I recently perchased Office 2003 Professional and WOW it is brilliant. I mainly use Powerpoint but Publisher looks useful and Word just looks nice. I'll do a brief description of all the Office Programmes:Word 2003 - Word is used for word processing at a higher level than Word Pad or Works' Word Processor. I used to own Word 2000 which was blocky and square but Word 2003 is very nice to use and nice a curved.
Excel 2003 - Excel is a spreadsheet programme. They are cutdown versions in Works and WorksSuite. It is more powerful in Office, you can see why WorksSuite is cheaper. Also it has very good icon. ;-)
Outlook 2003 - Outlook is the full version of Outlook Express. Although in principal it is fairly similar it has some extra features for advanced mail users and a reformed interface.
Powerpoint 2003 - Powerpoint is the presentation/slideshow maker, unfortunately there is no cut-down version in Works and WorksSuite. However it is very useful and looks amazing when you use Custom Animations.
Publisher 2003 - Publisher is for creating Newsletters, Leaflets and Letters. Although you can most of these things in Word is does make it a bit easier. It is not exactly important but might be useful for new users.
Access 2003 - Access is the database, there is a sort of cut-down version in WorksSuite and Works although thats very basic. I haven't really used Access yet, just browsed through it.
There are other programes avalible like Visio and OneNote though these are very expensive addons.