What's new in Word 2003?

The new Reading Layout View makes it easier to read documents on the screen rather than printing them out. It allows you flip the pages just as if you were reading a book, uses Clear Type? technology and large fonts to make on screen reading comfortable. This view is automatically used when opening email attachments, but if you don?t like it, you can turn off if you go to the Tools menu, choose Options and clear the tick box labelled Allow starting in Reading Layout on the General tab. This new view also has a couple of new buttons on it?s toolbar worth checking out!

One of the buttons on the Reading Layout toolbar is Thumbnails. This gives you a miniature view of your pages down the left of your document to help navigate. But you don?t have to be using Reading Layout view to use thumbnails ? turn them on at any time from the View menu.

The Reviewing Toolbar now contains additional buttons for inserting a voice comment and highlighting. There are also additional options available on the Track Changes tab in the Tools, Options, dialog box to control how the mark-up is displayed when tracking changes.

Using IRM in your Word documents means that you can specify who can read your document and who can edit it. You can tell whether you have IRM functionality by looking out for the Permissions button on your toolbar. For more information about IRM, see the handout entitled ?Protecting your Information?.

The new Document Protection task pane in Word 2003 has many features to allow multiple users to work together on a large document in a structured way. You can control who can edit different parts of the document, and even impose formatting restrictions! For more information about document protection, see the handout entitled ?Protecting your Information?.

The Research Pane isn?t only available in Word, but it is particularly useful in this application. It combines the thesaurus, translation and other reference functionality in one area. To quickly look up a work in your Research Task Pane, hold down your Alt key and click on the word!

The deep support for XML in Word 2003 is said to ?bridge the gap between documents and data? ? that?s great news for the developers, but ordinary users like you and I can sit back and wait to see what the technical people do with it! If this sounds like your kind of thing, then keep your eye on http://msdn.microsoft.com/ for more technical information.

Other things to look out for Word and other applications is the new Check for Updates option from the Help menu to ensure you stay up-to-date, and the new Shared Workspace Task Pane which enables you access or create a shared area if you need to work with other people on your documents.