Microsoft Publisher 2002 brings the power of the professional designer to your home PC. With powerful features and wizards to assist you, desktop publishing has not been so easy in quite some time.
Integrating with the rest of the Microsoft Office family and sharing the same 'dress' as them, Publisher can integrate with a number of programs, specifically Word. The program has been designed to cater to all users regardless of skill level.
A big part of using the computer today involves the Internet and Microsoft has endeavoured to make web authoring an activity that is fun and easy for everyone to get their work online. Publisher can easily save your work as HTML and automatically assigns a directory that will store your images that it has saved to .gif format. I personally found that feature disappointing as reducing the file to .gif reduces the quality of the picture. However for the novice webpage designer, this feature will be extremely welcome as it is just one more file that they don't have to look after.
As with the other Office products, Publisher now features the fantastic Task Pane (the pane on the left of each screen shot). With the pane, tasks are now centralised and easy to access. Also using the task pane you can also take advantage of some of the functionality of other programs, including the search feature in Microsoft Word.
When it comes to publishing, Publisher has got all the bases covered. Everything from standard signs, web pages, cards and advertisements can be created with ease.
Unlike previous incarnations of Publisher, now users can take advantage of Autocorrect to make sure that their work is up to par before printing or uploading. One thing I did notice however was when converting your publication to HTML, Publisher inserts a lot of it's own generic XML code which drastically adds to the file size of your web page. It does enable the page to be converted intact however and is the trade off you get for such functionality.
Publisher now also features compatibility with commercial presses and can support additional spot colouring in a design that assists with printing. Your printing shop does need to have compatible software that will understand Publisher formats in order to make the most out of the work that you have done. With this feature, small businesses can finally create their own advertisements without the need for a graphic designer.
When creating a new publication, users can take advantage of the newly implemented Font Schemes that are in place to maintain the integrity of your work. When using Font Schemes, they act pretty much the same as colour schemes did, but instead of matching colours on your page to be of a similar shade or hue, Font Schemes will make sure that your text compliments itself from one area to the next. This is a great idea that will result in you generating a more professional publication.
