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Microsoft Office 2004 for
Mac Standard Edition |
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With dozens of new features, tighter integration among components and a beefed up personal information manager and e-mail module, Office Mac 2004 leapfrogs its Windows counterparts in several key areas. The office suite consists of the four usual suspects: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage. Each module has been improved. Most notable is the “Project Center,” which implements a client- or matter-based approach for organizing files as a component of Entourage. This new function creates a central place to store and organize e-mail, contacts, calendar items and non-Office files for a project. It also provides basic task management tools. Files can be assigned to more than one project and shared. To ease the creation of a project, a wizard prompts the user for information, assigns a color-coded “dot” to related files and establishes “Rules” to connect files to the matter or project. All assembled digital information is accessed from a single screen in Entourage. Click on a project and the Overview displays a calendar view and all “To Do’s” associated with the project. Additional buttons provide information on other files, contacts, calendar items and the like. Project Watch folders exist in Entourage and the Finder to store related Office and non-Office files. Additional links between the files can be created in the Project Center interface, including notes and contact information. Projects can be shared through a network or .Mac account. Administrators can establish access privileges to projects. All content is easily backed up. However, there are limitations to the feature. Overall due dates can be established, such as a court date, but incremental deadlines can’t. While this can be accomplished manually using Calendar, Microsoft should add this functionality. It also would be helpful if Project Center facilitated templates for reoccurring calendar dates for specific projects such as court deadlines for dissolution matters or appeals. A second legally relevant, new feature provides quick access to frequently used text and other “boilerplate” language for use in future documents with a single click. The separate modules also sport some new features. Word includes a notebook layout that mimics the look of ruled notebook paper. The positioning of informational tabs on the side of the screen provide quick access to additional content by category. Since the notebook is designed more for note taking than word processing, the formatting palette uses basic formatting and editing tools such as cut, paste and copy. Notes are searchable and can be augmented with audio notes. Improvements to Word for attorneys include a “Track Change” function that facilitates simplified editing of documents among several users. Word’s “Comment Balloons” are color coded, oval-shaped displays containing the name of the editor, the date of the comment and the comment itself. These are tied to the content of the document being edited. They are placed to the right of the document body, and the changes suggested can be implemented or rejected by clicking on a Smart Button. I found it to be a good work tool although it clutters the page somewhat. Compatibility Reports, which identify potential compatibility problems when sharing Office documents with Windows users or users of older version of Office for Mac, are included as well. Excel provides new, improved tools to create graphs and charts. There also is an excellent page layout view, and an incorporation of a series of Smart Buttons similar to Word. Entourage shows the most improvement. Besides acting as the source application for Project Center, Entourage implements some excellent communication tools. Messages can be grouped by date, subject, sender, size and other user-defined criteria. A new view displays organizational folders, message lists and texts in three columns. Calendar printing to popular Daytimer formats has improved, as well as import capabilities from Apple’s Address Book. PowerPoint incorporates new transitions. More than 100 templates are provided. The most significant improvement is Presenter Tools, which permits the audience to see the current slide while you view its thumbnail, its successor and the notes associated with the current slide. Office 2004 contains dozens of subtle improvements. Support for Ink, Apple’s handwriting identification technology, is provided. Notes can be dragged and dropped hierarchically in Notebook. The new Navigation Pane greatly assists moving from graphic to graphic in a large document, although it’s not helpful for text-heavy files. You can turn off many of Word’s annoying auto formatting efforts. There are literally dozens of others similar improvements. Notably, there is no need for the product authorization that is so familiar to Windows users. A 30-day trial version is available on the Web site. |
Microsoft Price: $399 for the full version, $239 for the upgrade G3 or better; 256MB RAM; OS X version 2.8 or later. Reviewed by David A. Saraceno, a practicing attorney and owner of Pixelcraft Studios, a presentation graphics consulting firm in Spokane, Wash. PROS CONS VERDICT |
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