Re: How does Word 7 look for TW?

["Susan W. Gallagher" <sgallagher -at- STARBASECORP -dot- COM>]

Phil Block wonders...

> Anyone taken a look at Word 7 yet? How does it look for advanced
> technical writing? Have any of Word 6's bugs been resolved? Is there any
> way to find out which bugs have been killed? Any exciting new features?

I switched to Word 7 about a month ago and haven't had
any problems with it yet. One pesky bug -- the one that
would never save if it got a disk full message once --
is gone -- but I never had all that much trouble with
Word 6 anyway, so I'm probably the wrong one to ask.

MS is starting to deliver on the "intuitive word
processor of the future" promises that people started
buzzing about in the late 80s and early 90s.  If you
type 1.<tab>stuff<return>, the next paragraph is
automatically numbered 2. and the hanging indent is
formed automatically.  Likewise, when I imported a
square bullet from Wingdings, spaced twice and
typed a line, when I hit return the paragraph reformatted
with a handing indent and the wingding dingbat was repeated
automatically. These features are a little startling
at first - and you can turn them off.

Another thing is correcting misspellings as you type --
and not just for the words on the autocorrect list --
and automatically changing shorthand into symbols --
like, two hyphens to an em dash.

The interface, however, is exactly the same and it'll
read and use your normal.dot from Word 6, so you don't
have to redefine your macros and additional toolbar
buttons.

And, tho it still repaginates every time it's in the
mood to, it's *way* faster.

All in all, some nice changes.

Sue Gallagher
sgallagher -at- starbasecorp -dot- com
(where the manual goes in before the features go on!)
;-)