Office XP: What's New in Word

by Lee Hudspeth

This article series is in two parts:

• Office XP: What's New in Word (TNPC #4.11)
• Office XP: What's New in Word - Part 2 (TNPC #4.12)

Here's a listing of all the new Word XP features and my grade for each one. I did not have room to cover items 19-32 in the first article. Items 19-32 are covered in TNPC #4.12. The list shown below contains other links and resources for which there was no space in the original articles.

My overall grade of Word 2002's new features: 7.7 out of 10.

1. Digitally sign a document -- Grade: 7 (nice feature, but a tad hard to discover)
2. Customize the Places Bar -- Grade: 7 (nice feature, but the add operation is hard to discover)
3. New from existing document -- Grade: 6 (works fine, but limited usefulness)
4. Task Pane -- Grade: 10 (cool, but I prefer keeping the pane turned off until I need it: scroll to the very bottom of the pane and clear the "Show at startup" check box)
5. Speech recognition -- not graded
6. Handwriting recognition -- Grade: 6 (limited usefulness except perhaps for some handheld-stored handwriting, but maybe I'm missing something; let me know if you have a good use for this feature)
7. Reveal formatting -- Grade: 10
8. Format consistency checker -- Grade: 4 (the success rate I've seen is spotty, and the internal rules aren't easily discovered; for information about the rules Word uses see WD2002: Blue Wavy Lines That Appear Under Text Indicate Format Consistency Checker Is Working)
9. Outlining toolbar tweaks -- Grade: 7
10. Word Count toolbar -- Grade: 10 (I never turn this toolbar off)
11. Enhanced searching features -- Grade: 8
12. Office Clipboard and Paste Options -- Grade: 10
13. Clear formats -- Grade: 8
14. Multiple unconnected selections -- Grade: 10
15. In-place language translation -- Grade: 5 (this would be an 8 if it worked with multiple-word phrases)
16. Smart tags -- Grade: 10 (my #1 favorite Office XP feature)
17. AutoCorrect smarts -- Grade: 8 (great features, but "don't fire on retype" is a bit hard to discover)
18. Reviewing -- Grade: 10
19. Custom table styles -- Grade: 10
20. Sort by more than one word inside a table column -- Grade: 10
21. Picture rotation and compression -- Grade: 10
22. Diagrams -- Grade: 8
23. Drawing Canvas -- Grade: 7
24. Web Archive -- Grade: 8
25. Introduction field -- Grade: 1
26. Mail Recipient (for Review) -- Grade: 5
27. Booklet printing -- Grade: 6
28. Remove personal information -- Grade: 8 (for information about removing personal information in Word 2000 see WD2000: How to Minimize Metadata in Microsoft Word Documents)
29. Block access to Visual Basic projects -- Grade: 8
30. Save My Settings Wizard -- Grade: 8 (for information about the Office 2000 version of the Save My Settings Wizard see OFF2000: Description of the Save My Settings Wizard)
31. Crash management -- Grade: 8
32. Expanded object model -- Grade: 6

Amazon.com has some good prices right now on various Office XP upgrades, some of these packages include free shipping.

• Microsoft Office XP Standard Upgrade
• Microsoft Office XP Professional Upgrade
• Microsoft Office XP Developer Edition Upgrade
• Microsoft Office XP Professional

You can reach Lee Hudspeth at:
leehudspeth@TheNakedPC.com

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