If you can tolerate the losses, this is some of what you'll gain: WordMail | Workarounds | Other Issues | More Information Reasons to Upgrade You won't be able to select a Contact and choose Actions, New Letter to contact. You can still send documents as attachments. This is the email header that's displayed in Word, Excel and other Office programs when you click the envelope button or choose File, Send to, Mail Recipient. What do you lose by not starting the merge in Outlook? The ability to use Outlook's more powerful filters to create the mail merge dataset.

You can still use mail merge if you begin it in Word and can use Outlook's Contacts in the merge.

Mail merge when initiated from Outlook's Contacts.

There is no hack you can use to make Outlook 2003 use older versions of Word as it's editor. In order to use Word as the editor, you need to use the same version of Word and Outlook. What you'll lose by upgrading only Outlook: Tip: If you copy winword.exe from the old directory to the same directory as outlook.exe, you'll gain some of the spelling and grammar features back.

In Outlook 2003, Word cannot be used as your email editor unless its installed from the Office 2003 suite, but even if you never use Word as your editor, there are other issues to consider before installing Outlook.

See Outlook 2010 Standalone and Features not available when only Outlook 2007 is installed for more information about those programs In Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010, you'll have a limited version of Word available when only Outlook 2010 is installed, with some spelling and grammar features are missing.

Upgrade to outlook 2016 from 2007