What our customer's say!"Part of MS Office", I like Word very much, and I am glad MS separated it from Office as I did not need all the parts. Over time, I have learned to do all anyone could require of such a program, and the help on the internet is superb.
"Best ever", I finally upgraded my word processing program and love it. I knew I would because I have always used MS Word.
"Best Office Ever--But Could Be Better", I'm studying to become a game programmer. I bought this product to upgrade from an older version, primarily, for the ability to make your own formating styles (in addition to having normal font, the headers, and a couple others.. you can make your own custom ones) so that managing my game documentation would be easier. That way, if I wanted to change the apearance of soemthing in the document (such as the font color of a hero's ability), I would need only to change the format that each entry was using rather than change each entry individually.
While developing some documentation, I found that being able to set my own bookmarks was also a great feature. That way, I could make charts and tables that cross-referenced each other... while reading about an ability that makes an item, the user could click the name of the item to be taken to a description of it. From there, either alt+left arrow would take him back to continue reading about the ability. Unfortunately, the interface for all this is rather tedious--especially when you have a couple hundred references in a document.
Ultimately, I decided that building a database and displaying the data through HTML would be easier--it still provides the ability to update a style and have the document automatically update each part of the document using that style, but also gives me the ability to automatically generate links for cross-referencing.
Still, for a WYSIWYG editor, Office is pretty darned good. And since it's a WYSIWYG editor, it's still great for prototyping.
"Justified Upgrade for some, but not all", Word 2003 is more powerful than ever. Unfortunately, most of the new features are aimed primarily towards large business. As a result, many end-users simply won't need them (or be able to use them). The users who will benefit most from upgrading are corporate users or users purchasing bundles with new PCs.
Pros:
Instant Messaging support is now integrated with Office applications. However, only MSN messenger is used. Users who predominantly use Yahoo, trillian, jabber, or ICQ will not find any utility in this feature, without signing up for a messenger account.
The user interface has changed for the better, and matches the Windows XP interface better. Personally, I like it. Also, fonts are rendered better, and consequently documents will look better on laptops (no more jagged edges).
The Reading Layout feature splits the text into a two column format for easier reading (think newspaper).
If you have Microsoft Server and SharePoint services installed on your network, you can share and track changes to word documents. Nice feature, but requires a significant investment on server software.
When typing an hypertext link, word no longer reformats the font of the URL.
Cons:
Product activation, which requires network access.
All of the Office applications now have a blended help system that first checks help files online first, before getting local help files.
XML is useless for end users. Programmers who use Word to write XML will find that Word no longer tries to autocorrect much of the XML, but you will still have the annoying red underline on many of your XML tags because the spellchecker flags them as misspelled.
Still, I think it makes a worthy upgrade for 97/2000 users, but XP users will find the expense difficult to justify. More specifically, if you are an end user without a lot of Microsoft back end software installed on your network (Windows 2000/2003 Server, SharePoint services, etc.) I would think very carefully before upgrading.
