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Office:mac 2001 continues the recent trend of excellent Mac software from Microsoft. The trend began with Office 98, was extended by several iterations of Internet Explorer and Outlook Express, and has reached a new high point with the release of Office 2001.
The new Office is the clearest indication yet that Microsoft is no longer adamant about forcing Mac users to abandon the Macintosh way of doing things in order to live in a Windows dominated world. As a frequent Office user for over ten years, during the past month I have found Office 2001 to be a powerful tool to help me get though my workday.
Of the two-dozen applications I use on a regular basis, none is more important to me than email. My life's activities are encoded in a continuous flow of messages, and managing them has become more of a challenge every day. Office 2001's answer to the flood of email is its newest component, an application named Entourage. Entourage has a mixed legacy: it is made up mostly of Outlook Express version 5, to which has been added an integrated calendar and beefed up contact manager.
The transition from one email client to another is never easy, but I found the move from Outlook Express to Entourage to be almost transparent. Importing my contacts and calendar from Now Contact and Up-To-Date was more problematic, but not because of Entourage. My Now Contact file became corrupted at some point several years ago, and did not import until I converted it to text and cleaned it up. After the data was moved into Entourage, it has been fine.
As I noted earlier, Entourage is a hybrid, and while its email implementation is outstanding, its calendar shows a few of the weaknesses common to version 1 programs. The calendar display is a little buggy, overdue tasks do not carry forward unless they have a reminder attached, and a few bugs lurk in the contact list. However, none of the problems uncovered thus far are serious, and they can be worked around. For a 1.0 effort, Entourage exceeds what most version 1 programs deliver in terms of polish and features.
Links are a new feature introduced in Office 2001. Most evident in Entourage, links allow the user to collect various items in Office under one umbrella. For example, consider an email that starts off a series of events like this: first, the email arrives. In order to respond, you need to make a few phone calls, and perhaps do some research on the Web. It is possible to link the original email to the contacts that require phone calls, place the results of those calls in a new Word document and link it back to the original email. Next, browse the Web, and add several URLs to a new email message, attach the Word document you created, and send the result. By using the links, it is possible to look at each step of the process of creating your response. Everything in Entourage can be linked: calendar events, to-do items (called tasks), reminders, contacts, and notes. Moreover, each type of item can also be assigned one or more color-coded categories.
Integration in Office is not limited to links. In an effort to make them more alike, the other applications have each undergone some relatively minor revisions that will surely make new users happy, but may infuriate some existing users: the keyboard shortcuts, many of which have not changed in years, have been reassigned so as to make them more consistent across the entire suite. Excel is the most affected, and a complete list of the changes is in the Excel ReadMe file.
In addition to the shortcuts each of the other three Office applications, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, have received a facelift. The Mac OS X inspired ribbed look, which can be turned off, is standard. Scalable icons appear in the dock when running under Mac OS X. And extending the interface integration between the applications beyond the keyboard shortcuts, each app now shares a formatting palette, which collects the most commonly used editing functions into a single common interface.
Each application has one or two new features that stand out. PowerPoint can save presentations as QuickTime movies, Excel sports a new list manager, which helps when working with data in database form, and Word's standout feature is a new contact toolbar and data merge manager that simplifies creating mail merges using the data contained in Entourage. Another feature I especially like is the spelling dictionary, which uses the same custom words in all four programs, and works everywhere in Entourage including subject fields and other less common text fields that often do not get spell checked on many other applications. Moreover, Microsoft has finally fixed one of my pet peeves, and it is another indication of their desire to make Office a real Mac application: the Preferences menu item is now under the Edit menu where it should have been all along, instead of under the Tools menu.
A few annoying glitches have shown up in the new version. QuickView, a Control Strip module that uses the data in Entourage to beep reminders when Entourage is not running, does not work on my machine. The floating suggestions in Word that pop up in an attempt to guess what I'm typing sometimes leave a blank white space when they disappear, forcing me to save in order to see the complete text again. There are no manuals whatsoever with Office 2001, a provision that probably works for experienced users, although I am not so sure about users new to the Mac and to Office.
I have written in this column before of the deep skepticism I have developed while watching as Microsoft applications went from being good useful tools to terrible ports of Windows applications that no Mac user would choose unless they were forced. In the stunning turnaround of the last several years, Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit has impressed me with the depth of their commitment to making great Mac software. Office 2001 is the latest example of how the Mac community benefits from Microsoft's ability to turn out software that allows Mac users to survive and prosper in a Windows dominated
world.
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"Office
2001: Mac Users Win Big"
