[Chinney]

I have a question regarding Office 2004. I currently have Office v. X and I wonder how much better 2004 is than v. X. And I am not asking about the new features in 2004.

Instead, what I want to know is whether Microsoft has fixed, in the 2004 version, some of the basic performance issues that affected v. X. These performance issues were the subject of numerous old threads back at AI, and I must say that I experienced some of them. The three most annoying, from my perspective (all in Word), were

1. Basic speed issues: for example, annoying time lags in displaying characters on the screen as you type.
2. Arbitrary screen refreshes: sometimes, after a given input, Office finds the need to do a whole screen refresh even when it would normally be totally unmerited by the nature of the input.
3. Character spacing on screen: depending on the font and the zoom % chosen, Word sometimes spaces the characters displayed on screen either too far apart or too close together, which sometimes makes it difficult to see where one word ends and the next begins.

I know that other people had additional problems. None of them were the end of the world, but they were not welcome (some said “inexcusable”) in a ‘professional’ product that came at a very ‘professional’ price. And these glitches were not fixed by the service release for v.X.

Now I am sure that Office 2004 has its own glitches – most new software does – which perhaps have been fixed by this new service release. But my question is more fundamental:

Does Office 2004 fix the basic problems in v.X?