New Office suite for Mac hits the button

By ADAM GIFFORD

Kevin Browne, general manager of Microsoft's Macintosh business unit, describes the virtues of Office v. X for Mac simply: "This is the killer app for Mac OS X."

Just to make sure there's no doubt, the applications run on nothing but Apple's new operating system, starting at version X.1.

Mr Browne said X.0 was not stable enough, and with the earlier operating systems it lacked some of the features Microsoft needed.

"Also, politically, we needed to make a huge statement about OS X. If it does not work, we are out of business," he said.

As someone who has until now found the Claris (now AppleWorks) applications sufficient for most of my needs, I'm happy to say the Evil Empire has done something right this time.

It's a big advance on Office 2001 for Mac, and also benefits from the substantial improvements of X.1 over the initial release of the OS. Buttons are bigger, icons cleaner, and the Sheets, which replace many alerts and dialogue boxes, allow logical process to the next task.

The developers in Mr Browne's 160-strong Mac team have tried to make Office v. X as "native" as possible, matching the applications to Apple's Aqua interface.

Word, once I'd thrashed around in the preference panel turning things off, is behaving itself, not putting up its usual fight against my spelling and grammar.

It finally looks like a Mac application, rather than a Windows application which got lost on the way back to the office.

New features include some useful mail-merge tools and direct access to the Entourage address book through the menu bar.

Multi-Selection allows you to highlight multiple words or passages and then make a change to all - particularly useful for highlighting or italicising words, or for working in large documents.

The Quartz 2D drawing technology in OS X improves Word's ability to handle graphics. For those writing to length, the live word count, which sits on the lower status bar, saves the bother of having to run the word count tool to check progress.

Entourage, which combines address book, calendar and mail into one program, looked like a good idea in Office 2001 and in this latest version has turned into a useful application. It happily accepted the 800+ names in my shareware address book program, although I lost the categories. The search function makes finding contacts very fast.

The calendar also works well, especially the new tri-plane views, but until the Palm synchronisation is available I probably won't use it much.

As a committed Eudora user, I'm not about to switch to a Microsoft e-mail solution of any kind. If you want to use Entourage, you'll be able to do things like loading your mail down with graphics and multimedia.

Microsoft has integrated its MSN Messenger instant messaging with Office v. X, but warns that, while Entourage X connects to Microsoft Exchange Server through the IMAP 4 Standard, it does not support MAPI, so businesses which require a complete Exchange solution should use Outlook 2001 for Mac.

Excel X gives users the ability to customise keyboard shortcuts. If you are still trying to come to grips with the changes between Office 98 and Office 2001, this will allow you to get back onto familiar territory.

For those who use Excel to create charts, Excel X allows them to make chart elements transparent, a feature previously restricted to graphics programs. Quarts makes the lines and borders in graphics such as pie charts much smoother.

A lot of emphasis is put on creating and managing lists, and there are new tools for working with FileMaker Pro, the most popular database application for Mac.

The last application in Office v. X is PowerPoint. New features include transparency and the ability to integrate QuickTime animation, movies and sound into a presentation.

One key reason for stumping up the $1399 ($899 for the upgrade) for Office v. X will be the ability to seamlessly exchange files with people using Microsoft on other platforms.