Entrepreneur's Complete Guide to Software

Business owners may remember cutting and pasting words and phrases-with scissors and tape. Then you'd have to retype the whole document. The word processor has made it possible for millions to revise their work as often as they want without killing trees, and the average word-processing document, with tasteful fonts and type sizes, is a lot better looking than the average typed page ever was.

Microsoft Word 97, $339, upgrade $109 (Windows 95/NT), Microsoft Corp., (800) 426-9400, http://www.microsoft.com

The upgrade for Word 97 was our analyst's number-one bestseller. The program offers previews of styles before you apply them to your documents, greater control wrapping text around objects, more customizable toolbars and menus, and iconic drop-down menus. A Web toolbar lets users launch Web pages from bookmark-style lists or by typing the URL into a field, but the Web page actually appears in Netscape or the user's other configured browser. This new version also lets you make hypertext of any text and automatically formats URLs as hyperlinks-unless you get in and root out some of the unrequested auto-magic.

Word 97's fluffiest features include animated text formatting options, from a blinking background and marching ants to shimmering and sparkling text. There's also an option to get feedback from the program via animation. One of the most thoughtful features is the "Document Map" view, which opens a hyper listing of places in the document at the left of the screen so you can jump easily from place to place in your document. All these features take up only 46MB of hard-drive space. With careful selection of the useful features over the fluffier, program-slowing ones, Word 97 can be not only the bestseller but simply the best.

Other Products

Lotus Word Pro 97, $105 (Windows 95/NT), (800) 343-5414, http://www.lotus.com

This article was originally published in the November 1997 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Entrepreneur's Complete Guide to Software.