> Office 2000 and 2003 were great releases, the main applications (Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint and Outlook) were fast and stable as long as you weren't running some weird corporate domain deployment.

Or tried to use Microsoft Equation more than a couple of times inside a single document. The thing was ridiculously prone to crashing on top of producing butt-ugly typesetting.

Of course, that falls under “using OLE”, but IIRC so does using WordArt, which was rock solid (albeit much simpler and in particular incapable of in-place editing).