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Our Blogs Core Dump Microsoft Office 2008: first look
Our Blogs Core Dump Microsoft Office 2008: first look | Microsoft Office 2008: first look |
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| by Stephen Withers | |
| Monday, 21 January 2008 | |
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Page 3 of 5 WordFeatured Whitepaper
5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support
A new bar between the toolbar and the main part of the window provides access to the new features that simplify the creation of professional looking documents. Elements such as table of contents, headers and footers, tables, charts and other graphics are more exposed to the user. The Toolbox has also been improved to give easier access to a range of features including formatting, graphics, the iPhoto library, symbols (closer to hand than Mac OS X's Character Palette), reference tools and so on. Moving controls previously in toolbars to the Toolbox or inside document windows means those documents don't move around the screen when changing from Outline to Print Layout. It also helps keep them visible when needed. The new Publishing Layout is going to be very handy for those who want more control over the appearance of their documents. Instead of relying on text in fixed columns, you can create linked text boxes to get the arrangement you want, much like using a page layout program. Guides and other features help with alignment and fine tuning. A related feature that I'm really pleased to see is support for ligatures - single glyphs for character sequences such as fl, ffl and fi. These make type look much better, which is surely why they were invented. Not every font contains ligatures, but Word will use them when available. It only affects the way the characters are displayed and printed, so a search for (say) flour will give the same result whether or not the selected font has ligatures. Word includes a good range of document templates. There's always a risk that particular layouts will become very familiar, but the use of themes (combinations of colour schemes and typefaces) means you can tinker around without much risk of an ugly result. One bug that's still not been fixed from Word 2004 is that if you are working on a document in Outline view and then split the window into two panes, the lower section appears in Draft view. I'm happy with the idea that each pane can be shown in a different view, but shouldn't the default be whichever is current? If you like Notebook Layout from Word 2004, it's still there, complete with the audio recording feature. It's not a feature I've ever got along with, and the help seems particularly lacking. For instance, it tells me that I "Use note flags to call attention to an item or to designate its importance", but there's no mention of how this is done. (There's a button in the Formatting section of the Toolbox.) And don't expect the Notebook help to explain how to promote or demote a note from the keyboard - you'll need to search under promote or shortcut. Microsoft claims the mail merge feature has been simplified, but I can't really see that. Any changes just seem cosmetic to me. You still can't use the Mac OS X Address Book as a data source, though you can synchronise the Office address book (ie, Entourage) and Address Book to get at the same data. The big improvements in Word come from making it easier to create good-looking documents with Publishing Layout and the new templates, and from the better exposure of various features. This has been achieved without messing with the basic menu structure, so users aren't faced with much relearning. |
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