Xhris, like you I did my Ph.D. dissertation in Word 2003. (I finished it just before Word 2007 came out. I had a lot of tables, etc., including a lot of illustrations done in XXP. My printed output was totally acceptable. (I got my piece of paper...LOL) And like you, mine was almost 1,000 pages (more if you count the bibliography, index, table of contents, etc.)

And I wish I had Word 2007 for it! The upgrades to it are really awesome, not the least is working in XML.
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Will