WD98: What's New in Word 98 Macintosh Edition

Word can automatically offer suggestions for the rest of the word or phrase you are typing. To accept the suggestion, press RETURN and then Word automatically replaces your partially typed word with the completed word. Word 98 will automatically complete:

You can use the Word AutoSummarize feature to automatically summarize the key points in a document. Word analyzes your document statistically and linguistically to determine the most important sentences and gives you a custom summary based on this analysis. With AutoSummarize, you can highlight the key points in an online document and view it at different levels of detail. Or you can automatically create a separate summary or abstract. You have total control of the length of the summary.

It's important that you comply with all applicable copyright laws when using this feature. You should review the accuracy of any summary because it is, by its nature, not the entirety of the work.

Words 98 includes the following style improvements:

The Letter Wizard in Word 98 can help you write a new letter quickly and easily, or it can help you change and add to elements in your existing letter. It includes:

The Office Assistant uses IntelliSense natural-language technology. The Assistant anticipates the kind of help you need and suggests Help topics based on the work you're doing. You can also type a Help request in your own words and get the answer you need. You can have the Assistant offer to start a wizard when you begin certain tasks, such as creating a letter. The new Office Assistant character in Word 98 is a central place for you to get tips on how to use Word features more efficiently and find visual examples and step-by-step instructions for specific tasks.

Draw Table tool

Lets you create and customize tables. You use this intuitive drawing tool much the same way you use a pen to draw a table -- just click and drag to draw the table boundaries and cell partitions. You can now make individual cells any height and width you want.

Eraser tool

Lets you easily remove any cell, row, or column partition to achieve the same effect as merging two cells. In earlier versions of Word, you could only merge cells if they were in the same row. In Word 98, you can merge any adjacent cells -- vertically or horizontally.

Vertical alignment

Lets you align cell contents at the top, center, or bottom of the cell, using the convenient alignment toolbar buttons. If your text is oriented vertically, the buttons automatically adjust to give you left, center, and right alignment.

Vertical text direction

Makes your text flow vertically (rotated 90 degrees) in table cells, text boxes, and frames. This is a useful feature for creating labels and also for publishing oriented documents where credits or copyrights are printed sideways.

In-table row resizer

Lets you adjust any row's height directly in your table by dragging the row border up or down, just as you adjust column widths. If you hold down OPTION while you drag, the new vertical ruler shows you the exact row height.

New border styles

Gives you more than 150 border styles to customize the look of your documents. This includes 3-D styles and several publishing-oriented styles that allow multiple line borders, which are especially popular in professional documents.

Page borders

Lets you put a border around each page. Word Provides 150 new border line styles. Page borders are also highly customizable. For example, you can have:

Text borders

Lets you apply borders to words or characters within a paragraph. You can literally "block out" pieces of text by applying any of the available border styles. Text borders also make it easier to put borders around headings.

Text shading

Lets you call out parts of your document for other users. Just as you apply shading to paragraphs, now you can apply it to selected words or characters within a paragraph. Choose any shading color or gradation.

Gives you many new drawing tools and capabilities that can be easily accessed through the new Drawing toolbar. You can easily embellish your text and graphics using the 100 adjustable AutoShapes, 4 types of fill effects -- multicolored gradient, textured, transparent, and picture -- right-shadow effects, and 3-D effects. Office Art is a rich and sophisticated drawing layer that replaces the Word drawing layer and is shared by all Microsoft Office applications.

Gives you all the flexibility required for picture manipulation. For example:

Replaces frames and offers the full set of Office Art capabilities, such as 3-D effects, fills, backgrounds, rotation, sizing, and cropping.

Gives you the ability to link text boxes for desktop publishing use -- for example, you can flow an article from page 1 to page 4 in a newsletter. Once two text boxes are linked, text that overflows from the first text box appears at the top of the second one. Any number of text boxes can be linked in any direction.

Lets you wrap text around objects of any shape and size. You can wrap text straight to the edge of an irregular object.

You can use the Active Web--shared by all Microsoft Office programs-- to author and browse through rich webs of documents on an intranet or on the Web.

Hyperlinks

Link to any Microsoft Office, HTML, or other file on any internal or external Web site. To jump to the new destinations, you simply click the hyperlinks. Word can automatically recognize and format e-mail addresses and URLs as hyperlinks.

The Web toolbar

Quickly open, search, and browse through any document, including Web documents or pages. You can jump from one document or site to another, jump forward or backward among the documents you've opened, and add interesting documents you find on the Web to the Favorites folder to quickly return to them later.

Compressed graphics

Compress pictures or graphics inserted in documents automatically. Word natively stores JPEG images and converts all raster formats to PNG, a new compressed format.

Web Page Wizard

Start creating a Web page for you. The wizard provides customized Web templates that you can easily modify to meet your needs. You can choose from a variety of content templates that address the common types of Web pages, such as a sample personal home page. You can also choose predefined visual themes for these pages -- each theme contains fitting background colors, bullets, horizontal lines, and other elements.

Sound

Incorporate background sound seamlessly on Web pages if your Web browser supports it. You can specify the location of the sound file to be played and the number of times to play it.

Video

Choose a video clip to play, specify playback options -- such as "on open" or "on mouse-over" or both -- and, as in the case of sound, specify how often to play the clip. You can specify alternative images and text for browsers that don't support video.

Pictures

Add a picture to a Web page, just as you do with a Word document.

Scrolling text

Add scrolling text to your Web pages. Type in the text you want in this style, and you have full control over the animation type, direction, speed, background color, and size.

Bullets

Make your online Web pages graphically rich. Word provides a collection of colorful, graphical images that can be used as bullets on your Web pages.

Horizontal lines

Add HTML-specific horizontal lines that can be colorful and graphical additions to your Web pages. These lines are an extension of the built-in borders and shading functionality in Word.

HTML forms

Produce consistent results with both HTML and non-HTML forms. All interface elements are similar, except where they are extended for HTML-tag-specific controls.

HTML tags

Simplify authoring your Web pages. Word provides WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") support for authoring Web pages with commonly used tags, such as tables, fonts, and background sound. There are more than 80 HTML tags supported in Word.

Achieve the best screen appearance for your online documents. Text appears larger and wraps to fit the window.

Gain instant access to any part of your document. Word splits the window into two panes -- a Document Map in the left pane and the document content in the right pane. The heading-based outline of the document in the Document Map lets you quickly scan the document structure, gives you one-click access to the point of interest, and serves as a "You are here" road map by highlighting your current location in the document.

Link to any Microsoft Office, HTML, or other file on any internal or external Web site. To jump to the new destinations, you simply click the hyperlinks. Word can automatically recognize and format e-mail addresses and URLs as hyperlinks.

Create "live" cross-references in documents that others will read online by inserting the cross-references as hyperlinks. Instead of scrolling through the document to find the referenced text, now you can just click the cross-reference and use the Web navigational toolbar to jump back and forth between related paragraphs.

Make your document more visually appealing to read online by adding background colors and textures. You can see these backgrounds only in online layout view, and you can't print them.

Add animated effects that make the text appear to move or flash.

Browse through a document directly from the scroll bar. The browser lets you choose an element to browse by -- for example, to review all the tables or pictures in a document, you click Browse by Table in the browser. You can use the browser to browse through a document by page, section, comment, footnote, endnote, field, table, graphic, heading, or editing change.

Maintain a working history of a document. With this feature you can see exactly who did what on a document and when. You can also enter descriptive text about the changes made in each version. All the versioning information is stored within the document, so you don't need to maintain and track multiple copies of the document. In addition, you can have Word automatically save a version each time you save and close the document, so you can see who changed what in each version.

Consolidate all changes and comments from different reviewers in one document. Multiple reviewers can modify separate copies of the same document, and then you can merge all their changes into the original. Or, for example, you can take a document away overnight and automatically merge your changes back into the original document when you return.

Easily review someone else's comments online without opening a separate pane. You can see at a glance where comments were inserted, the affected text appears to be shaded with light yellow. When you rest the pointer over this text, a ScreenTip that includes the comment and the name of the reviewer appears above the text. You can now read each comment in context.

Quickly gain access to all the common reviewing tools you need on one toolbar -- track and review changes, insert and review comments, highlight text, save versions, and send the document in an e-mail message.

Type text in multiple languages. Word can automatically switch fonts based on the language you are typing. Switching the keyboard layout and language also automatically marks the text as a particular language. Marking the language ensures that Spanish text, for example, is proofed only by the Spanish proofing tools.

Edit and display multilingual text in Word. For example, you can search by a German author's name in the Find File dialog box in Word.

Correctly display text created in localized versions of Word if you have the appropriate fonts on your system. For languages that use a different character set, such as Russian, you first must purchase and install software that supports that language. Note that this applies to all localized versions except bi-directional versions, such as Hebrew and Arabic.

Specify a language on which to base the sorting order of text in your document. For example, a Hungarian double letter such as "cz" sorts correctly in U.S. Word when you set the sorting language to Hungarian.

Quickly insert special characters and accent marks by clicking Symbol (Insert menu). To insert characters from languages that use a different character set (for example, Russian or Japanese), you first must purchase and install software that supports that language.