Suite relief: Office 2004 for Mac is welcome mix of fixes, features

By Glenn Fleishman
Special to The Seattle Times

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I have sweet relief every time I launch Microsoft Word 2004 or any of the programs in the newly released Office 2004 for Macintosh suite. That relief comes from knowing that the programs are now fast and reliable, and have finally cast out bugs that rival cockroaches' ability to survive version after version of Office.

But it's the newest features that bring the most joy. Microsoft has a history of adding features instead of fixing problems. This release is genuinely the first I've seen in which the company focused on both fronts.

Office 2004 offers dramatically new ideas in project and document work. Even more significant, these new features are exclusive to the Mac. Each feature has the potential to save substantial amounts of time for projects in which files are shared or passed around.

Individual users will find the dramatically improved speed of Office worth cheering, and many features lend themselves to note-taking and revision. Many tools work as well for students and teachers as businesspeople.

The standard edition, for users running Mac OS X version 10.2.8 or later, retails for $399 or $239 for an upgrade. A special edition for students and teachers retails for $149.

Operating system: Requires Mac OS X version 10.2.8 or later Standard Edition: $399 full version, $239 upgrade. Single-user license. Includes Entourage, Excel, PowerPoint, Word. Available now. Student and Teacher Edition: $149 full version, no upgrade pricing. Three-user license for qualified educational buyers and parents of minors who are students. Same programs. Available now. Professional Edition: $499 full version, $329 upgrade. Single-user license. Includes standard programs plus Virtual PC for Mac Version 6.1. Shipping date not set. Individual programs: Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2004, $229 each for full version, $109 each for upgrade.

Project management: Office 2004 adds the Project Center to Entourage, the suite's personal-information manager. The Project Center coordinates files, events, contacts and e-mails for a specific project. You can create e-mail filters in Entourage so that messages appropriate to the project appear in an e-mail tab, and you can assign contacts as part of a project as well. The calendar feature lets you create timeline events for tasks that have to be completed for a project.

What might be the single standout feature is that you can collect references to documents in the project's Files tab without moving the files. This allows you to see in one place scattered items relating to a project that might span hard drives and networked storage without reorganizing or making copies of each element.

Each of the Office programs has a Projects palette that provides a bird's-eye view of the items in the project. It lets you add documents you're working on to a given project with a single click.

The project can be stored on a shared server mounted on the Desktop so that multiple users can work with the same information in a project.

Project Center is the fruition of what a personal computer was designed to do: tracking and combining many kinds of information into a gestalt. A single glance at an Office project summary could save minutes of rummaging.

In a future version, Microsoft could expand this idea to include automatic project organization. Creo's Six Degrees (www.creo.com) focuses just on e-mail, file attachments and people, but it builds links through analysis of messages, avoiding the explicit steps that Project Center requires. A combination of implicit links and explicit connections would make the feature more powerful.

Track Changes: Track Changes is known among professional writers as "that feature in Word for Mac we have to use all the time that's so broken we want to cry." It lets multiple people edit a document one after the other with all of their additions, deletions and comments color-coded and marked for easy review.

Unfortunately, several previous releases of Word on the Mac had many problems, including identifying an editor as Unknown. In an eerie case, my late friend Cary Lu started showing up as an editor in documents I was working on. Cary is still in my address book, and an error in the program displayed his name instead of the actual editor.

In Word v. X, the Smart Quotes feature — which replaces typewriter quotation marks with curly typesetting quotes — would often fritz the program completely, changing colors and editors while you typed.

Thankfully, Microsoft not only fixed this array of bugs, but added clearer ways to view edits that should aid any group of people revising documents.

First, you can choose from a pop-up menu on the Reviews toolbar whether to view the original unedited document or final documents with revisions applied. Or you can view the original with just deletions shown inline, or the final document with just insertions shown inline.

Second, in Page Layout View, changes and comments are called out to the right in balloons with dotted lines connecting them to the text they reference or modify. It's a beautifully clear way to review exactly what's happening in a document.

Third, also in Page Layout View, you can accept or reject individual changes by clicking appropriate buttons in the balloon.

Compatibility Report: Mac users have to face it: In many cases, we're a minority in an office and even in most of academia. Even a freelance writer such as myself who works primarily on a Mac is constantly sending and receiving Office documents across platforms.

Compatibility Report is a unique Mac feature that should help Mac users produce more Windows-friendly files, which may be a good way to ensure that Macs continue to be used in those workplaces.

The compatibility check can test for individual versions of Mac or Windows Office program compatibility from 1997 to present, or for compatibility across all versions of Office for Mac or Windows since that date.

The palette offers specific recommendations on how to fix each incompatible or potentially incompatible feature. A glowing red toolbox in the main toolbar pulsates when you add objects that aren't compatible with your current platform and version choice.

Taking notes: Word has been able to record audio into a document for some time. But Word 2004's new Notebook feature lets you interleave audio with note-taking, ideal for meetings and class lectures.

Interleaving means that if you take notes while you're recording, the notes are associated with a particular chunk of audio. When you later want to review the main points of a meeting, you can click an audio icon next to that note, and hear just that part of the audio recording.

While this may seem like a small innovation, audio segments tied to notes dramatically reduces wasted time in advancing and rewinding through digital recordings, while making furious note-taking less important because of the ease of later review.

To take advantage of this feature, you can use an iBook, iMac or PowerBook's built-in microphone, but for Power Macs or better audio recording, the audio feed from an Apple iSight camera or an external USB microphone would be a good investment.

The audio note-taking feature works only with live audio recorded directly into the file. You can go back and annotate audio you recorded into it, or play back audio recorded elsewhere. But you can't import digitized audio.

Exterminator Edition: You could call Office 2004 the special Exterminator Edition because of all the past detritus it's shoved out the door, but that would overlook the new ideas that Microsoft has baked into the latest release.

For the right group of people, Office 2004 removes the drudgery and replaces it with more productive, more creative work.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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