Microsoft Office v. X for Mac

Microsoft Office v. X for Mac

Elegant, solid and OS X compatible, Microsoft Office v. X for Mac is an impressive package. Although it doesn’t represent a major upgrade in features or functionality over Office 2001, the suite superbly integrates with the OS X by providing ease of use, a reworked, integrated calendar/contact module, aqua interface and improved formatting tools. It’s easily the best application suite currently available for OS X. For law offices considering a move to X, this office suite will certainly motivate.

The Macintosh Business Unit at Microsoft is the largest development team for the Mac outside of Apple. The unit completely carbonized Office to make it compatible with OS X. This includes a full redesign of interface elements to transfer Office to a true 3D, colorful aqua interface across the entire application suite.

Once you have installed and launched the application, you are presented with the Project Gallery, a remnant of Office 2001. The gallery allows you to select either a blank document or a template to work in any of the application modules. Office v. X’s new “Based On Recent” selection will open an untitled copy of any recent document you have worked on with the original text intact. This permits you to save document templates for use on a different client file, but based upon “boilerplate” language your office has used previously — a nice addition.

Microsoft adds some key features over Office 2001. One of the most useful is the multi-selection feature, which permits you to highlight noncontiguous portions of text in different parts of your document by command clicking on them. Formatting, spell checking or searching occurs only in those selections. Word also adds a “clear formatting” command as well.

Microsoft has improved integration between Word and its revamped Entourage X contact manager. A contact toolbar enables you to insert contact information directly into a Word X document without opening Entourage. You also can schedule appointments or create a new contact directly from the contact toolbar. Data merge capabilities have been greatly simplified. There are dozens of other minor improvements to creating tables, checking spelling and grammar, hyperlinking text and autocorrecting spelling. In addition, Microsoft provides 100 percent compatibility between Macintosh and Windows files.

The upgrade to Entourage is sufficiently significant to make it a full contact/calendar manager alternative for many smaller firms. It tracks appointments, tasks, deadlines, calendar events and telephone calls. Of course, it retains its e-mail capabilities as well. The program will generate onscreen reminders of appointments or tasks and accept calendar/contact entries from other Office modules without having to be launched. Palm synchronization will become available in Entourage once Palm releases OS X compatible conduits.

I didn’t discover many changes in either Excel or PowerPoint, although both have been revised to take advantage of OS X’s Quartz drawing technology. This means you can layer transparent shapes and images on top of one another or over other elements in PowerPoint or graphs in Excel to produce more eye-catching presentations.

Excel has also added an “Auto Save” feature to permit you to recover the last saved document following a power failure or other calamity. Excel also added customized keyboard shortcuts, improved auto insert capabilities and a Mac-only calculator that provides explanations of how simple formulas work in Excel.

Perhaps the most important new element in PowerPoint is its Packages feature, which collects all associated external files of a presentation and allows you to remotely present it using a burned CD or other removable media.

Microsoft requires the user to secure a Microsoft .NET Passport ID in order to register Office X, which in my view is unnecessary and annoying. In addition, if you are accessing the Web while using the Suite, the suite applications take up to 90 seconds to quit. I’m not certain why this occurs, but other users have reported it as well.

As a whole, this suite is a must-have for any firm using OS X.

Microsoft Corp.
(800) 426-9400
www.microsoft.com

Price: $499; $299 for upgrade

Mac OS X Version 10.1 or greater

Reviewed by David A. Saraceno, a practicing attorney and operator of MotionLaw, a forensic animation consulting firm in Spokane, Wash.

Apr/May '02 Issue

PROS
Takes full advantage of OS X technology. Beautiful, functional interface with many ease-of-use improvements. Improved Entourage database is excellent for small office. Full Windows file compatibility.

CONS
Annoying registration procedure. Performance hits on older, Mac OS X compatible hardware.

VERDICT
Much to applaud in this update. A must buy for any firm moving to OS X.