Microsoft Works gives you the essential tools you need for your home PC: word processor, spreadsheets, database, calendar, address book, e-mail tools, and more. Easily manage your personal finances, budgets, and spending down to the penny. Use the rich photo-editing tools in Works Suite to correct, organize, and enhance your images to make them great pictures and fond memories. Help everyone in the household learn more and do research for school. Make traveling a breeze and take the stress out of road trips by mapping your route, printing directions, and finding points of interest, restaurants, and hotels.
Just a warning to everyone, make sure you have everything you're supposed to have right away. I'd even take your Gateway computer to a Gateway store and have them verify that everything is included. Or just don't buy from them at all.
So besides not working if you don't have the disc, This Suite is pretty decent, I really like the Streets application (but it doesn't work if you don't have the disc)
In older versions of Word you are able to record macros by performing a sequence of actions. In Word 2002 you can do the same, but with one important difference: macro does not remember font attributes like underline, italic, bold, style, font etc. If you're a PC guru you may probably be able to repair such incomplete macro by entering Visual Basic Editor, but if you aren't, you'll probably be helpless.
Word 2002 has also some other bad characteristics. One of them is the size of its files. A 34 Mb Word 97 file fattened to enormous 49Mb in Word 2002 and a 55 Kb file to 70 Kb.Another is a fact that almost all of the Spelling&Grammar and Auto Text options are turned on by default. If you're not an English or an American, you need to do a lot of clicking before you can begin to work with Word normally. And poor you if you don't know what to turn off to make auto corrections and other disturbing features disappear. Try to imagine what happens if you write in Slovenian language with the English spell checker turned on! Microsoft should bear in mind that only (small) part of the world is English speaking and writing.
There are also some troubles with cut and paste (Clipboard memory seems to be unreliable).
PSI gave Word 2002 4 stars for its basic word processing features, but only 1 star for its macros and reliability.