The second of several articles describing experiences with Microsoft Office XP. The word-processor component of Office XP is known as Word XP or Word 2002. I have used the predecessors, Word 97 and Word 2000 extensively for newsletters, pamphlets, and letters for several years, but many of the more powerful features I have not used at all. In this limited space, I will try to provide a brief overview of the features I know about, with special attention to those improvement and extensions that are new with Word 2002.-- Mick

Overview -- Software that qualifies, as a word-processor today is very all embracing. Not just a way of putting words into a document anymore, but rather a tool for creating documents with headers, footnotes, fonts, columns, tables, photos, drawings, etc. A well equipped word-processor further allows working with the created documents to allow printing, web publishing, spellchecking, grammar checking, word substitution, mass-mailings, type-setting, outlining, etc. High-end word-processors can also be configured to extract data from data bases and trade information with spreadsheets and presentation software. Word 2002 can do all these, plus more-voice and handwriting recognition! And all the features are wrapped together with a mostly comfortable user interface, and a very powerful Visual Basic macro facility. A thorough listing of the features would more than fill my allotted space. All-in-all, Word is likely to be more powerful than you will ever use.

Of course, the list of things it can do is not very important (after all, it does not matter if your family car has a trenching tool, and front loader, if you only need a vehicle to get the kids to school and pickup a few groceries). What is important is, how easily can it do (or help you do) what you need to have done. Word is most appropriate for the work environment, because people who crank out a lot of documents will occasionally need to dig a ditch or move a boulder, and because their more frequent use of the software will make them more comfortable with the controls. But for the private user that does a significant amount of document work, (editing newsletters, large numbers of envelopes, etc) Word may be worth the investment.
In my view, if you have word-processing tasks, tasks that you plan to do as expected by the wizards of Microsoft, Word XP is excellent-strong visual presentation and the ability to cut, paste, drag, drop, draw, and other techniques that use the visual aspect of your document, rather than the previous method of entering numeric parameters. For example, rather than opening a page formatting sheet to enter the margin setting in inches, in Word you just drag little tokens on the horizontal and vertical rulers. The horizontal ruler looks much like that little metal bar on the old fashioned typewriter where you could drag the margin stops, and tab stops. Word works the same way, except that you can also drag hanging indents, and paragraph indents.

Many of the features in Word are very user friendly, and can be used, set, or modified using drag-and drop techniques. But when trying to do something a little off the beaten path (that is not planned by the Microsoft architects) these tasks can be very tedious and frustrating, to nearly impossible to figure out how to accomplish. It can be very tough to re-edit someone else's fancy formatting.

Some of the Submenus such as File-New and File-Search are different, docked like a big side-anchored tool bar known as a TaskPane. These can be made to float, this is a pretty big difference in look and feel, but probably can be assimilated by most folks with a little time. The help menu is very convenient and comprehensive; thankfully, there is a better option rather than the moronic "Clippie"-the upper right corner has an "ask your question" text entry block, which jumps to a list of likely interpretations of your question, and links from there to the answers. I had managed to strangle "Clippie" paperclip help-assistant on my previous installation, and the new installation honored that preference.

Smart tags and customization -- Smart tags are new features in Word XP. Many, such as the auto correct and paste smart-tags are small prompts that help streamline a previously existing capability. A customized smart tag might work like this: an office worker could type text containing information about the job into a corporate document. If this text included the names of business partners, financial information, addresses, etc, the company could use smart tags (programmed into the corporate version of Word XP) to recognize the text as it is typed and offer suggestions for appropriate user actions. Locations of significant data would appear with a small, dashed underline which the user could select with the mouse reveal the smart tag suggestions. While this type of programming is not attractive to most users, it has some promise in the corporate environment. For home users, the existing smart tags are already pretty useful, and third-party programmers may supply more.

Autocorrect -- I think I am going to like the autocorrect feature-in the past I was not a big fan of this feature, but I just discovered that it can be easily controlled. So now, if I type anyting rather than anything (which I do frequently), Word will just "fix" it for me. This happens not because Word decided to fix it, but because I told it to by right-clicking the misspelled word, and selecting the autocorrect choice. Actually this is not always for "correcting" but you can program the autocorrect feature to replace most any word with another string, like, by default, the ASCII smiley face :-) is automatically replaced by a symbolic face, . And, here is the key difference in XP that makes it a good feature-if the auto feature is too ambitious, and changes something that I did not want changed, I can use the SmartTag to fix it. The SmartTag is a small icon that pops up near selected words, and acts like a webpage link, but instead of just linking to another page or document, it can link to a process-for example when you paste text into a Word document the smart tag offers an option on exactly how to paste, and similarly, the SmartTag provides easy control of the autocorrect feature.

Graphics-- Since Word97 there have been very commendable illustration capabilities in Word. The ability to import pictures in several formats, control the size of the pictures, and an easy to use basic drawing tool that does not require outside software, or much practice to use. The 2002 version adds a Diagramming and Organizational Chart drawing tool which is sufficiently different from the other drawing tools to cause a fair amount of frustration. Likely it will become more friendly with practice. Also, I locked-up Word with it, maybe just a coincidence, and the auto-backup feature kept me from loosing any significant work.

Voice control -- This paragraph was typed completely by voice command after ten minutes of training the computer then injured this text as I spoke it into the microphone so I guess voice input to is practical in office X. P. this text was totally than 80 Ted after I finished speaking at. Oops, should have said "entered" rather than "injured", and "totally unedited after I finished…" One bad part about voice dictation is that it will not misspell any words, because they all come from its dictionary. So the spell checker will not help you with corrections in enunciation. Overall, much better than I expected. I may do my next article draft in all voice command mode.

Other notable features -- Many of the features of Word are just great, but some more powerful features are not trivial to learn to use, some seem almost hidden, but, with time they become understandable, and less irritating. I have never felt as comfortable with the overall features of Word, as with WordPerfect, but admittedly I can do things with Word that I was never able to do with WordPerfect. Maybe it is just what you grow up with.

The right click choice of Select text with similar formatting is very nifty for changing settings throughout your document. Using this, you can easily select all the Italicized text, and convert it to underline everywhere in the document.
As I mentioned, Word includes the programming language Visual Basic, and this is integrated into the user interface. I can think of no use for this personally, but clearly Word can provide automatic assistance for producing bulk documents, data-entry forms and similar features. At the same time, this programming capability provides an entryway for malicious intruders. While this access is blocked by default, some attention is required to keep Word documents from becoming a means of spreading viruses.

Word has a very irritating interaction with my wheel mouse. It frequently fails to scroll the printing cursor off the screen-then, after moving the text-insertion-point either with mouse or the cursor keys, it seems to correct the problem until next time.
As I mentioned in the first article of this series, the largest negative factor about Word is the price. When purchased as part of the OfficeXP Suite, most private users will find the price/performance ratio unacceptable. On the other hand, Word 2002 is included as a part of the Works 2003 suite, for around $100, as an upgrade from other word processors, and older versions of Word. Also, worth considering is looking for older versions of Works-you may locate a bargain for $30-$40-The older Word 2000 will include almost everything in 2002 except for SmartTags and TaskPanes. (And you may not need the newest bulldozer anyway).

More reading about Word can be found on the Internet-these sites in particular have been helpful.
Using Tables: http://www.microsoft.com/office/using/column13.asp
General Word help from MS: http://www.mvps.org/word/index.asp
Another nice Word tips site: http://www.jwolsen.com/allword.htm


(mick@iconusersgroup.org)