Microsoft Office Word 2003 Inside Out (Bpg-Inside Out)

What's New in Word 2003?

 New Feature   The biggest changes in Word can really be grouped into three different categories: the new look; new ways to find and enter information; and new ways to collaborate. This section gives you a quick overview on the new features, but you'll find much more detailed information in the specific chapters related to the changes.

A New Look

You can't have a new version of Word without having a new look. The new style of Word 2003 is rounded, slick, and modern. The boxy edges of menu bars and dialog boxes have been given a more sophisticated appearance. The toolbars are shaded so they appear almost three-dimensional—the menus, options, and colors all match up with what you're used to seeing in the Microsoft Windows XP operating system. Elements of the software's new look are as follows:

• New task panes Task panes were new in Word 2002 and they've been a hit with users worldwide. It's easy to understand why: the task pane pulls together commands, options, or settings you need to perform a specific task. You don't need to leave the current document or worry about what's behind the dialog box; the task pane displays everything off to the right so you can still see, scroll, and work in your document as needed. Word 2003 includes a number of new task panes, including Getting Started, Research, Shared Workspace, Document Updates, and XML Structure (available in Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 and the stand-alone edition of Microsoft Office Word 2003 only).

• Changes in Help There have been major changes—for the better—in Word's help system. Now if you're online your computer will automatically search Microsoft's online Help database to find you the most recent information about your issue or question. And at the end of every help entry, you are asked whether the information was what you were looking for—and if not, why not? This feedback goes directly to Microsoft to help product developers understand what's baffling users and what people are trying to find out. And that is bound to make the next incarnation of Word even better.

• Reading Layout view The Reading Layout view was designed for people who like to see the entire page on the screen at the same time and zoom in and out at will. The focus of Reading Layout is simply that: reading. When you open a document in Reading Layout view, Word displays the entire page, with thumbnails of other pages in the panel on the left side of the window. (If thumbnails do not appear automatically on your screen, click the Thumbnails button in the Reading Layout toolbar.) To move to another page, simply click the thumbnail you want to see. Reading Layout view makes it easy to scan a document quickly, tailor the display to your liking, and navigate through even a long document easily.

• Compare Side-by-Side view A new Compare Side-by-Side view (available from the Window menu) enables you to review two similar documents without having to merge the two documents into one. Scrolling in one scrolls them both; this makes it easy for you to see where the changes are in each document.

New Ways to Find and Enter Information

One of the biggest thorns in any writer's side is the hurry-up-and-wait syndrome. We try to hurry up gathering research, and then wait while we look for that one missing piece. Whether you are pulling together the narrative for the annual report, working on a Web page, or composing a draft letter to a prospective employer, you need to find and enter the information you need—preferably without interruptions—as you write your document. New features in Word make it easy for you to research and enter information on the fly, without ever leaving (or even minimizing) your Word document. Here is an overview of these new features:

• Research task pane The new Research task pane enables you to find more information about a word by holding down Alt and clicking it. If you are connected to the Internet, Word will automatically search the Web using any of the resources you've specified. In addition, you can access the Thesaurus and a Translation tool within the Research task pane.

• Word on your Tablet PC New Tablet PC support enables you to use ink technology to write on your documents, circling and underlining key phrases, drawing diagrams, handwriting e-mails, and more.

• Improved Help system Now when you look for help on a topic in Word, you're given access to all the resources you could possibly want—beyond the limits of your own stand-alone PC. If you're connected to the Internet, Word will automatically access the Microsoft Office System site to look for the latest information on the topic you entered. In addition, questions at the end of help entries enable you to tell Microsoft developers whether the help actually did help. If not, you can tell them why. If it did, you can say so. This improved feedback will be used in future versions of Word to make the help system even better.

• Big changes on the Office Web site Microsoft Office Online has been totally revamped to offer more information than ever. Now you'll find dozens of templates related to your specific task and new tricks, articles, clip art, and online courses to help you learn more about using Word effectively. A new Marketplace feature gives you access to Microsoft's partners for various business services.

New Ways to Collaborate

We've gone from working in single, isolated offices on stand-alone PCs to being part of a vast international network consisting of corporate networks as well as individual users. The Internet (or an internal corporate network) provides the connective tissue—the people and ideas give it the fuel. In this now-global workplace, the Microsoft Office System offers vastly improved collaboration features as well as the following new technologies that help you protect your critical business information:

• Shared documents Working collaboratively on documents is nothing new, but having an organized place to share them—and all the resources connected with them—is new. Word 2003 includes document workspaces, project-oriented Web sites created in a shared space on the Web that enable you to share and store documents, assign tasks, post events, and more. And sharing a document can be as simple as e-mailing it, if that's your style. Chapter 25, "Working with Shared Documents," will tell you about the interesting possibilities involved in sharing documents.

• XML support If you are using Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 or stand-alone Microsoft Office Word 2003, you can open, create, and save your documents in Extensible Markup Language (XML) format, which enables you to get more from your data and free up the information you have locked away in out-of-date legacy systems.

  Cross-Reference

  For more information on applying XML in your documents, see Chapter 29, "Working with XML."

• Instant messaging In this age of instant everything, is it any surprise that instant messaging would make its way into Word? Instant messaging is a great tool because it can give you answers fast. With instant messaging, you can jot a quick note to the department head to make sure you've used the most recent numbers in the sales projections; you can ask your assistant to confirm an appointment; you can trade a quick one-liner with a co-worker you just finished meeting with. The instant messaging feature in Word highlights the names of your online contacts wherever they appear in a document. To see whether the contact is currently online, you simply hover the mouse pointer over the name.

• SharePoint Team Services In Word 2003, SharePoint Team Services have been considerably improved and made more visible. The Shared Document Workspace relies on SharePoint Team Services, which create the space for the shared Web site and allow you to create and assign tasks, gather resources, create document libraries, and more—all while you're working in your Word document.

• Improved security The document protection features in Word 2003 let you control editing or formatting, or both. You can also restrict format changes to specific styles or restrict changes so that users can only read (but not edit) the file or make comments.

  With Information Rights Management (IRM), you can control the information you distribute to others. By setting different levels of permission, you can allow some users to read and change documents, while blocking others from printing, e-mailing, or changing the documents they read. This enables you to share sensitive information on a need-to-know basis, secure in knowing that once the information is received, it won't travel outside your organization.

• Built-in fax support Need to fax your current document over to the home office? Now you can do it from within Word. In the Microsoft Office System, the File menu includes the Send To option, which enables you to send a fax using either a fax modem or an Internet fax service.

The acronym XML stands for Extensible Markup Language, but it's actually much more than a language—it's a data standard that allows you to create your own method for tagging data types and separating the data from the format. When you save a document as XML, you are able to reduce it to its data only, which enables you to then "pour" the data into other forms for other functions. This enables you to create something once and use it many times, which helps you do things faster and reduce the margin for error in your important data.