Microsoft Publisher 2002 - Much Better
Written: Sep 26 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Many new enhancements! Easy to use
Cons: The Book is no help.
The Bottom Line: I would recommend that you upgrade your previous edition of Publisher to 2002. Many great enhancements that will make your job easier.
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| tchoate's Full Review: Microsoft Publisher 2002 (License Only) Volume Lic... |
Microsoft Publisher 2002 is the newest program for desktop publishing from Microsoft Corporation. I work for a church in Texas and we produce a weekly newsletter to all of our members. We have been using Microsoft Publisher 2000 since I have started working for the church. We decided it was time to upgrade and purchased Microsoft Publisher 2002 about 1 month ago. I was excited to get this program as it had many enhancements that the Publisher we had been using didn’t have.
Microsoft Publisher 2002 offers you many different options when preparing your document. There are templates for everything newsletters, business cards, calendars, greeting cards to just about any business form you could need, you can even design your website quickly and easily. The quick publication wizards are great, all you have to do is choose which of the formats you like the best, this includes the colors, the background, the font, the arranging is all done for you all you have to do is fill in the blanks with your companies information.
We use Publisher 2002 for not only doing our newsletter, but we take that exact newsletter and make a webpage from it to post for our members to read. Choosing the option of “Turn this publication into a webpage” very easily does this, Publisher then takes control and turns each page into a webpage for you. You have the option to move your articles, clip art and pictures around anywhere on the webpage that you want it to be. This is so easy and makes a great looking website. This part of the program makes it so easy for a beginner, like myself to make a really nice looking webpage and post it to the web with little help.
So What’s New In 2002?
The first thing that I noticed when I put the cd in to install the program was that it let me know that some of my components had to be updated since I was currently running Windows 98. Once I clicked on OK the program installed those needed components after which I was asked to restart my computer so that the program could then be installed. In a matter of minutes, my old version of Publisher was gone and I was the proud use of Microsoft Publisher 2002.
The first thing I noticed was the new look of the task bars and the task pane. They looked almost transparent and very clean and well arranged. The task pane has the choices their for what kind of publication you are doing; you can either choose one of those or choose to do a blank publication and start from scratch on your own. Since I have been using Microsoft Publisher 2000 I was familiar with the program and what it would do for me, but instantly noticed that things here where somewhat different.
The task bar that runs along the side of the task pane had some icons that had been changed and didn’t look the same. They also have included a new icon for Word Art that we didn’t have in the older version we had been using.
Another great new feature is Font Schemes this makes it easy to give your publication a polished looked. It groups fonts together that work well and look great together. You have 25 different font sets to choose form and they are consistently applied to your publication. This has been wonderful for us doing our newsletter. We no longer have to worry about what fonts work well together, Microsoft Publisher 2002 does all of that for us.
Another new feature that I really like is that we can import a document from Microsoft Word into Microsoft Publisher and create a great looking, professionally designed document to send to our members. Before this publisher release we had to copy our documents and then insert them into publisher, now this can be done in one easy step. I am for anything that saves time and makes my job easier. You are now able to open a Word Document in Publisher and retain that documents original formatting. This was one downfall of Publisher 2000, anytime that I opened a document from Word or Excel I would lose my formatting and it was time consuming to have to sit and reformat a document that was moved from another Microsoft Program.
We do a lot of mail merge documents and had found in Publisher 2000 that these were hard to do. With this newest edition we have found that the mail merge is very similar to the mail merge in Microsoft Word and this has greatly improved the ease of using Publisher 2002 for this kind of document. We have found ourselves using this program more than we did the older version, since these kinds of enhancements have been made.
I have found the most useful of all the enhancements to this program to be the use of the new smart tags and auto correct that are now right at your cursor. A little blue bar appears under the first letter of the word and you then can right click and set your options for auto correct, after that Publisher will take over from there. You are also able to have a copy and paste function right at your cursor. This has taken some getting use to for me, but the more I use this feature the more I like it.
I guess I have saved the best enhancement that we have found for last. We send an email each day to all of our church members updating them on activities for the day. With the old version of Publisher we had to retype our message into email, with this newest version it will send your entire Publisher 2002 file as a rich e-mail message so that anyone in our congregation can view it even if they don’t have Microsoft Publisher 2002. This has saved me from having to retype the messages each day into and email, we can now choose one page or just one article from our newsletter publication and have Publisher 2002 send it to all of our members. This is another great time saving feature of this newest version of Publisher.
Microsoft Publisher 2002 still offers the Office Help Assistant where you can type in your question and get easy to read answers very quickly.
As in the older version of Publisher you still have to place all objects in a frame before you can manipulate them. This includes text, graphics and pictures. But you still have area outside of the document boundary to store pictures, word art or clip art that you use frequently.
These are some of the great enhancements that Microsoft Publisher 2002 has come equipped with. I can only mention the ones that I use on a daily basis; because those are the ones that I can tell you truthfully are much better. I do know that there have also been some enhancements added to their commercial printing functionality, this includes 12 spot color in a single publication and a newer version of the EPS Filter. As I said I don’t use these things so I don’t feel as if I can give you an opinion on them. I have had friends who use this program for some of their commercial printing businesses who said that they noticed improvements with this newest version of Publisher.
System Requirements For Publisher 2002
PC with Pentium 133 MHz or higher (Pentium III recommended)
Microsoft Windows 98, Widows 98 Second Edition, Windows ME, Windows NT
24 MB of Ram of the operating system plus 8 MB of Ram for Publisher
100 MB of additional hard disk space for the installation of Office XP Content CD
CD Rom Drive
Conclusion
I have been using Microsoft Publisher 2000for about 2 years now. I was please with the program, but did believe that some enhancements were needed. When we purchased Microsoft Publisher 2002 we were immediately impressed by the number of enhancements and the time saving that those enhancements have allowed us. We use this program everyday and I have a found that it can virtually do anything that I need to at my job or at home for publishing purposes. It has clear and distinct clip art images and the use of your digital photos are now easier and clearer than before. I believe that Microsoft did a wonderful job with Microsoft Publisher 2002 in making it a more user-friendly program. If you have a need for publishing program then I would strongly suggest that you look at Microsoft Publisher 2002 it is the best I have used.
Thanks for Reading and God Bless America!
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
tchoate
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Location: Plano
Reviews written: 325
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About Me:
Proud First Time Grandmother of a beautiful granddaughter born August 31, 2006.
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