© 1-21-04 Dr. Neale Monks

- Print Friendly Version

• Product Name: Word 2004
• Company: Microsoft
• URL: http://www.microsoft.com/mac/
• Category: Word Processor
• Price:
  • $499 Office 2004 Professional edition (includes Virtual PC 7)
  • $399 Office 2004 Standard edition
  • $239 Office 2004 Upgrade
  • $149 Office 2004 Student and Teacher Edition
  • $229 Word 2004 Retail package
  • $109 Word 2004 Upgrade
• Requirements:
  • G3 PowerMac
  • OS X 10.2.8
  • at least 450 MB hard disk space
• Rating: 2 bounces - Lack Luster

Microsoft Word is the cornerstone of the Office 2004 suite, used by everyone from college students working on their dissertations through to professional writers and business people. There are of course lots of alternatives, from the word processing module of AppleWorks through to Mariner Write and Nisus Writer. But Word benefits from a massive user base across both Windows and Mac platforms, making it the de facto standard for collaborative work. It also takes something of a kitchen sink approach to features – there’s very little not included in Word that the users outside of the page layout field are going to need. Word handles things like text formatting, indexing, and tables effectively and reasonably easily.

The basic layout of Word is essentially unchanged, though there are some changes to look out for, such as the revised formatting palette and improved help tool.

Installation

As described in the earlier instalments of this review, the installation process for Microsoft Office 2004 is straightforward and presents no problems to even novice Mac users. However, it is well worth taking the time to configure which components will be installed if you need to save space.

Features

In lots of ways Word 2004 is the same program as before, and unlike Entourage 2004 for example, there isn’t much to indicate a dramatic re-thinking of the application from the ground up. The three big-ticket items are the ‘notebook’ view, more sophisticated tracking of edits and changes, and the built-in reference tools.

The notepad view combines a simple page layout style with the ability to add quick sketches and sound bites.

The notebook view is essentially designed for on-the-fly note taking, for example in meetings or lectures. It deliberately uses a rather loose, open style somewhat reminiscent of a PowerPoint slide; for example, tabs can be used to quickly add indents, and the backspace key used to remove them. Besides text, you record audio via your computer’s microphone, but note that these cannot be shared with older versions of Word, including Word 2003 for Windows. You can also add basic graphics, either by simply pasting pictures in or by using the “Scribble” pen to draw lines. Because you are basically drawing freehand shapes, this isn’t a tool for doing diagrams or complex charts, but it is adequate for adding connector lines between pieces of text for example.

Changes and edits are highlighted with a new flash symbol, allowing the user can reverse or alter them quickly.

Documents inevitably change, sometimes because you change your mind about a phrase or word, other times because the computer spots a spelling or formatting error, and at yet other times when a document is worked on by a collaborator or editor. Word 2004 tracks these changes in a sophisticated way, allowing you to examine, reverse, or dismiss changes as required. The example below shows a common example of automatic reformatting, where Word takes a string of hyphens and converts them into a proper line. Holding the cursor over the change reveals a flash symbol, and when clicked on this presents the user with a variety of options including the chance to undo the change if necessary. A different sort of situation happens where editors and collaborators change pieces of text. In the page layout view, Word 2004 flags any changes made by other writers with brightly coloured bubbles (a different colour for each writer) and this makes it very easy to spot changes, and then to accept or reject them as required.

Coloured bubbles highlight changes made by collaborators and editors.

The reference tools are an interesting and potentially very useful addition to the package, expanding the dictionary and thesaurus, and adding a link to the Microsoft Encarta web site. Word has always had rather nice writing tools, but Word 2004 adds to the mix by combining the dictionary with the thesaurus and expanding the definitions. This is great for situations where similar words have subtly different meanings, for example “practise” and “practice”, and this way, you can see at a glance whether or not you are using the right word. Linking to the Encarta web site offers more in-depth definitions as well as links to any relevant encyclopaedia entries.

Where the thesaurus and dictionary windows were separate tools before (top), Word 2004 rolls them into one (bottom).

Not a Bug But a Feature…

A personal annoyance is the way Word automatically formats URLs, e-mails, and other network addresses and links. The idea is inoffensive and simple enough: when you type a web address, Word converts the formatting from whatever you are using to a blue, underlined version more like a web address as you would see it on a web browser. Click on the link in the Word document, and the relevant Internet application will launch (a web browser for a URL, for example). If you control-click the word, you can use the “Hyperlink” option to change the web page link, add an anchor, and so on. This is all well and good, but the problem is that what looks good on a Word document viewed on a computer doesn’t necessarily print nicely. So if you are adding web addresses or e-mail links to a document that will eventually be printed, you need to manually remove the automatic reformatting as you go along. You do this by control-clicking the word, and pressing on the “Remove Link” button. This returns the web link or whatever to the regular document formatting.

Word 2004 automatically formats URLs in a web page style, but this can be annoying if you’re producing documents for print.

There are some limitations to this approach though: it is slow, demanding a couple of extra steps each time you do it, and moreover the reformatting isn’t ‘sticky’, that is, if you edit the web address, Word reapplies the web link formatting again. More annoying is that you cannot simply switch off this automatic reformatting in the Word preferences; instead, you need to edit the hyperlink style using the “Style…” command. As with any other changes to a style, by default these are particular only to the document in use, and need to be deliberately copied across to other documents and templates (including the default one). All in all, this is a clumsy way of handling hyperlinks in Word documents.

Performance

One of the things that many Mac users had been anticipating with the new version of Word was improved overall performance. Word v. X had a reputation for being a memory and CPU hog; in other words, unlike most other OS X applications, Word v. X didn’t hand over unused resources to the operating system for use by other applications. The following screenshots of the OS X Activity Monitor seem to indicate that Word 2004 is no better than its predecessor, and remains a CPU hog. If anything, because it uses up more memory and more CPU resources (“threads”), the moral of the tale is simple: if you want to maximise the performance of your computer with respect to running other programs, be sure and quit Word 2004 first.

Compared with Word v. X, Word 2004 remains a memory and CPU hog. In the top screenshot, Word v. X uses less than half the memory that Word 2004 uses, but more seriously, both applications occupy at least 8.5% of the CPU resources. Most other big applications, like Adobe Photoshop, do better than this as you can see in the lower screenshot.

Besides its sluggishness, Word has a number of visual bugs that make it feel less than perfect. One of the most annoying examples of this is the persistence of fragments of deleted text (see the screenshot below). Left alone, Word doesn’t seem to do anything to make these ‘echoes’ go away, and you basically need to force Word to redraw the document, for example by writing over the persisting gobbledygook or choosing “Select All” from the Edit menu.

After deleting some text, traces of the removed section remain, and don’t go until you either write over them or otherwise force Word to redraw that section of the document.

Similar sluggishness occurred when pasting in slightly complex fragments such as charts and tables. Tables pasted into long documents became messed up, seemingly because the text “underneath” where the table was going, which should have been shunted down the document to make space for the table, was left behind. The result was a strange mixture of table and paragraph text (see below). Again, forcing Word to redraw the document invariably remedied the situation, but it’s annoying nonetheless.

Word 2004 takes a while to redraw tables and charts, as can be seen here before (top) and after (bottom) being forced to redraw the document.

Conclusion

The new version of Microsoft Word is as full featured as ever and includes a good number of new features and updates, but overall the application is a disappointment. It feels annoyingly slow on my PowerBook G4 running at 1 GHz equipped with 1 GB of RAM. On older and slower machines, even those that meet the system requirements on the box, such as a 500 MHz G3 iBook, I found the performance unacceptable. Changing between different views took 2-3 seconds, for example. Basically users with machines running anything less than a G5 or a fast G4 are definitely going to want to stick with Word v. X (and this is likely to mean they will want to pass over the entire Office 2004 suite altogether).

Apart from the notepad view, which will be of limited value to many users, there isn’t much evidence of any deep thinking about how to expand or improve the program. There’s a little to keep it up to speed with Word 2003 for Windows, for which Mac users should be thankful, but otherwise there isn’t much to compel users to of Word v. X to upgrade.

One feature I continue to miss is the absence of Publish & Subscribe, which was standard to Word 5.1 and Word 6 I used earlier on in my Mac-using career, but was dropped from later versions of the program. Publish & Subscribe essentially allowed you to embed smaller Word documents in one larger one in such a way that you could work on the smaller ones independently but any changes done to them were automatically made to the larger document as well. The problem was that it was difficult to set up and use, and many people found it much more hassle than it was worth. But for professional writers, academics, and others working on long documents such as books and dissertations, this could be a great feature, and getting this to work well would be a great step forward for Microsoft Word, and an example of the sort of thinking needed to make it a sexy, must-have application once again.

In the meantime, Word is sort of the runt of the litter in the Office 2004 package: the new version of Entourage is great; PowerPoint has been brought up to speed relative to Keynote; and even boring old Excel has some useful labour-saving improvements. In comparison, Word rates no more than a lacklustre 2-bounces as a standalone product, and probably doesn’t even deserve that as an upgrade from Word v. X.

- Dr. Neale Monks

What do you think? Talk about it in our Forums...

• MacBook Pro (5-17-06) Dr. Neale Monks. A subjective review of the MacBook Pro
• Freeway 4 Pro (2-28-06) Dr. Neale Monks. Freeway Pro, the Quark-like web design program from Softpress, has been substantially revised and sports a bright new look. But do the changes go more than skin deep? Neale Monks finds out.
• Astrostack (1-18-06) Dr. Neale Monks. Long respected as one best astronomical image processing applications about, in its newest incarnation AstroStack now runs on the Macintosh. Has the wait been worthwhile?
• Virtual PC 7 (11-23-05) Dr. Neale Monks. Virtual PC 7 is the update to the venerable Windows emulator to be entirely all Microsoft’s own work. Can Mac users expect to see any dramatic changes?
• Eudora Pro 6.2 (8-5-05) Dr. Neale Monks. Eudora has been one of the most popular e-mail clients for the Macintosh for more than a decade. Neale Monks finds out how it compares with the Mail application that comes with OS X
• MacAstronomica (4-22-05) Dr. Neale Monks. How does this amateur naked eye astronomy software stack up?
• iKey 2.0 (3-11-05) Jeremy Young. How well does this automation utility work? How much time will you save?
• Wolfram Research Publicon (3-11-05) Jeff Terry Does this new scientific word processor live up to the potential?
• Microsoft Office 2004, Part 3, Word (1-28-05) Dr. Neale Monks. Are there enough new features to necessitate a jump from v.X?
• REALbasic 5.5 (12-03-04) Dr. Neale Monks. Neale takes a look at the latest version of this programming package.
• Office 2004, Part 2, Excel and Entourage (11-05-04) Dr. Neale Monks. In the second part of his review of Office 2004, Neale Monks looks at Excel and Entourage.
• Phone Valet 2.0 (11-05-04) Pat St-Arnaud. The best question to ask might be "Is there anything that you can't do with this telephone/Mac integration tool?"
• TiPaint Touch-up Kit and iKlear iPod Cleaning Kit (10-29-04) Dr. Neale Monks. Is it possible to restore the shiny good looks of iPods and PowerBooks even after years of use? Neale Monks looks at two cleaning products designed especially for Apple hardware.
• Microsoft Office 2004, Part 1, PowerPoint (10-15-04) Dr. Neale Monks. In the first part of his review of Office 2004, Neale Monks looks at PowerPoint, for many people still the benchmark for presentation software.
• ScrapX (9-17-04) Dr. Neale Monks. Aqueous Software's ScrapX brings the Scrapbook to OS X
• CDFinder (8-20-04) Dr. Neale Monks. Finding what you want from among a stack of similar looking CDs can be a hassle, but help is at hand. Neale Monks looks at CDFinder, a budget-priced but powerful cataloguing tool.
• Endnote 7 (8-13-04) Dr. Markus Geisen. EndNote 7 is a literature database that seamlessly interacts with your word processor. Is the latest version worth the upgrade?