Full Review: Microsoft Word 2002
By Lori Grunin ZDNet Reviews
It shows just how hard Microsoft has to strain to come up with new features for Office that the reviewer materials for Word 2002 list the Word Count toolbar as a major new feature. Better yet, Word's new Smart Tag engine thinks that "Word Count toolbar" is a person, which tidily exemplifies both the strengths and weaknesses of the truly new features Word offers.
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On one hand, we think the Smart Tags have a lot of potential--in Word and PowerPoint 2002 more than any of the other apps simply because those two apps create documents which hold the most varied types of information. For example, if you hover over a name, you can drop down a Smart Tag which offers you the option to send email, schedule a meeting, open the contact, add to contacts, or insert the address. But how frequently do you want to perform these tasks within a Word document? They're more useful in WordMail, but even then they only work as long as you compose in HTML. True, that's the default, but some companies will change it to plain text for security and message size reasons.
There are several new features which we're glad too see--we just wonder why it took so long to get them into the product. These include table and list styles, watermarks (text and picture), and the ability to select discontiguous blocks of text. You've also got more flexibility in the way you edit list layouts, such as the ability to drag entries to change indents. All these new style and format options have become somewhat cumbersome to track, however.
The Reveal Formatting Task pane gives you a quick snapshot of the formats and styles applied to a selection, but it's still a bit onerous to keep track of what comes from the font style, what's from the paragraph style, what's from the table style, and so on. We especially like the way the Styles and Formatting pane allows you to select all the instances in which a particular style appears--whether it's a defined style or an implied style, such as bolded text.
Similarly, you can now compare the formatting of two selections to each other, a step forward in maintaining intra-document consistency. None of this makes using styles much easier, but users well-versed in styles will appreciate the extra power.
If you use a lot of drawings in your documents, you'll also appreciate the new Drawing Canvas, which allows for absolute positioning of graphic objects within a document. And electronic collaborators should like the new Markup view, which slides all tracked changes into callouts on the right-hand side of the screen so that they don't interfere with line breaks.
Word now supports ODMA (Open Document Management API)--just in time to integrate with Microsoft's new SharePoint Portal Server document management system. Thankfully, it achieves this without jeopardizing cross-version compatibility: Word 2002 documents slid seamlessly into our workflow, which includes users on all Word versions from Word 95 up, as well as documents created using Mac versions of Word.
For all but a few users, there's no major new feature in Word 2002 that will send you clicking over to your favorite software shopping site to pre-order either it or Office XP. But when you do choose to make the upgrade, you'll be pleased with Word 2002's enhancements and file compatibility.
