| here. There are two schools of thouhgt about how to use MS Word, the keep it simple and use it like MS tells you to use it school, and the make it is as difficult and locked down as possible, so that you keep your programmers employed while they watch everyone else squirm school. I belong to the former. Word 2007 and 2010 are robust if you steer clear of all the corrupted old templates that the make it as difficult as you can people bring with them.If you start from scratch, turf all your old templates, use the built-in MS templates and styles as much as you can, and use Themes to change to corporate colour schemes and fonts, you can do just about anything with it. The GUI is friendly to amateurs, and most writers in an organisation are amateurs. In addition, the MS templates ARE reliable for amateurs. They start to lose the plot when the “experts” mess around with them too much and refuse to use them the way MS tells us to use them.The main problem with Word now is the so-called experts have not grown with the product and are still trying to use it the way they used 98. I liken it to someone driving a souped up Morris Minor, with all sorts of modifications to make it go fast. Then they get in today's Maserati and try to drive the Maserati the same way they drove the Morris Minor. Cringe! The main problem Word has now is the bad humour and low level skills of the so-called experts who simply have no idea how to use the modern tools.However, I do agree that SOME training is needed. The MS 2007 on-line training is excellent and can be used as the basis for training. 2010 is not so good and only covers the differences between 2007 and 2010, not 2003 to 2010, so it has shortfalls. I have recently conducted training for 2003 to 2010 upgrade, and we covered Word, Excel and Outlook in a day. In that time the general principles that go across all products were absorbed well and attendees went away happy and confident. However, I cannot attest that they stayed that way under the negative influence of the so-called experts who are determined to give it a bad rap, once they got back to their desks.I would also have liked to conduct a couple of days training on Word advanced features for those who the others turn to for advice, just to cover the correct way to perform some of the more advanced functions.
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