Microsoft Word 2002 Upgrade [Old Version]

It had an error in my system. I have Windows 7 PC so maybe it wasn't compatible with my machine. I can't say since it came with an error without giving a reason. I tried looking online for an answer, but there wasn't one.

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.

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.

As an avid user of Microsoft Office programs, I was interested in the new version of Word, after the more than adequate changes made to Word 97 with Word 2000. While Word 2002 doesn't totally break the mold from pervious versions of Word, I'm glad it didn't. Microsoft has already got a great product, with only a few egregious things that needed some fixing and altering. First off, the look of Word 2002 is more classic and softer to the eyes with soft hues of gray and white. Words in the menu bar are spaced out more, and highlighting is done in lavender as opposed to black. Language tools have also been improved. Basic (stress on basic) word translation, can be done within the program, from English to Spanish and French - a useful tool when composing documents in various languages and that translation dictionary is not as handy as it could be. Spell checking is more seamless, and some foreign languages can now be detected automatically. Word count has its own toolbar now, which is very convenient. With a click of a button (not a click of a toolbar, et cetera), automatic features can be turned on and off. Task panes aren't as obtrusive as I thought they might be, and are actually useful once you get accustomed to them. The Clip Art gallery gets its own task pane, although I prefer clip gallery version 5 (with Office 2000) to the new version packaged with Office XE. The obtrusive and marginally helpful office assistants (no new ones have been added to Office XE) have been exiled to the menu bar, but can reappear with a click of the mouse. Now, questions can be typed into an "Ask a Question" box in the menu bar. More intuitive, and streamlined, Word XE is a pleasant and effective update of an already fully functional program.

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!"