The papers that Microsoft at present (June 2004) have comparing what you get with Office 2000; Office XP and Office 2003 say that "Edit in Datasheet View" is a function of Office 2003. It is but only if you are running Office 2003 Professional. It is not included in either Office 2003 Standard or Office 2003 Small Business Edition. Mark Pfeifer points out that the missing component is the "Microsoft Office List Datasheet Component". Thanks to him for prompting me to add this FAQ item. Woody Windischman also sent me this address where it is mentioned "This page compares some of the functionality in different Office 2003 Editions. Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 and Microsoft Office Professional Enterprise Edition 2003 offer some enhanced functionality." Finally, a source that prefers to remain anonymous told me that it is possible to get Edit in Datasheet to work with Office 2003 Business Edition (*note that Monty extends this to Standard Edition*) by making a registry change. Here's his (or her!) text. "It seems that if you set: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common\ProductVersion]
"ProInfo"=dword:00000001 on a machine with Office SBE you don't even need to exit IE. The next time you click on "Edit in Datasheet", off you go." Monty sent me this confirmation that this works and a comment on the legality of doing this
We (my client) have MSDN Universal Subscriptions and called Microsoft on this issue. Their Licensing group has no reference to this in their marketing, sales, licensing, or product-selection guides. Their technical team also has no reference materials on this feature that would impact product selection. in short, Microsoft appears to not take an official position on this. All the software is loaded with Office2003 Standard and the ActiveX control to make this feature work. the Registry Key change referenced in your article works very well for my client. It basically toggles the feature on and off. unless anyone can reference a Microsoft communication that officially states this feature as legally only available to Office Pro users, a registry change like this cannot violate your licensing agreement with Microsoft.
Thanks, Monty. I'm sure that will ease people's worries. Alex Angas points out that the KB article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/909506 | 
