Microsoft Office v. X for Mac

Rating:
Summary: Great...but still doesn't sync with Palm!
Review: Basically like the program - Word is particularly useful in a world where anyone who wants to send or receive a document from you probably already uses it. Entourage is a more usable organizer than the Palm desktop in terms of material you can record in the various tasks, appointments, etc. (Palm's is prettier, but only a bit.) The big problem as of this writing (6/10/02) is that we STILL can't sync Entourage to Palm. As far as I'm concerned, that makes Entourage not-yet-usable, since daily syncing with a Palm is, for me and probably most users, an absolute must! So basically I've bought a word processing program with a convenient but, for the foreseeable future, useless (albeit elegant) desktop organizer. Wish it had a database program, too... in theory, Excel can do that, but it's nowhere near as friendly as Appleworks' database program.

Rating:
Summary: The best product for the task, too bad it's MS
Review: First, I'd like to clarify a common misconception that was mentioned in a previous review. The reviewer did not like any version of Office produced after Office 98, because he said his familiar Excel shortcut keys are no longer available. This isn't exactly true. In Office 2001, the shortcut keys that used the command key (a.k.a. the apple key) now use the control key instead. When many people try out the new version, they notice that "apple-k," for example, no longer did what it used to. A little more investigation would reveal that you can still perform all of the shortcut functions you used to. Any that no longer use the command key now use the control key, that's all.
Furthermore, in Office X, you can now set all of the shortcut keys back to how they were in Office 98, if you want.
Now on to the review of Office X:
I use Office all day, every day for email, process document authoring, data analysis, training presentations, and more. Mainly, I use Entourage and Excel. I spend hours a day in each. Overall, I think Office for the Mac is the best thing to ever come from Microsoft. The Si Valley-based MS Mac Business Unit is as far removed from MS as an entire division can be, though, and this is why Office X can be cool. Here's what I like and dislike about Office X:
Likes:
- No other spreadsheet application can drill down, simplify, manipulate, and automate complex data analysis like Excel. If you take the time to learn the ins and outs of Excel, you'll also learn just what all you can do with a list of data and the many patterns in the information you have. You will learn to demand more from your information -- and from Excel, and Excel can rise to that occasion.
- Excel documents will now autosave!!!
- Redundent tasks can be scripted using AppleScript, VisualBasic, or RealBasic.
- Entourage rocks. I receive 500+ emails a day, and they are easily managed and automated. They are automatically filtered when received -- they're automatically received. All the administration of email is taken care of so that I can concentrate on the messages themselves, and since my mail is filtered for me, I know which messages require more concentration and which can wait. Entourage remembers if you have ever sent or received an email from a certain email address or person, and as soon as you type a recipient's name in a message, it will give you a list of potential recipients, based on the characters you have entered so far. I don't use the other personal assistant features, so I can't comment on those.
- Word is the most powerful word processing tool that I have used. Sure, there's a learning curve, but if you want to do something that you don't know how to do, usually you can poke around and figure out how to accomplish it in not too much time.
- PowerPoint is great for presentations. Also, in the Mac version, you can save your preso as a Quicktime movie, which can be streamed on the Web, put on DVD, etc.
- Full, two-way compatibility with Wintel platforms.
- Bug fixes taken care of from the previous version.
- new Aqua interface, improvements to look and operation of Entourage.
- CARBONIZED!!! I don't have to run Office in Classic any more!
- Collaborative tools allow for multiple users working on a single document

Dislikes are below
-It's a MS product. No matter how cool the MS Mac Business Unit is, they're still MS.
- There are still a few bugs to iron out. I've made Excel crash twice so far. Of course, it had been up and running for probably a week or two.
- It seems a little slower.
- Steep learning curve for novices.
- Expensive (I get my money's worth, but others may find the price high for what they do)
- No foreign language grammar check. I compose some documents in French, and I'm not a native speeker. There's French spellcheck, but French grammar check would be awesome.

That's about all I have to say. If you're near an Apple retail store, all of the computers there are loaded with Office for X. Go try it out and see what you think for yourself.

Rating:
Summary: Better than its Windows Counterpart
Review: I am forced to use a Windows PC at work and use MS Office every day. I hate this term, but I would fall into the "power user" classification. I have a Mac with OS X at home, and working from home often, I use the OS X version of Office. I can say without hesitation that the OS X version is superior. With this limited space let me just say that there are no issues sharing documents. I am constantly building spreadsheets, powerpoint presentations, and Word docs at home and sending them to colleagues and customers with no issues. They never even know I am on a Mac. The Mac version is more intuitive and looks better as well. If you want a deep discussion of the features, see the details on Apple's web site.

Rating:
Summary: Pretty much an essential purchase
Review: I recently upgraded from Mac Classic (9.2.x) to OS X Jaguar. That was a story in and of itself. There was a major bump along the way for me there. However, now that it's done, I'm quite happy. OS X Jaguar is great. Best OS ever in my opinion. Fast, stable, feature-rich.

So, now that I've got an OS, I need office apps. I work at home mostly; and the people I work with all use Windows XP in the office.

Whatever your/my opinions about MS Word, Excel, and Powerpoint might be as standalone applications hardly matters these days. The facts are that they have become the de facto office app standards.

I'm happy to say that the Office X versions of these apps are just fine. All the functionality is there. They have been updated to take advantage of some of the cool new features of OS X. And, they have proven to be remarkably stable in my opinion. I've had no crashes at all to speak of.

Most importantly for me, they provide seamless file-sharing with other folks using other systems. I regularly exchange Word, Excel and Powerpoint files with colleagues (via email and our company network) using Windows-based systems without a hitch!

Despite some initial grief from our IT staff about me using a Mac; I've proven to them all that there is absolutely no reason not to. The fact that Microsoft has made these office app file formats stable and sharable across platforms has made my life a heck of a lot easier. There are no barriers to me using a Mac any more.

Rating:
Summary: some retrograde moves
Review: I still use Office 98 for the Mac. Why ? Because the newer versions of Excel are retrograde. Valuable keystrokes (eg Apple-D to fill down) are gone. Yes, I agree that versions 9 and 10 of all Office applications have an improved "appearance", but WHY do they take OUT useful features for USERS ???? Newer versions are supposed to advance the effectiveness of the users. Did M$T forget this principle?

Rating:
Summary: ...
Review: I understand why you would want to buy this product. If you constantly use powerpoint, then you should use this. But if not, than you don't need to buy it.

If you save your excel or word documents under save as, than you can save it as a word format to use with word. It is completely compatable with word, and if you do the work on word and go back to your mac, you can still open it on Apple works.

This is a great program, but if you don't use powerpoint, than don't buy it.

Rating:
Summary: Could have been much more
Review: I use Word and Entourage, every single day. I use PowerPoint at least once a week. I use Excel about once every month. I must use this suite for the interaction I need with PC users, but I am not a happy camper. This program is pretty, and it has some nice features, but, overall, it's mediocre. At times, it's downright bad.

Entourage is the worst of the programs in this suite. The freebie Mac Mail program has the most incredible junk mail filter I've yet used. It does nearly everything that Entourage does as far as making it easy to drop pictures or attachments into email. No, it doesn't have its own Calendar, but I don't use one of those things anyway. The Entourage calendar is a pain to deal with, anyway. It doesn't lay out well, and it doesn't account for schedules like mine. I have no use for it. Entourage also doesn't have a feature to just receive mail. No, one must send AND receive, at the same time, or just Send. Maybe I don't want to send mail just yet. Sheesh. Even MacMail lets you just Get Mail, without sending.

In Newsgroups, Entourage doesn't offer a preference to view only subscribed newsgroups for a particular server. No, I must go to the server, then go to View--Subscribed only. What a pain.

Where Entourage really messes up is its junk mail filter. It consistently lists valid mail as Junk Mail. Much of the time, anything from Apple comes in as Junk Mail. If Mac Mail mistakenly attributes an email after its "learning" phase, correcting it is a breeze: Click on Junk/Not Junk. The program REMEMBERS how to classify mail from the sender after that. To make the same change in Entourage, you have to add the sender to your address book. Maybe I don't want Apple in my address book, hogging up useless space. Why can't Entourage just REMEMBER that mail from that address isn't junk mail??? If I can ever get Mac Mail to connect to my college newsgroups (it's being temperamental about this ONE thing), Entourage is HISTORY.

If that's not bad enough, Entourage [alters] information I cut and paste into its standard text window from Word. Information I get from PC Outlook Express users who cut and paste from Word likewise gets jumbled when it gets to me. This program is a horrible mess.

Word has its quirks as well. Several times, I've been working on a document, I try to save it, then the Save window DISAPPEARS. I can't do anything with the document after that. I can't close it. I can't cut and paste the info into a new document. The doc window just sits there, taking up space. I usually have to quit or force quit to get rid of it. Sometimes, I'm lucky and autosave/autorecover save all my changes to a doc...but sometimes I'm not lucky. Sometimes I lose whole paragraphs of data. Most annoying, and Microsoft tech help is no help at all, as usual.

Word also has a nasty habit of changing the format of whole selections of text when cutting and pasting. I'll format all of a document to say, Verdana 12, and here comes a pasted selection in TimesRoman 12, or 10 or who knows what. I've changed my styles, font preferences, everything that remotely refers to fonts in any preference window anywhere--and it still does this.

Typical of all MS products, this monster known as Office has a really hard time remembering personal preferences for any of the programs, especially font settings in PowerPoint. I keep setting certain things, and Office blithely resets it to what it wants me to have, not what I want. This is like living with my mother.

Finding how to make certain settings in Office is a chore in itself. I don't like it when Word uses AutoType to input information from my address book for me, or when it tries to input a date. My work isn't oriented toward that, so this is most annoying. The place to set this preference isn't under Finder-->Preferences (where it logically belongs), it's under Tools-->Auto Correct-->AutoType. Brilliant. If I turn off my computer, my setting for this changes, according to Microsoft's whim.

If I could, I would junk this program.

Rating:
Summary: 1st Microsoft product I haven't wanted to toss out
Review: I've always hated Microsoft,but have to admit ,this is an excellent program,VERY easy to use.We have Office XP on the other computer(Compaq) so you compare them side bu side.The Mac version seems more streamlined,everything flows.The XP version has too many different panels and that damn annoying paper clip thing,I had used AppleWorks 6 but deleted it after a couple of days.If you have a Mac,get this !

Rating:
Summary: Office Mac is no Hack!
Review: If Microsoft just did a lame port of their software I would have purchased it no matter what, because with a world of Windows users what choice did I have? But what's nice about Office:Mac is that Microsoft not only took the time to make the product feel very Mac friendly, but best of all it plays very well with OS X (in fact as I write this I'm waiting for other leading Mac packages to come out for System X that are months away).

Office:Mac includes the expected holy trinity of programs (the word processor, the slideshow program and the speadsheet) which makes Office a good choice for being your first software purchase after getting up and running with Mac OS X. This suite will allow Mac users to work well with other folks using Windows, so in a professional workplace Office not only makes the argument for keeping your good old Mac, but it also paves the path for upgrading to OS X -- which scores very highly in my book.

The software is very friendly to use and makes ample use of wizards to guide one through a wide range of tasks, like the process of printing onto labels or designing a quick website. The ease-of-use makes the program a good choice for the home user, thus making the package a great gift for the non-geeky. The only downside of the package is that it can be a bit too feature heavy for novice users, but that's hardly a sin and anyone willing to use the Office Assistant will be able to discover a nicely featured set of programs.

While the price tag may seem a bit high, the same package costs pretty much the same for Windows users -- and if you think you are going to use more than one of the featured programs then buying the Office suite makes sense. I guess the real benchmark for me was that after playing with Office for a few hours I made the choice to add it to my Finder Toolbar, which means that I will be using it often in the future.

Rating:
Summary: Great Product for the Average or New User
Review: 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!