What’s the best productivity suite on any platform? Made up of 25 million lines of code, it’s called Microsoft Office v. X for Mac and it leverages the strengths of Apple’s next-generation operating system to the hilt. The Big Four All four Office applications — Word X, Excel X, PowerPoint X and Entourage X — have been customised for Mac, inside and out. On the inside, Quartz, Apple’s advanced graphics layer that gives you font filtering and crisp transparency. On the outside, Aqua, for an intuitive, fun interface. And each of them use the same file format as their Windows brethren, so you can work on a Mac and share the fruits of your labour with anyone on the planet. A perfect 10 The Aqua highlights on Office v. X for Mac almost make it seem like an organic part of Apple’s new operating system itself. Dialogue boxes look exactly like the dialogue boxes you see when you work with Mac OS X. Office v. X uses animation to help give you an intuitive grasp of features and functions. For instance, the Formatting Palette pops in and out of the standard toolbar so you get visual feedback and instant access to the things you use most frequently. Entourage X protects your investment Entourage X lets you create group mailing lists quickly and easily. So when you’re travelling, for instance, you can send the same wish-you-were-here message to several recipients at the same time. And if you’ve already invested a considerable amount of time and energy laboriously entering contact information — names, phone numbers, email addresses and so on — into a personal information manager (PIM), you won’t have to discard these assets and start from scratch. Entourage X has an assistant that lets you import your personal information from other PIMs. No need to re-enter your contacts, once you’ve exported them to a text file to bring to your new Mac.

The illustrated address book You can use the Entourage X address book feature to record much more than just the email addresses of family and friends. You can make a note of birthdays and phone numbers, and include pictures of them as well. Say you get email from a friend who’s fond of using big words. Entourage X lets you look up the definition for any word within a message by simply holding down the Control key, clicking the word and then clicking Define on the contextual menu. Incidentally, you can make sure you get your own spelling right by browsing the built-in dictionary (you can do this by clicking Dictionary on the Tools menu). Word X and Excel X Like the rest of Office v. X for Mac, Word X and Excel X feature semi-transparent menus, special menus and new toolbar icons. Plus the ability to select multiple sets of text to apply formatting at the same time. Excellent Excel X Office v.X for Mac leverages the graphics layer called Quartz so that you can, for instance, have semi-transparent Excel X charts. This new transparency feature lets you create a visual representation of data so transparent that your audience can see through each part to the next layer of charted information. Additionally, you can use anti-aliased lines directly out of Quartz to make your Excel X charts look absolutely stunning. They scale well, too: project them against a wall and they still look great. See you at the movies Worried about stability? You shouldn’t fret. Excel X gives you the ability to auto-save and auto-restore the work that you’ve done. And as for your next PowerPoint X presentation, you don’t have to think about whether your intended recipients have PowerPoint X installed on their Macs or PCs. Simply save your presentation as a QuickTime movie and send it to any of the 100 million people who use QuickTime to watch digital video on the Internet.

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