Word Up

I spent an hour or so this afternoon working with Sandra, the housekeeper of the Highlander, on Microsoft Word. She's taking a computer applications course, and she's got most of the concepts down (her understanding of applying formatting to different parts of text is surprisingly complete), but she was having trouble with inserting clip and word art. In some respects, I think the world might be a better place if more people had her set of Word skills. I cringe when I see clip art laden signage that has such poor formatting that the message is hard to understand.

Selecting text was also difficult for her. I showed her the trick of using the left margin (looking for the backwards cursor) to highlight a line at a time, but I was probably confusing at times. I've grown very used to the (far-superior) configuration of Word 2002, and going back to Word 2000 was frustrating. It's nice to see that Word is improving as a word processing program.