Word has seen more changes. Laptop owners will probably gain the most from the introduction of a new document type: the Word notebook. This is supposedly a way to ‘capture your thoughts and ideas in the equivalent of an electronic notebook’; in non-marketing speak, it’s really an extra template which has a different layout view, and pre-formatted headers and footers to help keep track of your work. What is definitely new is the ability to record notes while you’re typing and have them embed in the Word document.

Although it’s unlikely to be a hit in sales meetings, this feature is bound to be useful to students, particularly in light of the extremely good value of the Teacher and Student edition.

The other big Word-specific addition is a new toolbox palette. This provides access to the built-in thesaurus and Encarta World English Dictionary as well as Microsoft’s online Encarta Encyclopaedia and MSN search engine.