Office re-modelling for Mac

Pro

Except for a few risk takers out there, most of us don’t welcome major change. We need convincing evidence that leaving our comfortable ruts will benefit us. This is especially true when a change involves something we use every day, something our livelihoods depend on — for example, our operating systems and software programs. 

With the release of Office v.X, Microsoft may have given Mac users a reason to leave the rut of the Mac OS 9 operating system. Thousands of us rely on Word, Excel, Entourage, and PowerPoint, and those applications now run natively under Mac OS X. In fact, the new versions of these programs don’t run any other way, unlike some programs that work with both OS 9 and OS X. In a very real sense, the arrival of Office v.X legitimises OS X.

Different but familiar

With every upgrade, the first question most people ask is what’s new about it? For Office v.X, there are two seemingly contradictory answers: Everything and Not that much. Yet both answers are correct. 

Mountains of Code

For applications to run natively under Mac OS X, developers must rewrite large portions of them, especially if they’re going to take full advantage of the Aqua interface. It can take months to port one application using Apple’s Carbon application programming interfaces (APIs); all the underlying code that makes the program work needs revising, and every dialogue box, tool bar, and window needs tweaking to look right in Aqua. 

Microsoft developers had to port 25 million lines of Office code to OS X. Microsoft Office v.X consists of the four main applications; six ancillary programs (Clip Gallery, Database Daemon, Equations Editor, Graph, Office Notifications, and Organization Chart); and dozens of other files, such as shared libraries. Rewriting all that code required a mammoth programming effort that’s lasted more than a year. Much of that work went into Carbonisation rather than into new features. So although just about all of Office has changed under the hood, what you’ll most notice is the new Aqua paint job.

That’s not to say that Office does not have any new features. Entourage X leads the pack with a significant facelift, and Word X has a few nice additions. Microsoft gave Excel X and PowerPoint X comparatively short shrift in this revision.

All-over ‘aquafication’

Each program has been revised to follow the Aqua user-interface guidelines, adding a beautiful new look that may cause some confusion and require some adjustment. Word’s Replace command, for example, has always been 1-H, but Aqua reserves that keystroke for hiding the current application. 

So Word X now uses (apple key)-shift-H for Replace.

A Change to Sheets

Office now uses Aqua’s sheets for saving files; sheets are special dialogue boxes that slide down from the title bar of a document window. With sheets, you never lose track of which window a dialogue box applies to. 

And, because sheets are attached to the document rather than the application, you’re freed from an annoying Mac OS 9 trait: being stuck in an application by a dialogue box that must be dismissed before you can continue. If you’re in PowerPoint when your Entourage Calendar demands your attention, for example, you can take care of it right away.

Quartz Transparency

Taking advantage of yet more new Mac OS X technology, Office v.X now uses the Quartz graphics layer for its drawing tools, allowing for anti-aliased and transparent graphic objects.

Transparency might not sound like much of an improvement, but it can make a big difference in your documents. For instance, transparent elements in PowerPoint, Word, and Excel charts can help you present your data more clearly.

Although Office 2001 had a Semi-transparent option for graphics, it provided much less control than version v.X, which allows you to set an exact transparency percentage. And thanks to Quartz’s superior rendering, you get smooth colour gradients and higher-quality transparency.

Even though Quartz-driven transparency is a Mac OS X–only feature for Office, documents with transparent objects are still readable in older Mac and Windows versions of Office. These applications display the transparent parts of the graphics as dithered patterns, and you can’t edit the transparency level.

Easy on the Eyes

A large part of updating Office’s interface was creating 700 new icons and changing 800 dialogue boxes. Tool bars and their icons are bigger, more colourful, and more detailed, making them easier to understand — and nicer to look at. 

Scroll and Click

Thanks to the built-in support in Mac OS X 10.1, Office v.X applications are able to use some features in third-party mice and keyboards. Mice with scroll wheels and two buttons work; clicking the right button is the same as control-clicking, giving you easy access to contextual menus.

Entourage X

From an interface standpoint, Entourage 2001, Office 2001’s big addition, wasn’t much more than a buffed-up Outlook Express 5. The personal information manager (PIM) features of an enhanced address book, calendar, tasks, and notes were clearly shoehorned into Outlook Express’s interface. But Entourage X’s interface has had an extensive overhaul. 

Easier to Switch

Besides the Aqua look, you’ll find big buttons that switch between Address Book, Calendar, Mail, Notes, and Tasks, plus the vastly improved Custom Views. For the keyboard-oriented, each task area has a keyboard shortcut for quick switching.

At-a-Glance Improvements

In the Calendar, events spanning multiple days now show as banners rather than as a string of repeated events. Colour-coded days indicate workdays and weekends, and you can display a task list next to the calendar. New buttons in the tool bar toggle between Day, Week, and Month views.

Address Additions

When you address a new e mail message, a list of recently used addresses pops up, as do the usual address lookup choices that appear as you type. 

The recently used addresses appear regardless of whether they’re in your Address Book, and names are prioritised, with the ones used most often at the top of the list. If you accumulate too many names, you can clear the list or even turn it off altogether. 

E-mail Movies

You can now copy formatted text, pictures, and even QuickTime movies from other applications and paste them into an e-mail message without losing the formatting. As one example, a realtor could drag a Word brochure for a property, including JPEG-formatted photos, into the body of an e-mail message for a prospective buyer, rather than enclosing the brochure as an attachment. Because many people — especially Windows users — have difficulty dealing with attachments, this addition could smooth the communication process. 

Passwords

New support for the Mac OS X Keychain means that you can let the system manage the passwords for all your mail accounts, without having to store them in Entourage (thus leaving your e-mail vulnerable to whoever wanders by your desk).

Custom Views

If you are organising your life in Entourage, you need tools that help you quickly sift through its wealth of information. All the task areas now have dedicated Custom Views that let you show selected data; for example, Mail Received Today or Events Due In The Next Week.

You can create and save your own Custom Views, slicing and dicing data in any number of ways. For example, if you assign a common category to all of the items associated with a particular project, a Custom View can show you everything about that project, including appointments, e-mail, contacts, notes, tasks, and all the files you’ve created to support the project. 

New Way to Notify

Because Mac OS X does not allow extensions, the new Office Notifications application takes over the job of popping up and alerting users when Entourage reminders come due.

Room for Improvement

The PIM features in Entourage X still need improvements. Entourage is still a single-user application, so you can’t share your Calendar with coworkers. You can assign priorities to tasks but not to events. And when you complete tasks, they disappear from the Tasks pane next to the Calendar, rather than being shown crossed out. Most annoyingly, because Palm hasn’t completed native Mac OS X conduits, you can’t synchronise Entourage to your Palm handheld. Microsoft promises to make a free downloadable update available when Palm gets up-to-speed.

Word X

The most useful new feature in Word is non-contiguous text selection, which allows you to select one or more separate blocks of text in one operation: Select the first block of text, hold down the (apple) key, and then select the next block.

Word applies your next operation to all of the selected text. Say you’re formatting a report with headings at the start of each section. You can scroll through the document, selecting each heading as you go, and then apply a style with one click. 

Non-contiguous text selection also allows you to choose parts of your document for tasks. For example, you can check the spelling of the body of a report without slogging laboriously through that table of names and addresses in the middle. 

Clear the Decks

One long-overdue new feature is the ability to clear all formatting of a selection and reset it to the default style for that paragraph. 

Excel X

Although there are not a lot of new features in Excel, the program feels surprisingly fresh, again thanks to Quartz and Aqua. Text and numbers in cells seem crisper and easier to read, and improved shading in the row and column bars makes it more obvious which cell is selected. When you edit a cell, it appears to lift a bit above the rest of the worksheet, with a drop shadow that makes the cell you are working on very easy to pick out on screen. 

Custom Shortcuts

For hardcore users, the most useful addition to Excel X will be customisable keyboard shortcuts. As in Word, you can add, re-assign, or remove keyboard shortcuts. If you’ve been using Excel for several versions, this will be especially welcome, since Office 2001 remapped many long-standing shortcuts, such as (apple)-B for blanking out a cell’s contents. The ability to customise the keyboard in Excel allows longtime users to restore those familiar shortcuts.

Transparent Charts

When you generate charts in Excel, you can now set the transparency of individual bars, columns, or other chart components. For example, in 3-D charts, you can make the front-most elements translucent, so you can still see information in the rest of the chart. And because of Quartz anti-aliasing, jagged chart lines are a thing of the past.

Data Recovery

Excel’s new AutoRecover feature automatically saves a snapshot of your worksheets at the timed intervals you have set. If Excel crashes when you haven’t saved for a while, AutoRecover brings back all or part of your unsaved work when you reopen your document. You should then save it right away.

PowerPoint X

Like the rest of Office, PowerPoint lets you set the transparency of drawn objects or pictures, and it uses Quartz’s text manipulation and layout abilities to anti-alias text on your slides, making for clearer and more-attractive presentations. 

The Whole Package

New to PowerPoint are PowerPoint Packages. A Package gathers your presentation together with any linked files into one folder, which you can then burn to a CD or e-mail to a colleague. 

Comprehensive QuickTime

PowerPoint 2001 introduced the ability to turn presentations into QuickTime movies, but the movies were more limited than the original presentation, lacking interactive features such as hyperlinks and slide transitions.

PowerPoint X’s movies now look and act more like the presentation running inside PowerPoint, so presentations that you save as QuickTime movies and put on the Web or distribute on CD will display all of your presenting genius.

You’ll also find support for the TV-style transition effects built into QuickTime, such as cross-fades and circle wipes, in addition to PowerPoint’s slide transitions set. 

The Last Word

The initial release of Mac OS X was embraced by early adopters and the curious, but for most of us, it didn’t improve on the way we were working in Mac OS 9 — quite the opposite, in fact. But the one-two productivity punch of Mac OS X 10.1 and Office v.X can’t be ignored, nor can Microsoft’s commitment to OS X.

If you use Office and you’ve been sitting on the fence, wondering whether you should move to Mac OS X, Office v.X is a good reason to make the leap and hit the ground running.

What does it need, and what will it cost?

A full installation of Office v.X will require about 200Mbyte of disk space. Thanks to Mac OS X’s intelligent memory management, there’s no need to muck about with application memory settings, as was sometimes the case with Office 2001; as long as you have at least 128Mbyte of RAM, Office v.X should run fine. You’ll also need to run Mac OS X 10.1 — Office v.X requires it.

Mac OS 9 Support

The Office 2001 package will remain available for users of Mac OS 9 and earlier, but it has been placed into maintenance mode. Updates, if any, will be bug fixes and changes needed to maintain compatibility with possible future classic Mac OS releases. But any significant Office development will occur on OS X.

An upgrade to Microsoft Office v.X costs €392. The full version retails for €766.

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