What do you like most about MS Word?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

I'm always happy to bash Microsoft for their many sins, but give them their
due, they've produced a truly fine word processor. I started working with
Word almost 5 years ago, and approached the switch to the new software with
considerable trepidation. But once Service Release 2 came out for Word 97, I
found Word to be an enormously productive tool. Here's my main likes:

Flexibility: Word lets me control it entirely from the keyboard (mousing is
almost never required), and I haven't even begun to really push it to work
the way I do; you can customize thes software in so many ways you could make
a career of doing nothing but tweaking the interface. <g>

Revision tracking: Nothing else that I've seen comes close to the power of
this feature for editing. I'm sorry to hear that they've done a horrible job
of updating this feature for Word XP, enough so that I have no intention of
upgrading.

Stability: Word rarely crashes on me nowadays, and if you avoid known bugs
such as the master document and fast save features, it probably won't crash
much on you either. The autorecover features could stand some improvement
(they rarely work as well as they should when I do crash the beast), but
they're generally useful.

Speed: On a recent-model computer, Word easily keeps up with my writing and
performs acceptably for everything I do. Word 98 on my Mac is working
happily on a 5-year-old laptop, for that matter.

Features: Word does pretty much everything I want it to do, in a reasonably
elegant way; it's been a long time since I found myself thinking "I wish I
could..." I'm particularly impressed by its search and replace; it's not
GREP, but it does a mighty fine job anyway. I'm less impressed by the macros
(VBA is inconsistent and has many quirks), but they're still an awfully nice
feature given that I can record a macro for most of what I do instead of
having to program them from scratch.

Round-tripping: I've exchanged files between my PC and my Mac, and between
English versions of both systems and the Japanese version (for a client)
with nary a hiccup.

Support: Don't get me started about Microsoft's misleadingly named "online
help" or their skimpy manuals. Fortunately, there are so many Word users out
there in the ether that it's rare to encounter a problem that nobody can
solve for you. Plus, there are amazing authors such as Woody Leonard
(www.woodyswatch.com) working to demystify the software.

Bravo, Microsoft!

--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada
"User's advocate" online monthly at
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"With Linux, customers end up being in the operating systems business,
managing software updates and security patches while making sure the
multitude of software packages don't conflict with each other."--Microsoft
spokesperson in a News.com article
  
"And just how would that be different from Windows?"--Adam Engst, TidBITS

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