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BOOT CAMP 109
WORD
2000
Love it or loath it Microsoft Word has become the de-facto
word processing program for the PC. Its detractors claim it is vastly over
featured and difficult to use but those
who persevere and learn to live with its many quirks usually end up
appreciating the wealth of features, enormous flexibility and easy integration
with other Windows applications.
Word has been through many incarnations since the original
DOS program first appeared in 1983. The most recent offering is Word 2000; it
was launched last year, initially as part of the Office 2000 suite but was
swiftly followed by a stand-alone version. Word 2000 is the most significant
revision since Word 95 though users of both Word 95 and 97 should feel
immediately at home with it since most of the changes are well hidden behind
the familiar desktop.
We haven’t bothered much with Word 2000 until now but the
growing number of letters and emails we’re getting indicates that the program
is find its way onto the nation’s PCs, and causing a fair amount of
head-scratching in the process as users come to terms with new features or try
to find old ones. This week’s Boot Camp -- part of a short series on Office
2000 -- takes a look at what’s on offer and considers whether or not it’s worth
upgrading.
Many of the changes in Word are linked to wider improvements
in Office 2000, most of which are geared towards making the whole suite more
Internet-friendly, however, there are lots of new word processing features, and
that’s what we’ll be concentrating on here.
Although Word looks almost exactly same as before the layout
of drop-down menus has been simplified. Instead of displaying all the options
they are shown in short-form, with the most recently or frequently used items
at the top of the list. Clicking on a little arrow brings up the whole list. It
can be switched back to the traditional layout from Customise (Options tab) on
the Tools menu. File Open and Save As look different too. They’re one of those
global changes mentioned earlier, affecting the whole of Office 2000. Instead
of just showing a list of the files in a particular folder the dialogue windows
also displays a row of icons for quick access other frequently used folders and
applications.
The View menu now has just three options instead of the five
in Word 97: Normal is the same as before, Print Layout replaces and improves
upon Page Layout and Web View replaces the Online View. Web View still scales
the page to suit Internet page layout but it can also show backgrounds and
graphics.
One thing most new users will appreciate straight away is
how easy it is to choose a font. The drop-down menu on the formatting toolbar
shows an example of each typeface. Click and Type is a nifty way of quickly
keying in text into a particular position on the page, without resorting to
tabs, spacing changes or altering justification settings. It works on the Print
Layout and the new Web Layout views, all you have to do is double click the
pointer where you want the text to appear and a little graphic shows you the
style or effect you’re probably looking for, depending where you are on the
page (left justify, centre, right justify). One arguably retrograde step is the
return of the Overtype command to the keyboard, it’s toggled by the Insert key
– as it used to be in Word 6 -- however it’s easy to disable from the Command
list via the Keyboard button on the Customise menu.
The new Clipboard in Word 2000 is a big improvement. It can
now hold up to 12 separate items that can be copied or pasted between any open
document and Office application. The clipboard appears automatically when two
or more items are copied into it and it can be called up any time by
right-clicking into an empty space on the toolbar and selecting it from the
list.
Some of the biggest changes are concerned with the automatic
correction of spelling mistakes, a popular (and sometimes frustrating) feature
of previous versions of Word. It’s now much easier to tell Word not to change a
spelling. The Exceptions button in AutoCorrect has the facility to enter a list
of words that you do not want to be corrected. This replaces the cumbersome
Exceptions Dictionary. If you’re stuck for a synonym just right-click on a word
and a list appears, along with a direct link to Word’s much improved Thesaurus.
Language recognition is now automatic, which could be very
useful if you routinely work on multi-lingual documents, you can now create
AutoCorrect lists in any chosen language and Word will automatically correct
mistakes and make simple punctuation changes, like hyphenation, as you
type.
Here’s something that will interest a lot of users of Word
97. Mr Paperclip, the Office Assistant, has got some new friends. He has been
joined by six new animated characters, complete with irritating sound effects.
They include a bouncing ball, The Genius (aka Albert Einstein), a cat, dog and
a cute little Robot called F1. The good news is that the option to permanently
disable Office Assistant actually seems to work this time!
There have been some major enhancements to the Table
facility. It’s now a lot easier to create a table from scratch, just use the
pencil-shaped drawing tool to define the shape and insert the rows and columns.
You can also put tables within tables. Tables can be arranged side by side on a
page, text can be wrapped around them, they are also easier to resize, edit and
delete plus text blocks can be easily converted into tables using the drawing
tool.
Finally on this brief tour we come to Bullets and Numbering
on the Format menu. Bullets are a quick and easy way to smarten up lists; Word
2000 has a much larger choice of colourful bullets and it’s now much easier to
create and use your own designs.
Is it for you? If you are reasonably happy with your current
version of Word and mostly use it for straightforward word processing jobs then
probably not. The improvements are all very worthwhile but they are fairly
minor in nature. Nevertheless, for those who regularly work on multi-lingual
documents or are interested in web page authoring it is definitely worth
considering.
Next week – Outlook 2000
JARGON FILTER
AUTOCORRECT
Word feature that automatically corrects spelling mistakes
as you type
OFFICE ASSISTANT
Help feature in Word where a ‘friendly’ cartoon character
pops up and tells you how to do things. For example typing ‘Dear Sir’ will
bring up advice on how to write a letter
OVERTYPE
Typing a letter or character replaces the character or space
next to it
TOP TIP
Here’s another Easter Egg to while away a few aimless
minutes. In case you’ve not come across them before they’re pointless but often
amusing little extras hidden inside software applications by the programmers.
This one is in both Windows 95 and 98. Open Display Properties in Control
Panel, select the Screensaver tab, choose 3D Pipes, click the Settings button
and check ‘Multiple’, ‘Traditional’ and ‘Solid’. In Joint Type select Mixed,
click OK then Preview and look out for Teapots… No prizes but can anyone tell
us what’s so special about this particular teapot?
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