Word 97—Ease of Use

Automation

User Driven research has shown Microsoft that wherever possible, users want to reduce their routine and complex tasks through automation. AutoCorrect and AutoFormat are prime examples of automation tools that significantly reduce the mundane typing and formatting tasks that users face. Word 97, is delivering an extensive set of automatic functionality that will make everyday tasks easier.

Letter Wizard

How often have you recycled your existing letters by changing an address or name and sent it to someone new? Or wondered exactly where the Cc: and Enclosure lines go in your letter, or wanted to use something more original than “Sincerely”? Letters are very common documents and you can spend a great deal of time on details. In Word 97, the goal was to let you focus only on new content for your letter. Microsoft analyzed letters from all over the world and have built in all the structural and formatting details particular to letters into Word. And, they’ve made it easy for you to reuse your existing content, as shown in the following three examples.

Letter Wizard Dialog

Accessible from the Tools menu, this dialog easily lets you build your letter by choosing the letter elements you want. If you’ve already started a letter, this dialog displays the appropriate information from your letter, allowing you to get an instant snapshot of what you have and what you need. In addition, Word remembers who you’ve sent letters to and stores all related information such as contact name, address and title. Now the next time you have to send a letter to the same person, all you have to do is pick their name from a dropdown and Word automatically fills in the rest of the information for you. This cuts down on repetitive work.

The four-panel Letter Wizard dialog lets you easily
assemble letter components and tailor your letter’s appearance.

Step by step help via the Office Assistant

When you type in a common letter opening such as “Dear Joe”, Word recognizes it as a letter opening and immediately offers to step you through the letter creation process via the Office Assistant. The Office Assistant is fully integrated with the Letter Wizard dialog and provides hints and details on all the letter elements. You can either go through the letter creation process with the Assistant, or follow the steps yourself. In either case, you can always bring back the Assistant at any time to provide you additional information.

The Assistant notices you are writing a letter and
offers to step you through the letter creation process

Easy Text Reuse

Once you go through the Letter Wizard dialog, Word automatically adds structure and styles to your letter. Specifically, it converts known letter parts into AutoText List fields. For example, closing text such as “Sincerely” is converted to a Closing field. When you right-click on the word “Sincerely”, the context menu shows you alternative closings such as “Best Regards”, “Cordially”, etc., and you can easily switch to any of these closings in place.

AutoTextList field showing a ScreenTip and then a context menu

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