files.

For example, graphics content can be lost if a document created in Word 2003 is opened, edited and saved in any previous version of Office, and then subsequently saved in Word 2003. This scenario applies also to content created in Excel 2003 and PowerPoint 2003.

 Note    A file created in Office 2003 can still be opened and saved using the previous releases of the affected application. However, once the file is corrupt, if you attempt to save the file using the latest release of Office, you might lose graphics content unless the update has been applied.

Toolbox   The full-file version of Office 2003 Critical Update: KB828041 consists of one Windows Installer patch file (Mso-FullFile-GLB.msp) packaged in a self-extracting executable (Office2003-kb828041-fullfile-enu.exe). You can find this downloadable file on the Office 2003 Resource Kit Downloads page.

Localized versions of this update are listed later in this article in the section titled "Localized versions of the Office 2003 update."

 Note    The full-file version of the Office 2003 update will install successfully on installations of the release version of Office 2003.

Strategies for updating your Office 2003 installations

The method you use to distribute the Office 2003 update depends on the method you used to deploy Office 2003 originally. When you deploy from a compressed CD image on the network, Setup creates a local installation source on users' computers. Because users always have access to this local installation source, you can distribute smaller client (binary) patches. This method leaves your installation source on the network unchanged and avoids synchronization problems between an updated source and client computers. It is the most efficient way to deploy and maintain Office 2003.

The client version of the Office 2003 Critical Update: KB828041 is available from the Microsoft Download Center.

For more information about deploying from a CD image and using client patches to update Office 2003 installations or to create new installations, see the topic Distributing Office 2003 Product Updates and read the section "Caching installation files locally and distributing client updates".

If you created an administrative installation point and deployed Office 2003 from there, then you can still update your administrative installation point with the administrative (full-file) version of the Office 2003 update, and then recache and reinstall Office 2003 on your users' computers to apply the changes. If users do not have access to the administrative image, or if you do not know which patches they have already applied, you can also distribute the administrative version of the Office 2003 update directly to users. Users can apply the full-file patch even when they do not have access to the source; however, their computers remain out-of-sync with the updated source until they reinstall Office from the administrative image.

For more information about applying the Office 2003 update to an administrative installation point and updating client computers, see the topic Distributing Office 2003 Product Updates and read the section "Updating Office from a patched administrative installation point".

 Note    If you used Group Policy software installation features to deploy Office 2003, they you can also use Group Policy to redeploy Office 2003 from a patched administrative installation point. For more information about Group Policy software installation, see Using Group Policy to Deploy Office.

Localized versions of the Office 2003 update

Localized versions of the Office 2003 update are available in the following languages and can be downloaded from the Office 2003 Resource Kit Localized Downloads page:

Files changed by the Office 2003 update

The following table lists the file changed by the full-file Office 2003 update. If you need to confirm whether a share has been updated, you can check the related file version number.

Related links

For an overview of Office 2003 Critical Update: KB828041, see Description of the Office 2003 critical update: November 4, 2003 in the Microsoft Knowledge Base.

For general information on applying an administrative update, see Deploying Product Updates from an Administrative Installation Point in the Office XP Resource Kit.