Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I've been using this software for about three months now and have installed it on seven or eight different machines that I maintain, and honestly, the best I can say is that the actual upgrade process is very smooth.
You will first notice how nice everything looks and the new "Smart Pane," which is supposed to be a window with what Office thinks you will want to do. The contents of this pane include your most recently used documents and options to create new documents.
The menus look a lot like the DHTML effects common on many web sites--menu options are "highlighted" when you mouse over them. A few other things have changed, but the changes are mostly cosmetic.
The Smart Pane, which is really more of a "pain" than a "pane," is obtrusive to me--I am what is called a "power user," i.e., I use MS Office for about four hours a day, rely on it, and am very familiar with it. When I open an application, I want wide, open space. I often close the Smart Pane without using its features, instead opening documents the way I have for years-either by opening them from the Work menu I added or by clicking to them. This Smart Pane is supposed to close when you open something, but sometimes it doesn't, meaning I have to click to close it.
Worse, the Smart Pane automatically opens when you want to do something it thinks requires many options. For example, if I want to modify a style in Word, the Smart Pane appears and offers me myriad options for editing my styles. This whole process of opening the Smart Pane slows everything down.
Editing styles provides a good example of how bloated the software is. You may recall from Office 2000 that all the styles were either built in or created by the user. Now, however, XP creates new styles based on what it finds in your document. For example, if you have an italicized one of your Heading 1s, XP will show the regular Heading 1 style and the Heading 1 style with italics-you end up with way too many styles to load and look at!
Word slows down every machine it's loaded on. My oldest machine, a Dell Pentium 75 running Win 98, was still chugging along quite nicely, even with Office 2000 installed. Now, however, after I've installed XP on it, it moves so slowly that it's almost laughable. The worst part is that the computer is much, much slower, even if I'm not using any of the XP applications.
I have a few gripes with Word. First, I now have printing problems that I never had before. First, pages often print out at about 70% their regular size for no reason. Second, since I use a lot of hidden text in my documents, Word has a difficult time figuring out which page to print when I choose to print "Current Page." This has caused me many problems when I choose "Print Current Page" and later find out the printed page was several pages off. Third, a new feature, "Manual Duplex," is not very useful. This feature is supposed to make it possible to select a page range, choose "Manual Duplex," and then print out only every other page. Then, you take out the printed sheets, put them back in the printer, and Word is supposed to figure out automatically how to print the missing pages on the backs of the printed pages. Nice idea, but it only works if you have an even number of pages to print; if you have an odd number, which should statistically be half the time, it will not count the last blank page, and it will print all the pages "one off."
The other gripe is almost laughable, typical of Microsoft. Now, when Word crashes, it politely tells you that it has done so and offers to send a report of the problem to Bill. It swears that it won't send any personal data. The first few times I saw this, I thought, sure, why not, send it, maybe it'll help. Hah! Each time, without fail, my computer froze! So, instead of having just one program crash, I ended up with a frozen machine. Remember, I'm primarily using a new, major name machine with little other software installed. Learned not to do that real quick!
There is one change I do like in Word. Since I do a lot of editing for a living, I find the new style of showing comments much better than the previous method. In Office 2000, comments were shown as "sticky notes" that appeared when you moused over them. Now, however, the comments appear as neat rounded squares in the margin. They look good on the screen and they print out well for others to read.
My relatively low rating is for the upgrade, not for the overall quality of the product. The product, which crashes at least as frequently as Office 2000, seems to be no more functional than its predecessor, meaning that the upgrade is necessary only for those who want to have the latest thing. The best news is that I've learned how to take advantage of MS's support discussion groups. The answers and workarounds I found in those groups were a thousand times more helpful than MS's pitiful Help or canned tech support messages. Again: Don't pay for support-go to their support groups for help first.
In short, this is something of a "non-upgrade," and will most likely cause more problems than it will fix.
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Microsoft Word 2002 gives users the tools they need to streamline the process of creating, sharing, reviewing, and publishing their important documents. Word 2002 makes it easier for users to discover and use existing functionality and provides intelligent new ways for users to work with their documents. Word 2002 now makes it easier for users to share and review documents with others without changing the way they currently work. Discover and use more of the new and existing functionality in the application. New tools such as task panes and smart tags are shared throughout the Microsoft Office suite. Built into Word 2002 is improved technology for working with formatting, styles, bullets, tables of contents, and more.
AutoCorrect Options smart tags provides an easy mechanism for users to control and modify automatic behavior that takes place within Word. Undo an automatic correction, choose to not have that correction take place in the future, or access the AutoCorrect Options dialog box. With Name, Address, and Date smart tags, Word 2002 recognizes names, addresses, and dates. When an item is recognized, the user is provided with a Smart Tag that allows them to obtain additional information from the Web or other Office applications. Additional Smart Tags will be available on the Office Update Web site and can be extended by organizations and third parties to offer unique document solutions. Word 2002 now gives users the ability to translate words in their document (available languages are determined by language dictionaries that are installed) or to access a translation service on the Web. This service provides entire document translation as well as additional languages. Word 2002 now increases user productivity by supplementing traditional mouse and keyboard execution with voice commands. Users can dictate text, make direct formatting changes, and navigate menus using speech and voice commands. (Note: Speech is currently available for U.S. English, simplified Chinese, and Japanese.) The Word Count toolbar allows users to easily update the word count in a document without having to go to the Word Count dialog box. Additional improvements in Word Count allow users more flexibility in whether headers and footers are counted in their document.
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