First - Get rid of the Paperclip (Office Assistant)!!! (Desktop/Laptop)
I choose to remove the paperclip animation - I find it intrusive and annoying .. your mileage may vary. You should take a look at it if you haven't seen it though, you might find it useful if you are not as comfortable with Word. Once you become a "Power User" - you will want to get rid of it!
Here are the steps :
A) If the Office Assistant (paperclip) is not already showing, go to the HELP menu and select "Show the Office Assistant".
B) Right click on the Paperclip and select OPTIONS.
C) Uncheck the Use the Office Assistant! (Whew!)
D) Just to be safe - go to the TOOLS > OPTIONS > GENERAL tab and uncheck the "Provide feedback with animation" choice.
E) [Turning the Assistant off in step B will take care of the other Office prog]rams, but in Excel, you will have to go to Tools > Options > Edit to uncheck the "Provide feedback with animation".

Where are all the menu items and toolbars that I'm used to seeing? (Laptop only?)
Word 2000 tries to simplify the menus, showing only the most recently used ones, and a shortened list - I prefer to see all the items! This will also make the toolbars look more like Word 97.
I would suggest going to the TOOLS menu and go to CUSTOMIZE - under the OPTIONS tab, uncheck the first two items ("Standard and Formatting toolbars share one row" and "Menus show recently used commands first"). Your toolbars and menus should now look "normal" again!

Make WORD2000 compatible with WORD97 (Laptop only, at the moment)
If you have an LTU Techbook, you will have Word2000 on the laptop, but Word97 on your office computer. Can they talk to each other? Sort of … here is the easiest way, for the moment, to make this a smooth transition. Let's limit the Word2000 to the features of Word97 (many of us, myself included, are barely using all the 97 features anyway!).
Go to the TOOLS menu and select OPTIONS and then the SAVE tab. At the bottom you should see the choice to "Disable features not supported by Word 97" - check that box. Now, all the files you create should be able to be read by Word 97 with no trouble.

Setting locations for Word to look for the files. (Desktop/Laptop)

Word will default to directories like "My Documents" when you tell it to go look for a file - but what if you want to override that and place files somewhere else (such as in different folders for different courses). You could just create folders under "My Documents" .. or you might want them somewhere else. We need to tell Word where to find them.
Here is an example where we will change the default location, and create the folder if necessary (obviously, if you have already created the folder, you can skip that particular step).
A) Open the TOOLS menu, and select OPTIONS.


B) Select the FILE LOCATIONS tab and highlight the "Documents" line.


C) Click the MODIFY button.


D) You have a dialog box that pops up directing you to choose the new location. For this example, I pointed to the C: drive, and then chose the "Create New Folder" icon, as shown. This let me create a folder called MyWord. Once you say ok, you can see that the location window gets updated as shown.