Full Review: Microsoft Publisher 2002
By Luisa Simone ZDNet Reviews
With a robust toolset, highly automated design functions, and a low price tag, it is easy to see why Microsoft Publisher owns the low-end, Windows desktop publishing market. With this release, Publisher 2002 concentrates on providing more intelligent automation, sophisticated output for print and Web, and tighter integration with the other Office applications--specifically Word.
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Like the other Office XP programs, Publisher now sports a Task Pane. Publisher's Task Pane provides access to many of the same functions found in Word, such as Search, Insert Clipart, and Mail Merge. The new Office Clipboard is especially useful for designers. The Clipboard, which temporarily stores up to 24 items, can function as a scratchboard for frequently used design elements.
Publisher also takes advantage of the Task Pane to centralise many of its longstanding design functions. For example, the Wizards that automatically build complex documents (like newsletters or Web sites) are now found in the Task Pane. A few intelligently thought out categories--for design, colour schemes, and page layout options-- let you quickly modify any Wizard-based publication. And in each case, thumbnails (really schematic previews) provide an instantly-understandable explanation of the available choices.
Publisher's Task Pane contains a new and impressive design tool--Font Schemes. In the same way that a Colour Scheme provides a set of matched hues, a Font Scheme provides a set of typefaces that work well together. Font Schemes are intelligently mapped to both the predefined and custom text styles in a document. So when you switch to a different Font Scheme, all of the copy in your publication is updated for a consistent look.
Many of Publisher's new features are part and parcel of its tighter integration with Word. With Publisher you can now preview a print job on screen before committing it to paper, create custom toolbars, and access a Thesaurus. Longtime Publisher users who were frustrated by the out-dated internal drawing tools will be happy to hear that Publisher now includes all of the Office Art features, including the WordArt module, the Picture Toolbar, and AutoShapes. Though these features can't compete with a dedicated drawing program, they provide a down-and-dirty way to enhance your designs. For example, you can warp and extrude a headline or adjust the brightness and contrast of an imported image.
In our testing we found that one of the new crossover features--Smart Tags--works differently in Word and Publisher. In Publisher the AutoCorrect Smart Tag works on character-level formats, but not paragraph-level formats as it does in Word. So while you can correct an improperly capitalized word, you can't use the Smart Tag to reverse an auto-numbering scheme. Likewise, both Word and Publisher allow you to use the Paste Options smart tag to choose source or destination formatting for copied text. But only Word's Smart Tag provides access to the Styles and Formatting Task Pane. We also wish that Publisher had acquired Word's ability to define character-level (as well as paragraph-level) text styles.
Publisher 2002 offers two new picture functions. You can now export any selected object or group in a standard picture file format, such as WMF, JPEG, GIF or TIF. While this feature makes it easy to generate reusable art from Publisher, there are no export options to control the resolution or compression levels of the resulting file. Much less snazzy, but infinitely more useful is that fact that Publisher now maintains native file formats (like TIF and JPEG) upon import. This means that you can take advantage of the built-in compression capabilities of those formats to keep your publication file size small.
If you want a way to immediately improve the look of your documents, look no further than the 15 new Master Design Sets for Publisher's Wizards. These professionally designed motifs can bring a more sophisticated sensibility to a wide variety of publication types (including newsletters, brochures, and business cards). And a new Wizard lets you import a Word document into a Publisher template, while still preserving the original text styles, paragraph formats, and headers or footers. Publisher 2002 even handles inline graphics so that the pictures you have inserted into a Word document will be correctly positioned in the text flow. This last feature may prove to be a mixed blessing. While it guarantees that Word documents will be imported intact, it contradicts previous versions of Publisher that limited the content of text frames to text.
These days no graphics program can afford to ignore the Web, and Publisher 2002 adds a number of Internet-oriented features. If you have created a Web page with Publisher, you can directly open the HTML file for subsequent editing. This is a huge convenience that will make Publisher much more attractive to inexperienced Web authors. However, in order to maintain the HTML document in an editable form, Publisher--like Word--bloats the file with XML code. The resulting HTML file is huge (our sample Web page was 448K) and will download slowly over a dial-up connection. We did, however, like Publisher's ability to send a single-page document as an HTML email message (rather than as an attachment). Because the message uses the "universal" HTML format, recipients don't need to have Publisher installed to view the document (though they will need an HTML-capable email program).
While Publisher is not intended to compete with high-end publishing programs (like QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign), it is increasingly used to generate film for commercial offset printing. This version lets you generate documents that can mix process and spot colours. In addition, the old hard-wired limit of "black plus two spot colours" is gone. A Publisher document can now contain up to 12 different spot colours. Your service bureau must support native Publisher files, because the program still has not adopted a PostScript or PDF workflow. But in general, we were impressed with the spot colour implementation. For example, Publisher correctly identified the spot colours in an imported EPS file.
Despite the high degree of integration with Office, Publisher 2002 will only be bundled with Microsoft Office XP for a limited time as part of a promotional release called Office XP Professional Special Edition (AU$1,029). After that, Publisher 2002 will only be available as a standalone product (AU$276).
We must point out that Publisher 2002 has a few key features--most notably HTML output and Save As Picture--that sacrifice efficient output in favor of user convenience. But on the whole this upgrade to Publisher promises to improve the workflow of its intended small business audience. Publisher 2002 does an excellent job of combining easy-to-use design tools with Office-inspired productivity functions in one streamlined interface.
