lawman67's Full Review: Microsoft Office Mac Student and Teacher 2004 Full...
I recently switched from Windows to Macintosh, or more accurately, I re-switched, having been a Mac user before. One constant, however, whether I used Mac or Windows, has always been Microsoft Office. I have grown with Microsoft Office from the very first Word for Windows and Excel for Windows 1.0 versions, and have used all subsequent versions on both Windows and Macintosh with the exceptions of Office 2003 for Windows and Office 95 for Windows.
Along the way, there have been things I’ve liked and things that, well, were downright infuriating. Word for Windows 1.x and Word for Macintosh 5.x were probably my favorite versions, if nothing else than for the simplicity of the interface. Yes, I love the modern features, but I’ve always preferred a clean user interface over the myriad button and toolbars we have today.
That said, Office 2004 for Macintosh is a wonderful suite with so many terrific new or improved features that I can’t even begin to scratch the surface in a review without writing an entire book on it. What I can do is give a subjective “how it feels” analysis from the perspective of a Windows switcher and an Office v.X upgrader.
First, I’d like to point out that while I’ve used almost every version of Office, I’ve downgraded on a few occasions. When Office XP for Windows came out, I tried to live with it and stuck it out for six months, but two behaviors finally got so annoying that I downgraded to Office 2000, which I still use on my Windows computers today. Those behaviors were an address book in Outlook XP that was not directly linked to the contacts in the Outlook.PST file, and thus made it very difficult to access contacts in some situations, and the very annoying habit of not allowing a computer to be shut down if an Office application was running. The latter, for a laptop user, was simply too much to tolerate and so I downgraded.
My second downgrade was only of Word. When Office 4.2 came out, it included the new Word 6.0 for Macintosh, which was slow as to be all but useless on both my Power Mac and my ancient PowerBook. Until Microsoft improved the program with a free update about 6-months-later, I downgraded to Word 5.1, which lacked many features that I now consider essential (multiple undo, macros, autocorrect and spellcheck on the fly). Word 6.0 was so bad that the cursor couldn’t keep up with my typing, and I am not a very fast typist (50 wpm).
Macintosh versions returned to wonderfulness with the introduction of Office 98 for Macintosh, then the later 2001 and v.X versions added far more features. 2001 and v.X are essentially the same feature-wise, the only significant difference being that 2001 runs on the classic Mac OS and v.X is for OSX. Office v.X has the look and feel of an OSX program, but it is, essentially just Office 2001 Carbonized to work with OSX.
I bought the Student and Teacher Edition of Office v.X when I bought my PowerBook this last February, and with a few minor exceptions, I’ve been delighted. The interface is as simple or complex as you want it to be, which for me is with everything except the rulers turned off.
My only real complaints with Office v.X were the inability to import data (mainly emails and contacts) from either Outlook for Windows or Apple’s Mail program, and the very rare crash in Word. With those two exceptions, and the crashes were VERY rare, usually only when importing large graphics from my scanner, I found v.X a pleasure to use and would not have upgraded had it not been free (recent buyers of Office v.X get the 2004 upgrade free from Microsoft).
Now that I have Office 2004, I know that I would have paid for it as it really is a significant upgrade. First, while it still doesn’t import data from a .PST file (come on Microsoft, we NEED this), it does import directly from Apple Mail. Better yet, with v.X I had to hunt Microsoft’s website to find a tool to synchronize with my Palm, but with 2004 it comes right on the CD and is very easy to use. Palm synchronization with Entourage 2004 is a snap, and is much faster than it was with Entourage v.X.
Sticking to Entourage for a while, the other new feature of merit is the Project Center, which reminds me of the old Office Binder that debuted with Office 97 for Windows, only here it is far better implemented. In Project Center, you can create a project and attach contacts, documents, tasks, even emails to it, and Entourage is smart enough to organize it all the way I want to see it. An example is I can set a contact to my “Home Sale” project, and it will keep documents, spreadsheets and the like organized, but also route email from my realtor into the project. This is a major change from using separate applications separately as we used to, and while I’ve barely scratched the surface of its potential, I am now creating “projects” for everything from an upcoming business trip to my daughter’s school.
The Email portion of Entourage is itself much improved, with one interface element that really delights this “keeper of the archives”. I have over 50,000 saved email, from over 8 years of collecting the stuff. Outlook and previous versions of Entourage allowed the creation of folders, which makes it easy to sort, but Entourage 2004 allows it to be threaded by conversation, just like Apple Mail, then goes one further and groups by time, rather than merely sorting. I can close the tab for last month or last year, or open all of them, regardless of your preferences, it is very easy to see at a glance not only the sender and the subject, but also related emails (conversation thread) and a broad date category (last month, last week, etc). Finally, you can put the preview pane alongside the inbox, taking advantage of Apple’s current crop of widescreen displays and PowerBooks. My PowerBook is the 12” with a standard aspect ratio screen, so with a quick setting in the preferences, I put my preview pane back on the bottom, but I love having the choice.
While Entourage is the most improved of the Office apps, Word, Excel and PowerPoint were not ignored. As mentioned above, the formatting Palette (I have mine set showing while my toolbars are all turned off) is terrific in that it gives me just about every formatting control that I use, but doesn’t waste my screen space. It does this by turning translucent when not being used, and so I can put another document to the side of my active document as I like to do, and read it THROUGH the translucent formatting palette, but when I need to change something, style, or font for instance, it solidifies the moment my mouse cursor moves over it. It also can collapse on itself with vertical tabs, so it takes up very little space and shows only the controls you use frequently.
Other than that, Word remains much as it always was, an extremely powerful program that can no longer be called just a word processor. It has very powerful and simple table creation, macros and even non-contiguous text selection, which I use frequently. Finally, the new Notebook layout is terrific. I don’t really care about the lined-paper look, but I do love the recording toolbar that pops up and allows me to record notes that become part of the document. I just finished law school last month, and could really have used this feature as a student.
Word still has the same annoying automatic numbering and bulleting that has bothered me since version 6 (on both platforms), but thankfully, it remains easy enough to disable and I recommend doing so right away (hint, its under the autocorrect feature in the tools menu). Other than that, I have no complaints whatsoever about Word 2004, and it has yet to crash even when importing massive graphics through my scanner.
Excel 2004 and PowerPoint 2004 are both improved, though honestly I couldn’t tell you where. I use both programs and find the appearance better, but I never come close to even scratching the surface of Excel or PowerPoint’s features, and so, I’ve still not used anything new. Then again, version 4 already did everything I need on both programs. Still, neither program has crashed, and both of them open and work well with presentations and/or spreadsheets created even a decade ago, with no loss of formatting or attributes - very impressive.
The last feature I will talk about is perhaps my favorite, and that is the compatibility checker, which works in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Simply put, press one button in the save or save as dialog box and Office will give you a report of any aspect of your document that won’t display or print properly in a previous version for either Windows or Macintosh. This is tremendous folks, now you can make sure that your presentation will look good on your partner’s machine running PowerPoint 2003 for Windows or that your spreadsheet will show its charts correctly on Excel 98 for Macintosh. I’ve waited years for this, and now that its here, I can’t imagine going back, and the reason is simple; at work I use Office 97 and 2000 for Windows, while at home I use Office 2004 for Mac and my daughter uses Office 98 for Mac (old computer). With compatibility checker, my documents always work where I want them to, period.
I wasn’t even sure I would both to install Office 2004 when it came in the mail, and only did so on my desktop computer (my laptop is the primary machine) to check it out. Once I saw how quickly and easily Entourage imported email from Apple Mail and played with the project center, however, I was hooked. This really is the most excited I’ve been about a Microsoft Office release since 98 for Macintosh replaced the pokey 4.2 way back when, and reaffirms the fact that Microsoft, whether you love or loath them as a company, continues to make extremely good software.
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