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Microsoft Office 2001: by Joel Sparks |
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Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage work well, alone
and with others The CD also includes Internet Explorer 5, a GCN recommendation
for the Macintosh (see GCN, May 22, 2000). If Explorer is installed,
some functions are integrated with Office. All four applications in Office 2001 share some common characteristics.
They sport an attractive platinum appearance and extremely "Mac-like"
interface. Menu palettes and buttons are numerous and their small
icons are sometimes hard to interpret, but the Tool Tip that
pops up for each button generally make its function clear. Likewise,
Help balloons are available for nearly every function and most
of them are concise and well written. Only a few fall into the
trap of repeating a function's name instead of spelling out what
it does. The full Help application is fairly useful as well,
although it could use a glossary. For example, the user may wonder
what the difference is between the terms "project"
and "task" as used by Office. (A "project"
is the process of creating a single document; a "task"
is anything with a deadline tracked by Entourage). Opening any of the four Office applications presents a menu
of "projects", templates for a variety of common documents.
(Only a few samples load with the basic install, but many more
projects come in the Value Pack.) Most project files have limited
content, such as the four different shopping lists. The experienced
user will soon click the box marked "Do not show at startup". Word, Excel and PowerPoint share new graphics and HTML abilities as well. When inserting a picture into a document, the user can import graphics in standard formats such as JPEG, or use some of the extensive clip-art libraries in the Value Pack. For those who want to make their own art, basic drawing tools are improved from previous Office versions. Better still, Office can now accept input directly from a scanner or digital camera. Workers who need to put photographs in their presentations should be pleased about that. Once placed, the picture can be manipulated in a variety of ways using the pop-up Picture palette, with control of formatting, drop shadow, transparency, and a variety of Photoshop-like effects filters. In fact, Office is making a fair bid to eliminate the low-end user's desire for more powerful image software like Photoshop, since the user can now go from scanner to eliminating red-eye to stylizing brushstrokes without leaving the Office application. Further evidence of the one-stop-shopping mindset is Office's ability to save documents as web pages. Word, Excel and PowerPoint all let the user paste in hyperlinks, automatically accessing not only from the Favorites list from Internet Explorer, but the History as well. Hyperlinks can be given pop-up screen tips, and can also open documents on the computer, even in other applications. Saving the Office document as a web page includes a number of good options, such as the expected screen size of the viewer's system and the maximum resolution for graphics. And Web Page Preview is built in; it launches Explorer. But the HTML formatting is surprisingly basic. For example, indents and outlining in Word are ignored, although there are at least three simple ways to replicate them in HTML. Experienced web authors won't be choosing Office to make their pages. They will want more control over numerous things, like where linked files are stored and the XML tags that Office automatically inserts. But again Office makes it easy for the beginning user to stay under the Office tent. Word, Excel and PowerPoint have all moved commonly-used functions
from the top toolbar to the floating Formatting Palette. This
requires users to make a slight adjustment, but the new location
offers corresponding advantages. Font formatting buttons, like
Bold and indents, are at the user's fingertips, plus a few more
commonly-accessed menus. Each additional menu in the Formatting
Palette appears as a single collapsed line and is quickly opened
and shut with the little hierarchy-triangle familiar to Mac OS
users. The palette automatically adjusts to save maximum screen
space. The Formatting Palette is also unobtrusively context-sensitive,
adding collapsed menus appropriate to the task at hand. When
the user draws a table, for example, the "Table Cells"
menu quietly appears; when the user clicks back to typing in
the body text, it goes away. One small but enjoyable improvement is the new way to draw
tables. The user chooses Draw Table, then simply sketches out
a box of the desired size. Drawing lines across and down splits
the table into rows and columns with quick swipes of the mouse.
Erase a line (shift-click) and the cells are merged. Drawing
is fast, even fun, and the usual array of formatting options
is then available. A tiny but welcome improvement: Live word count is finally
implemented, a very nice feature for professional writers and
those who must follow strict guidelines in filing reports. Excel 2001 has good import capabilities, too. In some cases,
such as FileMaker, Excel launches the other application to extract
the data. Excel walks the user through the process smoothly,
but if the original application is unavailable, it gets much
more complicated. The List and Name functions are handy, especially when working
with large spreadsheets. Using the List Wizard, the user can
turn a block of data into a list with distinct header rows, like
a table within the worksheet. Clicking on a header lets the user
sort the whole list by that column, a great improvement over
the previous inefficient sorting processes. Excel treats the
list as a single object for layout purposes, preserving data
relationships and formatting when it's moved or copied. The Name
function lets the user ascribe a simple name to a complex calculation,
which can then be called from elsewhere in the workbook. It's
a programming-like option that advanced users will enjoy. Entourage is fairly customizable, but if the user follows
Microsoft's suggestions, Entourage will record name, address,
phone number, e-mail address, etc. for the user and all the user's
contacts. It's easy to import addresses, messages, and other
settings from programs like Eudora, Outlook and recent versions
of Netscape. This address book is then available from anywhere
in Office. For example, in Word, it takes just a few quick mouse
clicks to place a complete address block for someone in the contacts
list. Double-click on the e-mail address, and Entourage launches,
ready to send a message. (The user has the option of using a
different e-mail program instead.) The user can also create tasks, each of which has a deadline and scheduled reminders. Any Office document can become a task by choosing "Flag for Follow-up" in the appropriate Office application. Then a window of current reminders pops up each time an Office app is opened. The user can dismiss a reminder, which won't recur until the next time Office is launched, or use the cute "snooze" feature to send it away for a set period. The reminders could be more effective if Microsoft had provided a small background application to track tasks even when Office is closed. And double-clicking a document in the reminder dialog opens the deadline schedule, not the document that presumably needs working on. Entourage goes further to organize the user's life. Contacts, events, and mail messages can be placed into a number of customizable categories, such as "Work" or "Family". When the user receives a message from someone categorized as "Friends", for example, the message itself can be automatically placed in the same category. This makes it easy to later sort out work e-mail messages from personal ones, for example. Plus, individual links can be created among documents, events and contacts. At its most thorough, Entourage makes possible scenarios like
this: The user sends several colleagues an invitation to a scheduled
staff meeting. The meeting appears on the user's personal calendar
and the calendars of the recipients. Periodic reminders pop up
to prompt the user to work on the agenda. Replies from the colleagues
create a list of who will attend. And when the message from the
boss comes, with agenda suggestions, the user just double-clicks
on the agenda document in the links window in Entourage, thus
opening the agenda in Word for the necessary changes. For workers
who are willing to hand their lives over to Entourage, the app
looks like it will do a pretty good job of keeping things straight
without too much of a learning curve. There are a number of known compatibility issues, as detailed in the five Read Me files that accompany Office 2001. Users of third-party enhancements to Navigation Services should note that Office's Open and Save dialogs caused numerous memory-related crashes until the Action Files utility was disabled for Office. Word is also incompatible with RamDoubler prior to version 9. E-mail messages imported from Eudora lose their attachments. Some advanced FileMaker fields don't import cleanly. As noted above, some fancy PowerPoint animations work poorly or not at all cross-platform, and HTML output from Office still doesn't match the abilities of a true web-authoring program. The sheer number of functions can be confusing for users.
Word alone has at least nine different cursors to be mastered.
The four programs also sometimes overlap, and the Help information
contains notes on things like how to decide whether to use Excel
or Word when making tables. Entourage asks for a fair amount of personal information. Documentation that comes with Office says that this information may be used for things like driving directions -- not an Office function. Given current concerns about privacy and the Internet, and Office's tight integration with Internet Explorer, we need to hear more from Microsoft about how the privacy of Office users will be protected. Overall, though, the new Office is a welcome improvement for Mac users everywhere, and further evidence that Microsoft continues to take the Mac platform very seriously indeed.
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 Article ©2001 Post-Newsweek Tech Media Group, Inc. Reprinted with permission. Photo © Microsoft. Reprinted with permission. Published version available at http://www.gcn.com/gcnlab/reviews Pages ©2004 by Joel Sparks. All rights reserved. |
