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Provides: Word processing and page layout

Format: DVD

Developer: Microsoft

Minimum Requirements: 500MHz PowerPC G4 or Intel processor, Mac os X v10.4.9, 512MB RAM, 1.5GB hard disk space, DVD drive, 1024x768 display, Internet access (for Entourage and certain features)

Processor Compatibility: Universal

Retail Price: Full version: $229.95, Upgrade version: $109.95

Availability: Out now

For those of us who remember it, there will never be a version of Word as good as version 5.1. It was a tight, full, and well-balanced program. Word 6 was not only viciously bloated, but you could go out to dinner while it booted up. Starting with Office X, Word has started to regain what it once had by providing new features while letting older features become more accessible. With Office 2008, the number of features continues to increase, but, on the whole, the program is much easier to negotiate. Significantly reduced are multiple locations of the same preferences, gone are confusing preferences, arrived is easier access to features that will appeal to offices. But not existent are features to customize Word to anyone's wishes.

[Note: This is one part of a 6 part review. We recommend you read the Office 2008 Overview before reading this or any other review as it describes a number of features and dynamics that cover all of the Office programs.

As shown in the overall review of Office 2008, Word documents have changed their appearance. Now, the twenty two icons across the top of the screen have been decreased to fifteen. Gone are the cut, copy, and paste icons, which are not a loss. Added is a navigation icon which could have been my favorite new addition, but either it doesn't work or the Help menu that should describe the feature is as bad as I've said in the main Office 2008 review.

When clicking the Navigation icon on the toolbar (third from right below), a side panel opens on the left side of your document. It can display two different types of views, a Thumbnail (as shown below) or a Document Map. The thumbnail view is great, especially if you have any images on the pages. Assuming you can to see where you are, you can click on the thumbnails to get to where you want to go. Conversely, there is another option called "Document Map." I do wish I could tell you how this works, but I can't. Somehow, Word picks up tags from the document and leaves word phrases in the Navigation panel. By clicking on these phrases, you can jump to that part of the document. This sounds great, but I was completely unable to figure out what causes some phrases to have this tag, why others did not have such tags, how to remove the tag, or how to add the tag to a different phrase. As such, this whole feature is useless.

Another new feature that is absolutely fantastic, but, alas, is not yet "there," is the new Publishing Layout. When selected, you get a blank page on a "wooden table" where you can define text fields. The text can "jump" from one field to the other on the same or later pages. Thus, if you are doing a newsletter or document for which you want a more realistic layout than can be achieved by a standard Word document, you can now do it.

Unfortunately, I found a number of fairly basic features missing that otherwise are pretty standard in page layout programs. For example, if you want to have a wide column and a narrow column, such as for body text and sidebars, the standard way to do this with a normal page layout program is to create the skeleton of a three column page and use two of them for the wide text and one of them for sidebars. Well, in Publishing View there are no columns—this kind of makes sense since you can create columns of any kind at any location. You can create columns in the Print Layout mode and then switch back to the Publishing mode where the columns can be identified in the rulers. However, when you then go to the Master Page view, the column's ruler markings are now gone. The only way I found to do this was to just eyeball it.

If you are not into creating formats, Microsoft fortunately provides a number of pre-made templates ready for immediate use and/or for altering.

As mentioned in the Office Overview, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint have an Elements Gallery. In Word, part of the Gallery provides templates for such subjects as newsletters, brochures, and catalogs amongst others choices. While the templates do tend toward "institutional," they are certainly better than what most can do off the top of their head, and by no means must anyone follow them exactly. Variations can easily be done by selecting a theme from the Formatting palette or by changing the dynamics. If you can use the various templates as is, great.

Besides the various templates for the Publishing View, there are also many templates for a variety of other templates for mostly office or education/academic use. This included some fax layouts that always defaulted to my personal details within its layout, and it was essentially impossible to change these details. This was a classic case of robotic control to make one's life easy, but ended up making it harder. I, as with many others reading this review, wear more than one hat. That is, I write reviews, I have my day job, I have hobbies, I have other interests. So, when I need to send a fax and I choose to use one of these templates, I can't send it because it's automatically filled out for my generic personals, which are probably not what I need or want for that fax. Also, most of the templates had color. Can anyone explain to me why one would want to compose a fax sheet in color? Admittedly, you can get color fax machines, but I have yet to see an office with one. Although you need to create or implement the dynamics of non-uniform pages in the Publishing layout, you can then change to the Print Layout and still use the format as intended.

The formatting palette is greatly expanded to include a wide variety of enhancement capabilities. It is very powerful and one of the best parts about the new Word. The icons across the top (as seen to the right) are "Formatting Palette" (currently active), "Object Palette," "Citations," "Scrapbook," "Reference Tools," "Compatibility Report," and "Projects." While some of these were in Office 2004, these have all been enhanced significantly. For those who use iPhoto, there is now a direct link to your iPhoto collection. Ironically there is no link to your images in Expression, part of Office - Media Edition.

As seen on the right, I've opened all of the controls that either are new and/or enhanced from the previous version.

One new layout is the Web Layout. I had some hopes with this because one of the most common problems for web designers is receiving text from people in Word format that needs to get transferred to a web page. If the writer has Word set to show curly quotes, once the page is transferred to the web, strange characters start showing up in most browsers. So, what I was hoping for is that if one is composing in the Web Layout mode, simple things like curly quotes and double spaces after periods would be turned off. Alas no.

If you have a basic page of text with a few images, it mostly works. However, there are no standard web controls for image placement. Interestingly, if you open a new page, go to Web Layout, place some text and go to save, the default format is .doc. You have to manually select .htm as the document format. It seems that if I'm in Web Layout, any page created in that mode would automatically default to the .htm format. Amusingly, pages saved in Microsoft's web html format are tagged to be opened by Internet Explorer, a program that Microsoft stopped developing for the Mac in 2001.

So, the major question is does this version of Word provide enough new features that an update is in order? The answer is mostly...well, maybe. With the exception of ready access to the new XML format and the Publishing Layout features, there's not many features here that are necessary if all you do is write up pages of text. While it is wonderful to not constantly be asked if I want to save the new Normal (that's been fixed, yea!), the reality is that this new Intel version of Word doesn't really open that much faster than Word 2004. If you depended upon VBA, you may wish to hold back. On the other hand, features that were difficult to find are now right out in front, so if you've ever felt you were only using a small portion of Word because you didn't know what to look for or where it might be, now you have less of an excuse. You still may not know what things are, but you will know where to find them.

If you work in an office environment and want to place workflow graphs, charts from Excel, and have consistent themed appearances with your Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, you are in luck. Besides, if you work in an office environment, you will now be able to easily share .docx documents.

If you do not want to purchase Quark, InDesign, or iWork and want to do a quick newsletter or the like, you will appreciate the new functionality provided with the Publishing Layout.

If you are in academics, you will appreciate the footnotes, endnotes, citation capability etc. But these are not all that much different from Word 2004. The Notebook Layout provides a good place to take notes, but again, this is not all that much different from Word 2004.

If you are still using Word X, you will find a number of pleasant surprises in Word 2008. If you use Word 2004, you do not share documents with others, and all you mostly type are pages of text with little or no formatting, there's not all that much to be enthusiastic about.

• See other Microsoft Office 2008 product reviews.

___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.