Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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49 of 53 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Wait for the next one!, September 11, 2001
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.
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23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
More is worse, July 8, 2003
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.
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Word 2002 - if you upgrade to it say goodbye to macros, September 9, 2002
By A Customer
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.
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