Average Rating: 
Rating:  - The Common Review of Microsoft Office v.X, pt 2
Word
As you might expect, Word is the heart and soul of Office. If you didnÕt need a better word processor, the rest probably wouldnÕt matter too much. Most of the improvements that will matter to me were here. Being able to strip out the format structure of a document that doesnÕt look or play right by using Clear Formatting is a big help. No matter how cross-platform a program tries to be, sometimes it just doesnÕt do what you want or expect! Being able to start from scratch is a big help. Vast improvements were made in the Data Merge (what used to known as Mail Merge) features. Ever since Word 3, IÕve always thought doing a mail merge in Word was a nightmare. Now with the advent of Entourage (first added to Office for Macintosh in version 2001) and the revamping of the Data Merge feature, Microsoft says itÕs now possible to do a mail merge in as few as 10 steps, over the 50 and up it took in Word 98. Word has added transparency capabilities (based on the same OS X Quartz 2-D engine that Excel and PowerPoint do) into itÕs drawing feature, so it is moving farther into the realms of page layout programs with graphic functions. Web functions have become more and more integrated into other programs of late, and Word is no stranger to them. Taking two seemingly distant features, namely picture importing and text bullets, Word now lets you make custom graphic bullets, and treats them like regular bullets in documents with bullet lists. How cool it that! A real world feature that means a lot to me is WordÕs continued backward and cross-platform compatibility. Multi-platform companies usually donÕt convert all at once, and there is almost no way to know what a person at another company has in terms of what version of Word. Microsoft has added a new function called Compatibility to WordÕs Preferences in the File Menu. Somewhat different to the save format feature, Compatibility will actually disable features that do not exits in earlier versions of Word. When you save down a document to a different format, you used to get a message saying that certain features in your document may not be available in that format, but doesnÕt tell you which ones. Now you donÕt need to worry about that, since you took care of that by telling Word which version you wanted to be compatible with up front. If you ainÕt got it, you ainÕt gonna loose it! COOL! KudosÕ and bugaboos
One thing that always drove me nuts about Office 98 is that dialogue boxes of similar functions didnÕt even come close to looking the same between the various programs. DidnÕt these people EVER talk to each other. So far, I havenÕt seen that problem in Office v.X. The menu bar icons are consistent throughout each program, adding to the unified feel of it, rather then making it seem like four programs packaged under one heading. No more Office Manager. Thank you É thank youÉ THANK YOU! Entourage canÕt import from the OS X Address Book. But then the Address Book canÕt export either, so I guess it all works out. Word has a Normal template that lets you pre-assign formatting like font face, size, document margins and the like. Why canÕt we have one like that in Excel. At least for font face, size and things like that. None of the Office programs have the Spelling/Grammar checker as a default icon in the toolbar. You have to go to the arrow to the right of the Help button to get it. Adding it is no big deal, but come on! Custom header/footer information doesnÕt seem to work too well in Excel when sending the spreadsheet to an Excel 98 user. It creates an out of memory error. DoesnÕt seem to matter whether the document was saved as an Excel workbook or in the more universal Excel 97-2002, X 5.0 & 95 format. The custom header/footer feature in Word appears to work OK in saved down documents. Various reports have mentioned bugs in Office v.X attributing them to fonts, or other Value Pack items. Some have mentioned issues with QuickTime plug-ins with browsers or the OS X native version (beta) of RoxioÕs Toast CD burning software. Be cautious when adding things from the Value Pack. If you do them a few at a time, it wonÕt be so hard to track them down if you run into problems. Overall
By the very nature that you have OS X means you are willing to go out onto the thin ice for a while. So belly up to the bar and get this program. End of story.
Rating:  - Great Product for the Average or New User
If you're thinking about getting a Mac and you're concerned about needing Microsoft Office for compatibility with others, then this might be OK for you. Yes, Word, Excel, and Powerpoint have worked great on the Mac since before Windows was a useable product. That's the good news. The less-good news (that you might not really care about) is that some of the most advanced features of Office on the PC are not available in v.X or any other Mac version. These are mostly esoteric things like debugging capability in Visual Basic. Microsoft claims that there are features in v.X that are not in the latest version of Office for PC [perhaps true at the time that v.X was released], and this may be literally true but irrelevant. There are features in the XP version of Office that are not and may never be in a Mac version. For anybody who just wants to be able to do moderate writing or presentations, this product will work just fine. But, it will not be compatible with the PC versions in *every* feature. [Now that I think about it, the problems are usually worse when going from PC to Mac rather than Mac to PC.] Let me put it this way: I am a good user of both Windows and Mac, but I am a Mac fan by nature. Until recently I only owned Macs, but used PCs at work. Recently I was laid off and needed a computer for consulting work. As much as it hurt, I bought a PC laptop to get the advanced features of Office XP. I still love the Mac and OS X, and I even like v.X. But in my business I couldn't make a living off of v.X. Microsoft controls the Office experience, and they make it work better in Windows. If you don' know or care anything about esoteric advanced features, please go get a Mac, Jaguar, and v.X!
Rating:  - Top notch stuff
Mr Barker from Illinois has probably written down everything anyone will ever want to know about the technicals of Office:mac. Thanks mate. My penny's worth is that this Office program is the most slick, free flowing suite of programs I have ever worked with. It makes (new & improved?) Office:Windows look prehistoric and that awful thing from Lotus just, well, awful. Word and Excel have been transformed and are now both crashproof and visually appealing - unlike the Windows version. Entourage, the email program, has a first class layout and options menu. You can transform your layout in almost any way you wish. (Importing address books from yahoo is causing me some grief, but I'm sure that's more me than them). Overall, I'm just sorry our Windows friends aren't aware of what they are missing. All that stuff about software not being available for mac and the processors being slower than Intels and AMDs. What a load of hogwash. This is a top notch product for people with style and imagination. Right On!
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