Hi Graham
thanks for info...
I think the jury is still out on 1) and themain point (obtrusive popup box)
in 3) .
PK

"Graham Mayor" wrote:

philk wrote:
Hi
although I've been using Word2003 at home for a while, the office
finally caught up and I snapped. Admittedly there are several
improvements, but I think some things have been refined so much that
they are now past their peak of useability, and are becoming less and
less generally useable as features are added to solve minority
issues. Can I suggest that Microsoft gets a panel of end users to
review specifically this? I'm sure you do anyway, but maybe focus
gets lost sometimes.

One man's improvement is another's bugbear

Some examples:
1) tracking was easy to understand and flexible in Word2000. It's much
harder to manage in 2003 - although I love the printed output format
- a vast improvement.

I don't do tracking so cannot comment.

2) amending a style format used to be simple - menu format, style;
then change. Now an unwanted help window leaps out, displays a load
of stuff I don't want or need, and takes up 1/3 of the screen. I have
to click on a dropdown to find the modify button.

Add the FormatStyle tool from Tools customize commands all commands
and the dialog will be the same as it was before.

3) before 2000, we could have text boxes with rounded corners. We
lost that in 2000, but otherwise it was fine. Now when I click on
text box, a huge picture frame springs out and shifts my text all
over the place. I had already clicked where I wanted the text box
anchored, so I don't want this. I have to click outside the
boundaries (a tiny space in the margin) to make it go away - but then
I have to relocate and resize the text box. This seems pretty tedious!

Turn off the drawing canvas from tools options general - and yes you can
have rounded text boxes. Add a rounded autoshape from the drawing toolbar
and put a borderless text box inside, then group them.

On the other hand, my colleague says mail merge is much more
difficult. I think it's much better.

Not more difficult so much as different and all the old tools are still
available - http://www.gmayor.com/mail_merge_lab...th_word_xp.htm


--

Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com
Word MVP web site http://word.mvps.org