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This installment in the Take Control series of TidBits e-books won't win any awards for excitement. It is hard to get too excited about advanced editing and formatting in Word. That is, unless you are a Word power-user and these things will have an impact on your daily use of Word 2004. I am not quite a power user. I tend to think of my use of the MS Office suite to be advanced-intermediate. I use it daily, but rarely do I put it to the true test of heavy-duty use. But for me, the new features in Word 2004 have turned out to be very useful and time-saving, if not really exciting.
This book presents information about several new advanced editing features, which a Word user WILL run into fairly quickly. And true, one can sort of learn about the features as one goes along, and as you are presented with new "smart tags" and dialog boxes. But Microsoft itself has not seen fit to provide a whole lot of background on what these new features do.
This "Take Control" title helps the Word 2004 user make sense of the new Auto-Correct features, Smart Pasting and smart tags, Numbered List smart buttons, reformatting lists, new Style control features for tables and lists, and Unicode text input.
If you ever need to input foreign characters, Word 2004 is now for you. This was one of the biggest complaints many users had about Word v. X for Mac: its lack of real Unicode support. No more. Word 2004 is now aware of all Unicode text and you can copy, paste, and type it freely in Word documents.
The Auto-Correct feature in Word has been beefed up, and this book tells you just how so, and how you can fine tune it to better meet your needs.
My favorite new features in Word 2004, and one which this book explains well, are the "smart tags" that pop up when you paste text in Word. These new smart tags can let you quickly reformat pasted text to match the document you are pasting into, saving you lots of time reformatting pasted text. But I quickly discovered -- after updating to Word 2004 -- that the options in these smart tags varied frequently. "Take Control" cleared up these matters for me, satisfying my curiosity and helping me to make better use of the new feature.
As I said, this is not necessarily exciting stuff. But if you want to make the most of Word 2004 and you either use Word frequently or anticipate using it a lot more in the near future, this 78-page e-book would be worth your investment. If Word is used in your office, perhaps your admin staff would enjoy a copy of this PDF book.
I give "Take Control of What's New in Word 2004: Advanced Editing & Formatting" a rating of five moose.
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