Apple - eNews - Office:mac 2001

By Brad Cook
No one has ever doubted the power, impressive feature set, or versatility of Microsoft Office 98 for Macintosh. But many Macintosh owners using Office wished it felt and operated more like a classic Macintosh product and less like its Windows sibling.

At the Macworld Expo, Microsoft announced that it would soon release a successor to Office that would turn those wishes into reality. Slated for release in October, Office:mac 2001 is expected to include a host of new features available only on the Mac.

In this new Office suite, each of the three main applications—Word, Excel, and PowerPoint—will be more robust than before and will offer plenty of new cross-program tools and functions. Meanwhile, a new Mac-only application, Entourage, a combination e-mail client/personal information manager, will join them.

Start Me Up the Macintosh Way
The default start-up screen for Word, Excel and PowerPoint is the Project Gallery, which presents an array of templates for the types of documents you create every day: text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, newsletters, web pages, catalogs, invoices and a host of others. You also have the option of using wizards to guide you through the creation process as you enter data and begin to shape a new project. Office:mac 2001 links its applications with such new features as:

	•	a context-sensitive palette which displays the appropriate toolbar for the work in progress
	•	a group of cross-application image editing tools for reducing red-eye, rotating pictures, applying filters and more
	•	an enhanced clipboard that lets you collect multiple images and bits of text—words, phrases, sentences, or paragraphs—that you can then paste individually or all at once into another document (in whichever Office application you’d like)
	•	an expanded clip art gallery full of images which can be used anywhere
	•	cross-application importing and exporting, which allows you to simply drag files from one program to another

And since it recognizes that many files move between Macintosh and Windows environments these days, Microsoft included a simple mechanism for appending Windows extensions to Office documents, making it easier for Mac Office customers to share documents with colleagues and friends using Office for Windows.

Publish on the web? Another new feature makes it easier to translate all of your Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files into HTML documents faster and more easily than ever before. Entourage also allows you to publish your personal calendar as a web page.

Searching for the Right Word
Word has several new features that make everything from typing a letter to sending off a mass mailing much easier.

Click and Type, for example, allows you to double-click anywhere in a document and start writing. Word fills in the formatting as you type.

The Data Merge Manager—available only on the Mac—is an updated version of the Mail Merge function from earlier versions of Word. Using a single window, you can set up a mass mailing much more efficiently than before. In fact, Microsoft says that you can complete this task in 10 clicks of the mouse; it required at least 50 in earlier versions of the application.

Striving to Excel
Many of Excel’s tasks have been simplified thanks to research undertaken by Microsoft. According to that research, about 60% of us use Excel to create basic lists. So, to accommodate us, Microsoft gave Excel a List Manager. This new feature allows us to enter, sort, filter and format information in lists with simple interface controls.

Microsoft has also added a new FileMaker Import Wizard that makes it easier to open a Filemaker database in Excel, decide what information should be included how it should be viewed.

Also updated are Excel’s AutoComplete and Calculator functions. AutoComplete now presents a drop-down list of items which match your input as you enter it, and the improved Calculator allows novices to create formulas more easily.