Microsoft Word 2003 Description:

Microsoft Word 2003 review:
5 stars (Excellent Product) - This is my first time using any MS Office Product. I found the installation to be a breeze. Product is working flawlessly. My wife really enjoys the spell checker. Recommend this to all as a step up from WordPad.

John M
4 stars (Still the best word processor for Windows.) - Word is one of those products which has become a victim of its own success, and automatic features that are more annoying than the conveniences they were intended to be. Another issue is the almost non-existent backwards compatibility with previous versions, meaning that only the simplest layouts are likely to successfully transfer across versions. And it doesn't seem to matter whether you save as a rich text file (.rtf) or a previous version of Word.



To get around these problems, I switch all the auto-format features off, and ship anything that needs to be accurately conveyed as a .PDF (Adobe Acrobat), which Word is highly integrated with. Macros work okay, but are best written up in the macro editor. Text for use outside of Word is best saved as a plain Text file, and any formatting done within the destination application. Framemaker, for example.



Word is a good word processor and is not a DTP application to any useful extent. And used in its word processor mode, it does compare more than favourably with any alternative that I have tried. And that's quite a few. The font options and quality of rendition is particularly good. It's also a good idea to visit and subscribe to word tips, who have a huge amount of advice about Word in general and macros in particular.



All in all, there's not too much to complain about if the aforementioned is observed. Users requiring a more sophisticated product should consider Adobe's Framemaker.
3 stars (The famously broken bits are still broken.) - Pointing out Word's faults is like pointing out the pyramids are crumbling--it may be true, but they're still going to be there. Still, Word's Master Document "feature" is still the surest way to document corruption. And you'd better track down the internet page that gives detailed instructions on the convoluted way you need to set up heading numbering if you want to keep your Word documents from corrupting.And so on. I doubt anyone cares. Word is a fact of life, no matter if it's constantly falling to bits. The new version's XML support does give you a new path to recovering a corrupted document: saving to XML and then converting that file back to Word format has saved me some time on a couple of occasions.We use Word because we have to. On those occasions when I don't have to, I use WordPerfect, because I like to actually produce things, not spend my time dealing with software problems.