THE UPSIDE OF MICROSOFT WORD

Microsoft Word has come a long way since its conception. Originally, this word processing software was released as a general DOS program for IBM in 1983 for the Xenix systems platform. It soon became available for Macintosh users on the SCO Unix and OS/2 platforms one year later. Then by 1989, Word was added to Microsoft Windows. Gaining quick popularity, MS Word was soon developed into the Microsoft Office Suite, which it is still best known for today, although you can purchase this as a stand-alone product as well.

For good, all-around word processing, MS Word is hard to beat. For instance, the spelling feature of this program is excellent. You can set the default of the program to check your spelling as you type, which would then underscore misspelled words in red. To make corrections, you could change the spelling on your own or if you were unsure the proper spelling, right-click with the mouse for a drop-down menu of possibilities.

Another excellent spelling feature of Word is the "auto-correct". The program has created a database of words commonly misspelled. Therefore, when you accidentally type one of these words, the spelling would be fixed for you automatically. Best of all, if you find that you often misspell a word not found in this list, you could add it.

MS Word also has an excellent grammar check. By going to "tools", "options", "spelling and grammar", and then "settings", you can set the program up the way you want it to check your work. Just as misspelled words are underscored in red, anything having to do with possible grammar mistakes would be underlined in green. The nice aspect of this feature is that it is great for finding fragmented sentences, duplicate words, extra spaces in between words, and so on.

You will also love the built-in thesaurus. Many times, finding the right word is challenging. By using this special MS Word feature, you could create a flawless term paper, thesis, or speech. With this, you have two primary options. First, if you have already typed in a word but you want to double check the meaning or find a replacement word, simply highlight the word and then click on "tools", "language", and "thesaurus" at which time the thesaurus toolbox opens. However, if you were just looking for help in creating a structured sentence with the right words, you could open the thesaurus toolbox and use it as a stand-alone feature.

The nice thing about using MS Word is that it is very user-friendly, meaning people of all ages and skill sets can quickly master the basic commands. Because of this, Word is the most widely used word processing program. Over the years, significant changes have been made to the program, maintaining the simplicity for those with little skill while offering intermediate and expert users more advanced options. Having tools to save a document as a web page, being able to quickly determine a page's statistics, creating graphs and charts, and sending a document via e-mail from within Word are just a few of the exciting features to enjoy.