There are relatively few new features as most of the reprogramming effort went into making it run on OS X. For many of the new features, Microsoft utilized what OS X had to offer. This is a very good thing and a model of what OS X can do and has to offer to other software companies.

For example, Office X uses the anti-aliased power of OS X's Quartz Drawing capabilities to run the graphic engine that spans all the office programs. Also well implemented is the use of "sheets." That is, when you go to save a document, the "Save" dialog is attached to that document (not the system) and thus, you can do anything else you want to do on that computer while the Save dialog box is up. This means you can go back to the Finder to look up something, open a new document, anything. Here, you can thank Apple for creating the opportunity and Microsoft for utilizing the feature. Below shows how a "sheet" appears (actually it appears to drop out of the top of a document like a roll-a-way blind) and the various "save" options available in Word.

Also new with Office X is something that should have been in Office since documents didn't require translators to move between Macs and PCs: now one can click on the "append file" box and Word document will have ".doc" placed on the end, Excel documents will have ".xls" placed on the end and ".ppt" is placed on the end of a PowerPoint document. In addition, these are "smart" suffixes so that when the name is highlighted for renaming, the suffix is not highlighted.

Although you cannot save in an Appleworks format, Office X can open an Appleworks 6 document. Similarly, you can share documents across platforms as before with Windows Office XP, 2000, and Office 97. On the Mac side, you can share documents with Office 2001 and Office 98. A converter is supplied with Office X for you to give to users of Word 6 and Office 97 (Windows).

I should point out that one thing you don't get with Office X is much paper. There is no manual except for a 6 page pamphlet with a cover that doubles as a place to hold your CD once you've installed Office. The online help is limited at best. No, correction: the online help is dreadful. So if you are new to Microsoft Office, or you just plain like having a paper manual, plan on purchasing a 3rd party book. The CD is supplied in a bubblepack--the kind you get from the hardware store that holds screwdrivers. So unless you like tearing up your hands, have a sharp pair of scissors available to get access to the CD.

Speaking of the online help, the Microsoft Assistant is back, obnoxious as ever. However, you can turn off the Assistant so you can get help without having it rear its annoying self. If you do want to check out the Assistant (or one of its cousins supplied on the CD) be advised that when you click the close box, it still lingers like heartburn for a few moments longer to waive goodby. You can install a number of Assistants for variety or turn them off for a peaceful existence.

As in Office 2001, when starting an Office program you will be confronted by the Project Gallery (this can be turned off by simply clicking on a box) which allows you to select a template from any of the Office Programs. While I tend not to use this, you do have the Project Gallery option in every File menu and this means that you don't have to go back to Finder to start Excel if you are in Word--simply bring up the Project Gallery, select a blank Excel template and go. This can be done from within any Office program.

Although much of these programs appears to be unchanged from Office 2001, there are a few new features. An overview of the new features and some of those from Office 2001 (if you didn't update after Office '97):

In Word:

There are a variety of cool new treats, but for me, probably the greatest addition is non-continuous selection. That is, one can select words, sentences, or paragraphs distributed throughout a document by pressing the Command key as selections are made. Similarly, one can use the Find command to highlight a word throughout a document and then apply a style to all the highlighted words. And, if you got carried away and have a document that is too full of formatting, one can simply select "Clear formatting" from the Style menu and you will have a styleless document.

There is built-in interaction between the programs, mostly Entourage. All entries placed in Entourage's address book are available in Word. So, if you are writing a letter and want to send it to someone in your address book, bring up the Contact toolbar, drop their name in the letter (along with their address) and you are on your way. Mail merge? You bet. You can either run a mail merge via the address book, an export from an Excel document, or from FileMaker Pro. (You can also easily import a FileMaker Pro database into the address book.)

Introduced in Office 2001, you can now have nested tables. That is tables inside tables. While this is often essential for web design, it also means you have better compatibility with Windows versions of Word.

Speaking of web design, like Office 2001, you can directly save a Word page (or Excel or PowerPoint pages) into a web page. Although you can do this, I can't recommend it as these pages are phenomenally longer than they should be. However, they are now more compliant with "other" browsers than in past versions of Office.

One annoying legacy from Office 2001 is that when you open an old document, there's no knowing what zoom magnification it will show up at. I can't seem to find any way to have it consistently open to a repeatable magnification.

Another cute thing also brought in from Office 2001: do you remember when you first got your word processor and you wanted to start something in the middle of the page about halfway down? So you clicked with the mouse where you wanted to start typing, and the blinking cursor laughed at you from the top left of the page. Well now you can do this. What you do is to double-click on the page where you want to start typing and Word will provide all the Returns necessary to get the cursor low enough on the page to the right level and then place a tab to the amount into the page to where your click was. This feature/capability only works in Page Layout view.

While one should never depend on a computerized grammar checker without knowing grammar rules well enough to know what is right or wrong, be advised that the grammar checker in Word is dreadful. I found the grammar checker generally weak and often wrong.

In Excel:

Microsoft has been with the Mac since the original Mac 128 when it released Multiplan. Several years later Multiplna turned into Excel. Now we have Excel for OS X.

If you are a long time Excel user AND you have used keyboard commands, get ready to be annoyed. Many of the key commands have been changed. What's worse is that most of the command key assignments are not shown in the menus. Thus, if you want to know what a key command is for any action, you need to select Customize from the Tools menu, then select "Keyboard..." from the Customize Window, then select the menu you are interested in, then scroll down to the desired action to see whether there is a key command assigned or not. This isn't all new, it happened in Office 2001, but they didn't correct it. At least you can reassign key commands, but you have to go through the pathway I just described to accomplish the task. What is surprising is that among the Word Customization options, you can still select the Word 5.1 toolbar. Yet, there is still no global option for an earlier Excel key command setting. However, I could not find a setting to display the key commands in the menus.

Excel utilizes OS X's Quartz drawing technology to provide some interesting options. Aside from anti-aliased edges, it also allows you to create transparencies in such items as Stacked Area Charts. You can set the degree of transparency of each layer.

For some time Word has had auto-save, and now it's in Excel. Office has a default auto-save for your file every 10 minutes--this can be increased or decreased as you choose.

Another new feature for the Mac is the calculator. It interacts between the spreadsheet and what you enter into the calculator. Aside from the standard simple calculator functions, there are all the various functions contained within Excel.

Microsoft has also worked closely with FileMaker to obtain a variety of mechanisms to coordinate the two. You can drag a FM file from the desktop onto the Excel program, you can open a FileMaker document from Excel's Open command, or you can import the data from Excel's Import command (uniquely hidden in the Data menu, not the File menu). Either way you do it, the next thing that happens is that FileMaker opens (you must have a copy of FileMaker to make this work) and you can then select which fields to import and/or which layouts of fields to import. I was able to get this work with both FileMaker 4 (in Classic) and 5.5.

In PowerPoint:

PowerPoint has probably the fewest "new" features of Office X. Like all the other Office X's, PowerPoint takes as much advantage of the Quartz Drawing capabilities of OS X as it can. Considering how important graphics are to PowerPoint, Microsoft should be grateful to Apple for Quartz.

One handy feature of the new PowerPoint is the PowerPoint Package. In PowerPoint, one has two ways to connect a multimedia item. One can either bring the picture, movie, sound, etc. into the presentation so that a copy of it is part of the presentation (and simultaneously increasing the size of the presentation) or link the multimedia item to the presentation. The main advantage of the latter is that when you link a multimedia item it doesn't affect the final size of the presentation.

While linking a multimedia item to the presentation does keep the size of the presentation down, if the multimedia item isn't carried with the presentation, the presentation will have a gap where the multimedia item should be. Packages solve this by providing a "suitcase" for all the multimedia components required for any presentation.

As in Office 2001, you can use multiple slide masters in the same presentation. But, what's new is that you can utilize Quicktime transitions in your slides. Also, Microsoft claims that Quartz transparencies can be used for enhanced transitions. But after one hour of playing with the program and searching through the limited on-line help and Microsoft's web site, I couldn't figure out how to make the transparencies work.

In Entourage:

Whereas Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are the main components of Office, Entourage has become the heart of the suite. It has received the most of the update energy and in many ways, all the other programs revolve around Entourage. At one point I tried to change a setting and I received a dialog message telling me to quit any other Microsoft applications that may be open because they are all dependant upon the link that is made to that setting.

Despite the obvious effort that has gone into Entourage, it is still somewhat of a work in progress as I had the most problems with this program. Entourage quit on me several times during my testing, and while trying to import my files from Eudora, Entourage kept on quitting on me prior to finishing the import. Admittedly, I had almost 50 Megs of information I was trying to import, but that shouldn't make a difference. It wasn't until I had removed about 5 Megs of information was I able to complete the process. The joke was on me as I found out that I had been using Eudora in a POP mode, and I wanted to use Entourage in an IMAP mode but the files were thereby not compatible.

I also had one other problem: I use the same email account at my work as I do at home with the POP account. Although I was using an IMAP account with Entourage, as I filtered my messages, they were somehow being transferred into my computer,. Thus, messages I had looked at at home were not available to me at work and vice versa. There may be a way around this problem but I spent several days trying to work it out and I couldn't read the manual because Microsoft didn't provide me with one. The online help was of no use here. I also had to recreate my filters from scratch as I couldn't find any mechanism to transfer the rules from the "POP" side of Entourage to the "IMAP" side of Entourage.

Above is a view of the Entourage screen, and to the left is a full size view of the buttons to the program's different components. As shown, Entourage provides a mail account, and address book, a calendar, a place for notes and tasks. The Custom Views provides a place to change how you view what you are looking at between the Mail, Calendar, etc.

While the Calendar will not be any direct competition for programs like Now-Up-To-Date, it will be more than enough for those who want a basic calendar/scheduling option. Working with the Calendar is Office Notifications.

Office Notifications is a small applet installed with Office X that brings up reminders of appointments you've set in the Calendar. These reminders can be integrated with the various programs in Office X so you can bring up a document that you want to do further work on. Office Notifications can remind you of a Calendar event and if you are connected to Microsoft.net, it can send you alerts from there as well. While Office Notifications is supposed to work separately from other Office programs, it seemed to "wake up" only after starting one of the Office programs. This might be because I don't have something set up right, but as there is no manual, I cannot check this.

One curious quirk I found with the Calendar and Office Notifications is I had set up a test meeting on a Wednesday for a Thursday. On Friday, while I was working on the computer, I received a notice for the Thursday meeting. On a whim, I dragged the meeting from Thursday to Wednesday and immediately got an Office Notification about the (now) Wednesday meeting. Why I should get notification of a meeting that was (now) two days old I'm not sure. I don't know whether this is a bug or a feature. It seems that only after you click on the "Dismiss" button will a notice about an event stop from coming up.

One other UI aspect within Entourage I disliked was that preferences were split into two different selections. Under the Entourage Menu, one can find both "General Preferences" and "Mail and News Preferences." If you are not sure where you are looking for some things, you'll spend quite a lot of time going back and forth looking through all the preferences. But, it gets a little worse: let's say you want to set up filters for your mail? That's not in the Mail and News Preferences, that's under "Rules" under the Tools menu. Similarly, how often Entourage checks the server is also not under Mail and News Preferences, it's under "Schedules," also under the Tools menu. In short, if you are not sure where you saw a preference, get ready to hunt and hunt and hunt.

One last aspect I had problems with Entourage was when I would be checking out some aspect of Entourage, seeing various features, and later was totally unable to recreate what I'd seen at a previous journey. I'm not sure where the problem here is, but it's very frustrating to see something and not be able to find it at a future time. I could try to check the manual, but alas, there is no manual.

Lastly:

I would be remiss if I left out several other features of Microsoft Office X:

• MSN Messenger. Microsoft's Instant Messaging program. Any site that supports Microsoft Passport can utilize this program.
• Real Basic Integration: the folks from Real Software Inc. worked with the Microsoft Mac unit to provide integration between what can be done in Real Basic and Office X. The ironic issue here is that Microsoft first brought Basic to the Macintosh around 1985. On the CD you are given a trial copy of Real Basic 3.5.1.
• In every Office program in the Help menu are selections for Downloads and Updates, Mactopia, and even a place to send Feedback on the Program(s). As I write this there are updates for Entourage and updates for French and German users of Entourage and French users of Excel.
• There are a variety of other things in the Office X web site worth checking out. For example, several years back Microsoft dropped the CD version of Encarta. This is available for anyone now with an internet connection.
• There are also Hints and Tips for Office X and Office 2001.

In Short:

In short, Office X is good but I found problems that should have been addressed. Microsoft has traditionally made their programs battleships with every button and bell possible, and the more complex a program is, the more a manual is mandatory. I'm not sure who at Microsoft felt that NO manual was a good idea. There wasn't one for Office 2001 and the lack of one for Office X is no better, even worse. I guess the lack of manual wouldn't be AS bad if the online help was any better, but it isn't.

All that notwithstanding, Microsoft has done a superb job of implementing the nuances of OS X to Office X. However, in each program there are aspects that should have been better: the dreadful grammar checking in Word; the mixed up key commands in Excel; and the confusing aspects of Entourage are but a few of the areas in Office X that could have been better. It is because of that I have to give Office X two different ratings: the program and the program with a lack of a manual.

Office X (by itself)

Applelinks Rating

• Home
• iPhone
• iPod / iTunes
• iLife / iWork
• Software
• Blogs
• Reviews
• Forum