Customer Reviews

Microsoft Office v. X for Mac [Old Version]

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Office is far and away the best thing Microsoft does, and probably the main reason for their dominance in the software industry. The Mac OS X version of Office is generally regarded as superior to the Windows version, so this is the very best version of all. Having used a trial version for a month, I have to admit that it is in many respects very impressive. Although it occassionally misbehaves, for the most part it works splendidly with the OS X operating system. The interface is very nice: it looks better even than Apple's office suite, Appleworks. It does sometimes hog a little more CPU when it's open but not being used, but that's typical of 3rd party carbon ports.

Despite the many fine qualities of his app, I cannot give it a complete endorsement. I suspect that many people buy MS Office because of its prestige and its dominance in the market, not because they necessarily need it. If you rarely use spreadsheet, don't really need to make presentations, and don't need all the extra features of MS Word, then you don't need this application. Excel and Powerpoint are industry standards. If you're in business and you need such things, those are the ones to have. If you're not, you don't really need them. The spreadsheet and presentation program that comes with Appleworks will do fine. (Or if you don't have Appleworks, install XDarwin and use gnumeric or KOffice for free.) As for MS Word, well, to tell the truth, I prefer the Appleworks: it's simply easier to use. In all the times I've used Appleworks, I've never had to go to the help browser to figure out how to accomplish something. With MS Word, even a simple task such as changing or realligning paragraphs requires a visit to the annoying little help box. While I recognize the awesome power of the program, I just don't need anything quite that sophisticated. I suspect that there are a number of people out there who shell out the big bucks for MS Word or Office but who don't really need its power. There's no reason for that. Nor is there any reason to buy it just so you can open us MS Word documents. Appleworks, Abiword, and OpenOffice will open all but the most sophisticated word docs. As for those they can't open, well, let's face it: Mac and Linux users really need to begin putting pressure on people to send documents in file types that use open standards, like rtf and PDF. There's no reason why non-Windows users should cooperate in extending Microsoft's dominance in the market.

To start with, make sure you are buying Office for the right reason. It's not meant for the timid home user just looking for something Jr., and Sally can write their book reports with. You want to do that, then just stick to AppleWorks (which I also use, in conjunction with Office). If you're not used to Office, yes, it could definitely have a steep learning curve. But if you're an experienced Mac Office user, working in OSX, then this version is a must, if for no other reason than it runs natively in OSX which makes it substantially faster than previous versions running in Classic mode. For those who claim all MS did was make it pretty, the interface is a rsult of Apple's Aqua interface, not a primary thrust of MS's MBU. Crashing? I've used Mac Office v.X for well over a year now, and I can honestly say, I cannot recall once having the machine crash while running Office. And for the person who compared using Word for page layout vs. Adobe FrameMaker...I use Frame daily at the office to layout books (I'm a designer of books and am forced to use Frame for it's XML functionality), and that's a truly unfair comparison...it's like comparing AppleWorks paint mode with Adobe Photoshop. They are completely different applications for entirely different tasks. Also, I find its cross-platform compatibility with Office XP (et.al.) to be seemless so long as the same True Type fonts are used between both PC and Mac systems.

Need more info on running Office v.X? Microsoft has also published a book called Office v.X Inside Out that I got when I purchased my software which has returned my investment on the book many times over. Even to an experienced Office user, there are many helpful procedures in here that will help lessen the upgrade learning curve.

The only reason I don't give MS Office v.X five stars is because I don't believe anything is perfect...but for the life of me, I can't see where this version of Office is lacking at the moment. This is a good investment for offices small or large.

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!

To start with, let us accept that Office is bloatware. It is big, relatively unwieldy, and is full of features. A quick scan of the menus and cryptic toolbars almost screams "DESIGNED BY A COMMITTEE".

On the other hand, this is not all bad. I use Word ALL of the time and Excel on a regular basis. I keep trying to find an alternate word processor, so I've download Nisus and iWrite and a host of other toys. Most of these are perfectly respectable word processors, but I rarely get far before I need to use something I'm used to in Word. Sometimes it is image embedding, sometimes it is an obscure cross referencing facility, and sometimes I need to build a table that spans pages and, oh, and, oh yeah, and .... Word has the BEST tables facility. I used to work with a guy called Matrix Breath, so I really got to know tables.

Suddenly, I'm exporting my document in RTF and a promising application has been demoted to "toy". This is actually the upside of bloatware. It's sort of like those toolkits one always drools over in hardware stores with nine hundred ratchet bolt heads, a glistening array of extender bars, and six power grip handles, one for each arm of Siva. Normal humans never need these kits. They may buy them, use one small set of components, then lose a piece and then go out and buy a screwdriver.

My plumber owns four of these, all calibrated. My auto mechanic owns six, because he needs English, metric and Alfa Romeo.

The downside of bloatware is the learning curve. You really have to learn in order to use even 10% of all the features. Did you know there is an equation editor? Did you know that there is a garbage grade drawing program? Did you know that there is an almost lame, but actually useful image processing component? Word v.X can probably edit movies and burn DVDs, but if you can't get to Dungeon Level XVI, stick with iMovie and iDVD.

Yes, you do have to spend your first half hour with Word disabling the "Do What You Think I Mean" features. I learned how to format a business letter back in grade school and I'll insert my own superscripting, thank you very much.

Still, it is no exageration to say that Word is possibly the best piece of bloatware ever written. (EMACS is a close number two).

As for Excel, it too is a fine piece of bloatware. VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet was almost lapidary. It had just enough stuff in it to sell Apple IIs. Lotus 123 started the accretion process and at some point, the planetary disk coalesced into Excel which lets you solve partial differential equations using the Karmarkar algorithm and format the result in cuneiform. It takes two extra keystrokes for hieroglyphics.

I don't even use those little calculator programs anymore. I just keep Excel running - no sweat under OS X - and then, when I decide I didn't mean 2+2, but I really wanted a regression analysis, I already have my data sitting right where it can do me some good.

As for Powerpoint. I haven't used it in years. Yes, so I'm a mutant. Mutants are IN nowadays. Ask Hugh Jackman or Anna Paquin. My niece wanted to make a birthday card and she accidentally started up Powerpoint. Well, it has mutated. You can do collage animation, it supports sound, video, programmatic sequencing and even some lame user interaction. It's no threat to Macromedia, but these features are such time sinks that we might be spared a few bullet slides.

As with everything else in the Office suite, its accumulators crackle with barely restrained power. (Any Doc Smith or IBM 1130 fans out there?)

So, if you are a normal human. Try getting a normal human office suite. Appleworks is just fine. If you need more, more, more, then you should break down and go for Office. It definitely has more, more, more, just like Bill Gates.

As a bonus, the Macintosh version and Windows versions eat the same file formats, so you can freak out Windows users.

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.

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.

Some very nice person posted this. So I feel it's my duty to spread the word.
You may get a "Word has unexpectedly quit your system has not been damaged" message. You'll see an angry review below about someone who was broken by this problem.

Do the following
1. Open your folder with your user name
2. Open your library folder
3. Open your microsoft folder
4. DELETE the following two files:

Word Font Substitutes
Word Settings (10)

If for some reason you are having trouble finding the files just type them into the folder names into your search engine and you should be able to locate them. Microsoft Word will immediately work again and the files will be recreated automatically.

SPREAD THE WORD (v.X)!

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.

This suite of applications represents what OS X can do; the Aqua interface is beautiful and the ease of use is greater than ever. The Formatting Palette, introduced in Office 2001, was something that I didn't use at first but now find invaluable! I wish it existed on Windows Office at work. It seems to be improved in Office version X. Excel's new Print Preview is welcome, I am a heavy Excel user and like to use it to lay out some of the hardcopy I create, and the new Print Preview replaces the eyesore Preview from 2001.

The number of new features since 2001 isn't that great, but the real feature is that this suite is native OS X and has a true Mac look and feel. Microsoft began to win me over with Office 2001, and Office X has made my migration to OS X worthwhile.

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 !