Customer Reviews

Microsoft Word 2002 Upgrade [Old Version]

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I've been using this software for about three months now and have installed it on seven or eight different machines that I maintain, and honestly, the best I can say is that the actual upgrade process is very smooth.
You will first notice how nice everything looks and the new "Smart Pane," which is supposed to be a window with what Office thinks you will want to do. The contents of this pane include your most recently used documents and options to create new documents.
The menus look a lot like the DHTML effects common on many web sites--menu options are "highlighted" when you mouse over them. A few other things have changed, but the changes are mostly cosmetic.
The Smart Pane, which is really more of a "pain" than a "pane," is obtrusive to me--I am what is called a "power user," i.e., I use MS Office for about four hours a day, rely on it, and am very familiar with it. When I open an application, I want wide, open space. I often close the Smart Pane without using its features, instead opening documents the way I have for years-either by opening them from the Work menu I added or by clicking to them. This Smart Pane is supposed to close when you open something, but sometimes it doesn't, meaning I have to click to close it.
Worse, the Smart Pane automatically opens when you want to do something it thinks requires many options. For example, if I want to modify a style in Word, the Smart Pane appears and offers me myriad options for editing my styles. This whole process of opening the Smart Pane slows everything down.
Editing styles provides a good example of how bloated the software is. You may recall from Office 2000 that all the styles were either built in or created by the user. Now, however, XP creates new styles based on what it finds in your document. For example, if you have an italicized one of your Heading 1s, XP will show the regular Heading 1 style and the Heading 1 style with italics-you end up with way too many styles to load and look at!
Word slows down every machine it's loaded on. My oldest machine, a Dell Pentium 75 running Win 98, was still chugging along quite nicely, even with Office 2000 installed. Now, however, after I've installed XP on it, it moves so slowly that it's almost laughable. The worst part is that the computer is much, much slower, even if I'm not using any of the XP applications.
I have a few gripes with Word. First, I now have printing problems that I never had before. First, pages often print out at about 70% their regular size for no reason. Second, since I use a lot of hidden text in my documents, Word has a difficult time figuring out which page to print when I choose to print "Current Page." This has caused me many problems when I choose "Print Current Page" and later find out the printed page was several pages off. Third, a new feature, "Manual Duplex," is not very useful. This feature is supposed to make it possible to select a page range, choose "Manual Duplex," and then print out only every other page. Then, you take out the printed sheets, put them back in the printer, and Word is supposed to figure out automatically how to print the missing pages on the backs of the printed pages. Nice idea, but it only works if you have an even number of pages to print; if you have an odd number, which should statistically be half the time, it will not count the last blank page, and it will print all the pages "one off."
The other gripe is almost laughable, typical of Microsoft. Now, when Word crashes, it politely tells you that it has done so and offers to send a report of the problem to Bill. It swears that it won't send any personal data. The first few times I saw this, I thought, sure, why not, send it, maybe it'll help. Hah! Each time, without fail, my computer froze! So, instead of having just one program crash, I ended up with a frozen machine. Remember, I'm primarily using a new, major name machine with little other software installed. Learned not to do that real quick!
There is one change I do like in Word. Since I do a lot of editing for a living, I find the new style of showing comments much better than the previous method. In Office 2000, comments were shown as "sticky notes" that appeared when you moused over them. Now, however, the comments appear as neat rounded squares in the margin. They look good on the screen and they print out well for others to read.
My relatively low rating is for the upgrade, not for the overall quality of the product. The product, which crashes at least as frequently as Office 2000, seems to be no more functional than its predecessor, meaning that the upgrade is necessary only for those who want to have the latest thing. The best news is that I've learned how to take advantage of MS's support discussion groups. The answers and workarounds I found in those groups were a thousand times more helpful than MS's pitiful Help or canned tech support messages. Again: Don't pay for support-go to their support groups for help first.
In short, this is something of a "non-upgrade," and will most likely cause more problems than it will fix.

Every time Microsoft dinks with Word and creates a new version, their geniuses take out or modify features users have come to depend on. Thus Word becomes less user friendly and more cantankerous.

After trying Word 2002, our office is switching to FrameMaker 7.0. The learning curve was much gentler than we expected, and the power to create simple documents and complicated tech manuals that number correctly is beyond price. The new version of Word finally forced us to change and we'll never look back.

Microsoft Word is a very good word processor, but if you use to work with macros, I strongly advise against upgrade to Word 2002. This version of the most famous word processor seems to be a step back instead forward. At least my experience with it says so.

In older versions of Word you are able to record macros by performing a sequence of actions. In Word 2002 you can do the same, but with one important difference: macro does not remember font attributes like underline, italic, bold, style, font etc. If you're a PC guru you may probably be able to repair such incomplete macro by entering Visual Basic Editor, but if you aren't, you'll probably be helpless.

Word 2002 has also some other bad characteristics. One of them is the size of its files. A 34 Mb Word 97 file fattened to enormous 49Mb in Word 2002 and a 55 Kb file to 70 Kb.
Another is a fact that almost all of the Spelling&Grammar and Auto Text options are turned on by default. If you're not an English or an American, you need to do a lot of clicking before you can begin to work with Word normally. And poor you if you don't know what to turn off to make auto corrections and other disturbing features disappear. Try to imagine what happens if you write in Slovenian language with the English spell checker turned on! Microsoft should bear in mind that only (small) part of the world is English speaking and writing.

There are also some troubles with cut and paste (Clipboard memory seems to be unreliable).

PS
I gave Word 2002 4 stars for its basic word processing features, but only 1 star for its macros and reliability, and again only 1 star for its price. Together it's 2 stars.

I've used Word on and off since 1991, and have in the last several years (when the job market permitted) used required use of Word as a screen for writing jobs I wouldn't apply for. It was great in 1995 and has bloated horribly since then. OK, not a terrible product, but not fabulous, and this upgrade's just another way to get a few more bucks out of us for no particular reason, without enough improvements.

What's your alternative? Not getting it. You don't actually need Word to make or read Word files. Download OpenOffice.org for free or StarOffice on this site, and use its word processor to read and create Word format files, if you need to.

If you still want this Word upgrade, well, then you must love it more than I do. :)

The only reason I decided to dish out 70 bucks for this was the speech recognition. I originally had Word 2000, there weren't very many advancements in this that I absolutely needed, except for the speech recognition. That is amazing, I would pay even more then 70 bucks for it. You can even extend it so that you can use it in nearly any Windows product. Great Idea!! Pretty much elimiinates the need for a keyboard. The training sessions for it are very simple and only take a few minutes. If you take all of the training sessions it will boost accuracy up to 95% (so they say) a great buy for people who are writing long reports and need a lil help with it.

I wouldn't rush right out and buy this upgrade. I'm running it on a brand new very snappy Dell workstation with XP and buckets of RAM and it crashes on a regular basis, as in several times a day. And upon crashing it goes through a confusing routine in which it apparently tries to save changes to the default normal.dot template, which is going to drive people who don't even know what the normal.dot template is crazy. Yes, there are some nice enhancements here, but the overall experience reminds me of running Word97 on Windows 95 -- "Save your work!"

Most people who use a word processor use it for tasks not directly related to their full-time profession. The vast majority of students and office workers need no more than an easy to use program that allows for such mundane tasks as file creation, deletion, and editing. The original WORD processor allowed that in spades. However, when one is tempted to upgrade at considerable cost to the rather esoteric features found in the 2002 upgrade, then one ought to examine exactly what use one might expect to get from these additional features. Then a cost-versus benefit ratio is a good idea. In my case, I am a teacher who needs an easy to use processor and the original WORD was fine. As I examined the various extras listen on the blurbs (plus reading the generally negative reviews from Amazon.com), I realized that the cost was high but I decided to take a chance anyway. Bad idea. After a few weeks, I got bogged down in the surprising complexity of the upgrade. Most of the enhancements are really for those writers who do far more than merely write. If you feel you fall into this vanishingly small percent of power users of WORD, buy the upgrade. But be prepared for a program that is not user friendly.

I don't write many reviews, but the misleading reviews below forced my hand. In one, Word 2002 is dinged because it doesn't open quickly on that person's outdated computer. In the other, it's dismissed as being crash-prone. I have found neither to be true. Running Word 2002 on a desktop (1.5 P4, 52 MB RAM, Windows XP), I find the program to be fast, stable, and able to help me in any document-related task I need to get done. I'm not a fan of Microsoft, but I have to give them props for a terrific WP program and a great new OS to run it on.

MS Word's 2002 upgrade makes a great product even better. Smart tags, the ability to select multiple chunks of text so that cut/pasting is easier, document translation- and many more features make the upgrade a must-have for any faithful Word user.

I've used WordPerfect for necessary jobs, but would rather work solely with MS Word. This package is even worth having to register, the only real drawback, with Microsoft for continued use. If you work with Word, upgrade- you will be glad you did.

I ordered this product for fear of not being able to open documents sent from customers and companies that I sell for. This application has become a cumbersome beast. Double clicking on a .doc file requires a 20+ second Word start up (at 400MHz). Who needs watermarks and voice commands?