The interface may be clean, but these omissions reduce this view’s usefulness, because you have to spend extra time switching into a different view to use familiar tools. Features such as Word Count and the ability to select heading styles aren’t available in this view, and Word Count even disappears from the pared-down Tools menu. Only two toolbars appear in Notebook Layout view: a standard Notebook Layout toolbar and an Audio Notes toolbar.

Click on the speaker icon next to a note to play back the audio that supplements that note. (You need a microphone, but they’re not hard to find - and most Apple laptops have a built-in mike.) If you’re recording and taking minimal notes concurrently, Word will associate sections of the recording with each new bullet point. Using the Audio Notes feature in the Notebook Layout view, you just click on the Record button to start recording. There are even more ways to get notes into Word 2004. In addition to letting you type text into your document, Word 2004 supports Apple’s Ink technology in Panther and Jaguar, so you can write on a graphics tablet and watch your letters turn into text. There are also disclosure triangles for expanding and collapsing subordinate points, and clear markers for moving or selecting individual note points - all of which make for a much more attractive, and OS X–like, way of navigating an outline than Word’s Outline view. The Note Levels feature lets you drag and drop notes hierarchically. The Notebook Layout view resembles a notebook, with its lined-paper look and divider tabs (see “Taking Note”). If you still use a spiral notebook for taking notes, this version of Word may herald your time to digitize.

At the same time, other features, such as Track Changes, have become clunkier. And Microsoft has tackled the discoverability factor by adding new buttons and Formatting Palette panels. This year’s incarnation, Microsoft Word 2004, brings some new, interesting ways to work, such as the Notebook Layout view with audio notes. Microsoft Word has always represented a struggle between two aspects at odds: a clean, simple interface and a teeming mass of undiscovered features - some of them treasures, and others that are just plain clunky. Word 2004: Streamlines Program but Can Confuse Users

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