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4 Smileys - 1 Smiley Poor, 5 Smileys Excellent
Platforms: Mac OS
Forward Word has long since stopped being a simple word processor and now you can not only make simple letters and memos but newsletters, catalogs, to-do lists, books, lab reports, and even web pages. Microsoft's aim was to make it faster to create and customize documents, all the while keeping the interface easy-to-use and easy-to-learn both for new and old users. Did Microsoft succeed in adding new features without cluttering up the interface? Read on.
An Easy Way of Creating Documents
So you start up Word and are looking at an empty new document and have no idea where to begin. Word comes with themes whose aim is to help you get over this creative block. The dialog box to the right presents dozens of themes along with a preview and a few options. Each theme has a different font used, color of regular text, bullet and horizontal line styles, heading styles, and hyperlink colors. You can select whether you want vivid colors (bright or dull), active graphics (designs of bullets and horizontal lines), and a background image for your document. If that weren't enough, you can also change the color scheme to dozens of color selections. Of course, you can always change parts of the formatting if it isn't exactly how you want it since the themes aren't written in stone. You will never go without help in deciding how your document will look like from austere to crazy to colorful to technical.
Getting In Touch With People When you create a letter or envelope, you write them to a person. This used to involve going to your PIM, copying the contact information (usually one line at a time), going back to Word, pasting, and repeating for how many letters and envelopes you had to send. Now that you have Entourage you have an easy way to insert a person's name, address(es), phone number(s), and email(s) into Word from the Contact toolbar. This is a great boon to writing letters because it saves you lots of time in copying and pasting, especially when you're writing many letters and envelopes. You can even use the toolbar to take a contact from a Word document and add that to the Address Book in Entourage 2001. The only bad thing is that this is only available through the Contact toolbar so you need to bring that up if you need to insert a contact's information.
This is all well and good when you are creating a number of different letters, but what if you're making a form letter that you need to send to many people? You use the Data Merge Manager (formerly known as Mail Merge) to send mass communication via physical mail or email. For the most part it's a pretty easy process as the Data Merge Manager is divided into the steps that you need to complete. You first create the document with the elements that you want to appear on every one and select it as the main document and what type of document you are merging (form letter, label, envelope, catalog). Then you choose the data source which can be a tab-delimited file, your Entourage Address Book (identified as the Office Address Book for some reason), a FileMaker database, and you can even create a new data file. You then have further power by being able to decide when to skip a record, whether to include text if the record has certain features, and more. I found this to be rather complicated and not very user-friendly. For example, I don't think it's possible to exclude records if they come from the same domain. They seem to be very powerful so if you can figure them out, they will be a great help. Then you can decide which fields to include such as first name, last name, address, phone number, email, and more into the main document. You preview your work, pick a range of records to use, and then finally merge the data to the printer, a file, or email. Overall, the Data Merge Manager is a vast improvement over the mail merge feature in Word 98. What I'd like to see is a simpler method to choose and exclude records and the ability to add attachments to the emails, but I think that this will work great for you even without these features.
Other Neat Improvements Let's suppose that you want to type some text at an arbitrary point in the document. In Word 98 you had to create a tab, but in Word 2001 you can simply double-click anywhere in the document and start typing. You can also double-click in the header and footer to insert text in them without having to go to the View Menu. The cursor also changes to reflect what is going to happen so you always have feedback about what you're going to do. Although making a tab isn't that arduous and you can still do it, I like the added ease of just double-clicking where I want the cursor to be.
Do you like to use tables but have been frustrated with them in the past? Suffer no more! Tables in Word 2001 have been much improved with the ability to make a table within another table (also known as nested tables), repeat a header row on multiple pages, and add diagonal lines in cells. You can also move a table around a page by just selecting it and dragging and dropping, put two tables right next to each other, and have text flow around a table just as you can with a picture. In addition to these features, you have many new ways of adding pizzazz through the use of the Borders and Shading dialog box. You have a veritable smorgasbord of choices to customize how your tables and pages look. I think this dialog box is pretty self-explanatory so I'm sure you can see how much flexibility you have.
Conclusion
Microsoft has worked hard at making it easy to pick pre-made designs and customize your documents to look exactly the way that you want them to. I don't think Word will ever have the same kind of power that Adobes InDesign does, but for most of us just trying to get work done, Word 2001 has made creating and customizing new documents much easier. There are also a number of improvements for us power users although one of the most annoying features that didn't get changed involves updating indexes and table of contents. You control-click and select the update command and you're asked if you want to update everything or just the page numbers. Most of the time I want to update everything so I have to select the option and then click okay. Aside from this, many of the annoying problems have been fixed which has not only reduced the irritation factor I sometimes encountered but increased my productivity as well. I can definitely say that Word 2001 is a worthwhile upgrade.
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