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The Number One word processor for Windows (according to sales reports exclusively, not according to quality). And that says it all.
Software Review - Pros
The only highlight I can see, in all honesty, is that Microsoft have incredibly maintained the Word 97 (also known as the Word 8.0) file format in Office 2000 too. Kudos for that, M$! I thought it would never happen. Otherwise, I have used Word 95 for a short while and I can't say that Word 97 improved much on that. As for Word 2000 and Word 2002, I haven't had the honor to lay my hands on them yet.
Software Review - Cons
The Office Asphyxiant
Enough has been said already about that stupid talking paperclip dubbed "Office Assistant", so I won't repeat it. What morons do you reckon your users are, Microsoft? Well, you got a point there: they do buy MS products, therefore they can't be exceedingly bright, can they?
And it becomes particularly mind-boggling when you think of all the usability testing that is supposedly carried out by Microsoft before any program gets released. Can you imagine that anyone of the usability volunteers really voted in favor of the "Asphyxiant"? I find that extremely hard to believe.
The Killer Memory Leak
The upgrade (or should I call it degrade?) from Windows 95 to Windows 98 rendered my copy of MS Word 97 instantly and totally worthless. Just issuing a simple word search and repeating it a couple of times gives me a GPF (General Protection Fault), sending all unsaved text to unretrievable Nirvana. Thanks, Mc$oft! Yes, I know, there is a MKB (Microsoft Knowledge Base) article describing this bug as a "memory leak" which does not occur in Windows 95. And, in fact I've never had this problem while using Windows 95. According to MKB again, the "issue" has been fixed in Windows 98 SE, but that's exactly the point: why the heck make the upgrade from Windows 95 to Windows 98 then? Moral of the story: shelling out money for new versions of Windows is tantamount to throwing money out of the window.
But, hey, Microsoft "fixed" that bug in Office Service Releases 1 & 2. Well, alas, those two are multimegabyte downloads with devastating side-effects on my phone bill. Hmm, shall I try it regardless? OK. Download the first one, download the second one¸ run them... nothing. They don't recognize my copy of Office (probably because it's a localized version) and categorically refuse to patch it. Moral of the story?
As someone ingeniously put it: We are exclusively buying Microsoft products in the vain hope that they managed to correct all the bugs of the previous version... Only to find that the new version is as swarming with bugs as was the previous one. And I am beginning to seriously ask myself: can it be that the only thing Microsoft really updates in new software releases are the bugs, not the software as such?
The Trouble With Custom Dictionaries
Want to crash Word 97? Well, I know that's not a problem since it crashes enough by itself, but just a tip: try creating an "exclusion dictionary", namely a plain text file, or even a zero-length file having the same file name as your main spell-check dictionary (e.g. MSSP2_EN), but with the extension .EXC instead of .LEX, and saving it in the directory where your main dictionaries reside (usually something like C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Proof)... See? (A proviso is in order: I have a non-US version of Office so there's a slight chance you don't have the same bug in your copy of Office). All I want to say is that these custom dictionaries are a real pain. Why did Microsoft choose to limit their size (to ~64 kB) I'll never know. That's hardly enough for any serious work - it's barely enough to make life with Word 97 totally unbearable! I filled up my Custom.dic in a matter of weeks and the pains begun. Although Word can only update (write to) one user dictionary at a time, it should theoretically be perfectly able to read (consult) several user dictionaries at once, so the 64 kB boundary shouldn't really be a problem. Well, as usually with Microsoft software, what shouldn't be a problem just... is one. My copy of Word 97 simply won't add to a user dictionary if there's another full (>64 kB) dictionary active. So what, I hear you say. Deactivate the full dictionaries and the problem is solved! Well... not quite. You see, if I deactivate my other custom dictionaries Word 97 can't consult them and so it prompts me to correct every word I have painstakingly stored in my user dictionaries so far. If I tell it to store it again instead of correcting it, the new dictionary just gets filled up very quickly (and with duplicate words to boot) kicking me right back where I started from...
User Report - Tips, Tricks and Tweaks
The Send Fax Feature in Word Not Working?
Interfering with your office chores? Driving you crazy? A possible culprit is your Normal.dot template (the one that gets loaded by default each time you invoke Word). At least that's what happened to me: I tried to send a fax from Word, but to no avail. Every time Word would stop in its footsteps grumbling that no default printer was installed. On the other hand, the fax program itself (I'm using the good ole MS Exchange 4.0, since Windows 98 ships without a proprietary fax utility) worked without a glitch. But every time I retried to send a fax from Word, the printer dialog would show a blank "Printer Name" drop-down list instead of the Microsoft Fax printer device. I opened Control Panel, checked the printers - of course Microsoft Fax was installed! I even set it as default printer: to no avail. To cut the long story short: I began to notice that after each vain retry, when I closed Word, I was prompted to save the default template or discard changes. So, just for the sake of it, I finally agreed to save it - and the next time I restarted Word, the fax was sent seamlessly! You wonder what had happened? I haven't a clue... except that it definitely had something to do with the settings hidden deep down in Normal.dot. Besides, I hold in high esteem the unknown guy who first uttered the words: If it ain't broken, don't fix it! So I just use the SendTo Fax Recipient feature now, without trying to mess with it.
And, maybe, there's even a far more important lesson to be learned here. Namely, this was not the first time I've noticed that Microsoft programs aren't always as stupid as we would like to think: sometimes it's us. We just don't have any confidence in Microsoft, and so we disdainfully discard any suggestions the program gives us, thinking that we must be smarter than a stupid program. Well, sometimes this is true, but sometimes it just isn't about who's smarter and who's not. It's about a programmer's philosophy. The simplest solutions aren't always the most logical ones. Sometimes what made perfect sense to the Microsoft crew doesn't make any to us, and so we heedlessly reject a perfectly sensible solution the software suggests us and go to great lengths to find a convoluted and over-complicated workaround.
Hey! Tired of always troubleshooting Word's quirks? Looking for a more capable (and more expensive), all-in-one communications package for sending, receiving, saving, and recalling your fax, e-mail, and pager messages? Definitely check out Simply BitFax Professional Edition - Complete package - 1 user - CD - W95/98 W98 SE Win2000/NT4.0 Windows ME - STD which lets you:
fax a laser-quality document directly from popular applications such as Word and Excel without having to print it first,
use multiple phone lines/modems at the same time to send and receive multiple faxes simultaneously,
create multiple password-protected fax mailboxes even with only one phone line,
get faxes automatically forwarded to a remote location when traveling,
get alerted to calls and fax messages on your pager or pager-enabled phone.
If, on the other hand, you are looking for a cheap (just under $50 or thereabout) solution that will enable you to use the Internet for your faxes and cut the prices of long-distance fax calls, you may want to try out InternetFax Win 95/Win 3.5in Diskette.
You issue a search-and-replace command, and Word screws your machine up?
Try setting the hardware acceleration of your graphics card a notch or two lower. Or maybe adding DevBMP=0 to the Display section of your System.ini. It just might help... But then again, it may as well not.
Suggested Further Reading
For around $40 you can get either Word 2000: The Complete Reference which provides comprehensive coverage of the changes and updates to Word, focusing on the Click and Type option, expanded right-mouse menu, and improved table editor and table drawing tool, or Word 2002: The Complete Reference which explains all the new features, including the new formatting and proofing options, enhanced graphics capabilities, file search methods, and speech recognition capabilities. You'll also get an introduction to VBA and will learn to write macros to automate repetitive Word tasks.
