Word XP training - what's new for Word XP

Word XP is a tricky one. There are many new features, such as improved reviewing and tracking, better style formatting and a mail merge wizard, but for us this is one version where Microsoft did not quite get their changes right. Unless you do a lot of publishing on the web from Word or document reviewing, you might be best sticking with Word 97 or 2000. Specific changes include:

Change	Details
Creating and formatting styles	We got really excited when we heard about this feature - Word styles have always been strange - but underneath the new task bar (shown below) everything works pretty much the same way as before.
Reviewing documents	The facillity to review documents and track changes has been made much easier to use - an example is shown below
Handwriting and speech recognition	This potentially vital faciliity still has some way to go before it is accurate enough to be useful - although Word did recognise the word below as THIS
Improved mail merge	The new mail merge wizard manages (we think) to make a simple task more complicated
Multiple selection	You can select multiple blocks of text and apply formatting to them all simultaneously
Diagrams	You can create diagrams easily using the new diagrams tool on the drawing toolbar

You can view a full list of changes in recent versions of Microsoft Word by returning to our main Microsoft Word version history page.