What’s New in Word 97?

Work Smarter

AutoCorrect, AutoComplete, and AutoText   New in Word 95 and enhanced in Word 97, these IntelliSense features save you time as you type by correcting typing errors and inserting complete words and phrases for you.

AutoFormat   Type an asterisk before and after a word to make it bold, type three consecutive hyphens to add a page-wide underscore, or type 1. to begin a numbered list, and you’ve seen AutoFormat “as you type” in action.

Grammar Checker   The Grammar Checker is fully redesigned for Word 97 and is now “smarter” about the mistakes it questions.

Automate tasks   Microsoft Visual Basic for applications is now the programming environment for Word and replaces WordBasic. However, the macros you have written in WordBasic will still operate in Word 97. Working in Visual Basic for Applications means that the macros you write for Word can easily be adapted for Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint.

Polish Your Work

Tables   In Word 97, creating a table is a simple task. With the Draw Table feature you can create complex tables quickly and add columns of various widths and cells of varying heights.

Manipulate text and graphics   Word 97 makes it easy to add desktop publishing effects, such as wrapping text around pictures or “jumping” a story from page one to page four. A graphic can be positioned anywhere on the page, and you can have text flow around the graphic in a variety of ways. If you want to create your own graphics, or add text effects, you’ll find a complete set of drawing tools.

Wizards and templates   Word 97 comes with many templates and wizards to help you create a variety of documents. The templates provide many alternative designs; the wizards walk you through the creation of a document, and the Office Assistant is fully integrated into the wizards so Help is close at hand.

Share Your Work

Track Changes   If you need to track changes you’ll find improved and easy-to-use change tracking. It’s easy to see who made a change and when. If you need to keep multiple versions of a document, Word now allows you to save these versions within the same document.

Mail Merge Helper   Simplify the complex process of creating form letters with Mail Merge Helper. Set up queries in your data source to target specific names, save the form letter with merge fields for future use, too.

Word and the Web   Use Word 97 to create documents for use by you and your co-workers on an intranet or on the World Wide Web. Word easily adds hyperlinks to documents so that you can jump to any location in a document, between documents, to documents in other Office applications, or anywhere on the Internet. The Word Web Page Wizard makes creating home pages and other Web documents easy, even if you don’t know HTML.