Microsoft Word 2002

Rating:
Summary: Much ado about nothing
Review: I ordered this product for fear of not being able to open documents sent from customers and companies that I sell for. This application has become a cumbersome beast. Double clicking on a .doc file requires a 20+ second Word start up (at 400MHz). Who needs watermarks and voice commands?

Rating:
Summary: Poor
Review: i think this product was very poor, it is well over priced, and sould come as standad on new computers

Rating:
Summary: Microsoft Jalopy
Review: I was trained on Microsoft products 15 years ago. I was very sensitive to the anger and ridicule friends and Mac users had for Microsoft. It's pretty hard for a company to go astray when they have brand allegiance from someone as naive as I used to be.
...unless you're Microsoft.

I still very much dislike Macs, but after years of working with superior, more thoughtful non-Microsoft software (Adobe, Maya, Vectorworks) Microsofts problems are abundantly clear.

For the first time in months I found myself needing to produce an all-text document last week, and I was really stunned. Now that I have more experience, my snooty Mac friends were right. Word really is a terrible product! As long as the only thing you need to do is place letters on a page one after another and want little control over any other aspect of producing a document, you'll be fine. Anything else is counterintuitive & headache inducing. It is inconceivable that Microsoft could have spent even a day on 'Clippy' the helpful (UNhelpful) talking paperclip annoyance, and still not have touched their assinine numbering and bullets tool. Or enhanced this piece of garbage so that you can actually position an image in a fixed place, with precise registration in a tight layout. But really the booby prize for the stupidest feature EVER designed into a piece of software is embedding the formatting of a paragraph into a hidden character at the end of some text. So WHATEVER YOU DO do not back over this invisible character, because a whole paragraph will instantaneously transform to a different format, perhaps even one you never put into the document in the first place.
Isn't that ingenious (stupid) and helpful (infuriating)?

I'm actually looking for a different word processor now and can't wait to delete this clunker from my system. The only company that cares less for how you use their product is (was) Polaroid, which deservedly filed for bankruptcy last year after sitting on their monopoly and producing truly awful products for 20 years.

Rating:
Summary: Not Quite Ready for Prime Time
Review: 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!"

Rating:
Summary: Buggy to the extent of being unusable
Review: I've been using Microsoft Word since 1985. I don't even remember the version(s) of DOS Word I used. For the most part, I found it worked in many areas better than anything else. It wasn't better than WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, but then again, neither was most any software ever written. But Word XP/2002 is trash and I refuse to use it anymore. As I have been a Microsoft defender for years, that should tell you something.

First, the outline numbering feature doesn't work. It hasn't worked since Word 97. If you want something in the form of I.A.1.a, etc., you better be prepared to do it by hand because while the outline styles will format correctly, the numbering will be off. You will have an a)1 and a)2, followed by a b)3 and b)4, as the number won't reset. I have been on the phone with Microsoft tech support at least 5 times over this one issue and none of the techs know 1/10th the Word I know. That in itself is frustrating, but the most frustrating part is 30 minutes into the conversation, they will say something like "well, you have to click on feature ____ under the _____ window." Of course, I had already done that and it didn't work, hence the call in the first place. And, yes, I've reinstalled, and the system is state of the art (and then some).

Now, Word likes to lock up on occassion. Not a real lockup like Windows locking up, but you can't use the keyboard or type in Word. For some reason, when I do a cut and paste or a c&p special, the document will lock up. If I wait, I can then type a letter or a few letters, then it will lock up again. I refuse to call MS tech support, and have posted this on a web site, but apparantly can't explain it well enough. The best way to describe it is the mouse pointer disappears, and no keyboard function works. I can move to a different application, and sometimes when returning to Word, it will start to work, but only for a few characters. I charge by the hour, but I can't bill clients for buggy software and time spent adapting to it. Until I find my copy of WordPerfect I had, I downloaded Open Office to do documents in.

When it does work, the windows that appears sometimes on cut and paste functions is terribly annoying. And I don't care to speak to the rest of the features in this program (read my review of Word 2000 if you want to see that) since I can't get even the basic features to work right. I say stay the heck away from this or other MS products until they write stuff worth a darn.

I don't know what's worse: the fact that MS released a new product as buggy as this or that they haven't fixed known bugs from a product released 2 cycles ago.

Rating:
Summary: Wait for the next one!
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Marketing-driven update--just get OpenOffice.org/StarOffice
Review: I've used Word on and off since 1991, and have in the last several years (when the job market permitted) used required use of Word as a screen for writing jobs I wouldn't apply for. It was great in 1995 and has bloated horribly since then. OK, not a terrible product, but not fabulous, and this upgrade's just another way to get a few more bucks out of us for no particular reason, without enough improvements.

What's your alternative? Not getting it. You don't actually need Word to make or read Word files. Download OpenOffice.org for free or StarOffice on this site, and use its word processor to read and create Word format files, if you need to.

If you still want this Word upgrade, well, then you must love it more than I do. :)

Rating:
Summary: Use a typewriter instead
Review: If you are familiar with Word, this is just more of the same bugginess and I don't know why you're still looking at using this program. If you have never used Word before, see if you can try it somewhere before buying it. It's fine for letter writing, but can not be used to create documents that require numbers, bullets, or frequent changes in fonts and formatting. Macros you record to use custom keyboard shortcuts to invoke format changes don't work reliably either, so you are constantly struggling with the broken formatting features to make simple format changes. These formatting features simply do not work. The software pre-thinks everything you are trying to do and decides for you what your document will look like; where the bullets will go, what they will look like, how they will be indented, and sometimes it decides you can't use them at all. It does the same with numbering. You will want to tear your hair out. I am simply stunned that Microsoft has the nerve to charge money for this software. It is awful.

Rating:
Summary: Just one more bug fix
Review: Microsoft continues to issue pricey upgrades with minimal enhancements. Most folks want a reliable word processor that is easy intuitively easy to use - that's definitely not this product. Just try to set up different page numbers!

Rating:
Summary: Great Word Processor...Creepy, but still great.
Review: Microsoft Word 2002 is possibly one of the best and easiest to use word processors around. That being said, I don't find it THAT much better than it's previous incarnation Word 2000 and arguably even Word 97! I say that mainly because even though there are a few knick knacks that are kind of nice to have around, it doesn't justify for me anyway the new product activation procedures. They are not that inconvenient and I understand that Microsoft has the right to take steps to prevent pirating, but I find it downright creepy. Yup, that's right, you HAVE to contact Microsoft to activate this product! What happens years from now when they no longer support this? Who knows? If I get a new computer years from now and want to install Word 2002 on it, will I still be able too? Then again, I see no short term problems with activation-I just happen to think it's a bit creepy. I think I'll keep my Lotus WordPro Millenium edition (a perfectly capable Word Processor too-AND without product activation!) around just in case my computer crashes years from now and Microsoft won't reactivate my legitimate copy of Word because "THEY" believe it "MIGHT" be pirated. It's hard to like an otherwise outstanding Word Processor when the burden of proof is on YOU if you have a problem, thus the 4 stars.