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Microsoft Word

New features in the leading word processor

The main reason for the popularity of Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word is a powerful word processing programme that helps you create professional documents for use across your business processes.

Whether you’re creating a piece of marketing material to send out to your customers, a business plan to present to your bank or a report for your shareholders, Word can make your job easier and help ensure that you and your team remain productive.

Word provides you with tools to help you communicate eloquently and professionally with your clients, whether you're sending out a direct mail shot, an email newsletter or a personalised letter.

Cool tools

Word comes with handy tools like a word counter that can also be set to count characters and spaces if you so wish.

Word’s style and formatting options make it easy to create professional-looking documents and give you the ability to change the look of your entire document in just a few clicks. And features like the ability to easily add a watermark of say your logo help add style to your communications.

Word’s Check Format functionality helps keep the look of your document consistent by finding inconsistencies in formatting and allowing you to quickly fix them.

While the feature has been available for some time, the latest versions of Word make sending out a mass mailer easy as pie. The Mail Merge Wizard helps you create faxes, form letters, mailing labels and envelopes in minutes, and then lets you sit back while your technology does the rest for you.

The latest versions of Office have leaped forward in the areas of team collaboration, providing powerful tools to help your team work together to create, review and share documents.

The Send for Review feature streamlines the feedback process and gives you full control over which comments and revisions to accept or reject. When a Word document is sent for review, the correct reviewing tools are automatically turned on for others to review. When the document is sent back, you can merge the changes back into the original document.

Mark-up balloons furthermore identify who has changed what in the document, allowing you to track changes to the document.

Word 2003's Document Sharing capabilities gives you complete control over who can access and amend which parts of your document.

Word helps you work faster by putting the relevant tools at your fingertips. The Task Panes introduced in the latest versions place commonly used tools comfortably to the right of your work area, giving you one-click access to tools like your clipboard and formatting functionality.

Smart

Smart tags furthermore speed up access to relevant features, like formatting options for pasted information. Smart tags also let you link to information from the Web and Outlook, so that if for example you type somebody’s name, the name is highlighted and you are provided with options to send that person an email, schedule a meeting, open their contact details and so on.

Find out more about Smart Tags

Word’s Application and Document Recovery feature can be a lifesaver in the unfortunate event of an error. No more having to start from scratch – this feature lets you automatically save your document and safely shut down the application if anything goes wrong.

You are also given the opportunity to report the problem to Microsoft so that it can be looked at and rectified in later updates.

Get more information from the Microsoft Word home page.

What next?

The best way to see if Word 2003 is right for your business is to give it a go. You can order a free 60-day trial of Microsoft Office 2003, which includes Word.

You can also get more information about the other Office System programs.


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