Pricey Office:mac 2001 fails to thrill

By ADAM GIFFORD

A confession is in order. I have had Microsoft Office 98 on the Macintosh for two years, but apart from opening the Word files people persist in sending me, I haven't used it much.

Whenever I try to write in Word I feel I am fighting the program as it tries to second-guess my spelling and grammar.

Even worse, every time I open up the program (and wait and wait and wait), it gobbles up 10Mb of memory. With a system chugging along on 32Mb, that means working with a browser open as well is not a goer.

But Microsoft has a reputation for getting things right second or third time out, so I am ready to give Office:mac 2001 a try.

Microsoft does, after all, have the biggest Mac software team outside Apple (whence many of them came), and Office 98 was certainly regarded as a big advance on Word 6, which tried to simply port a Windows application over to the Mac platform.

This time Microsoft says it has recognised how important the Mac "look and feel" is to Mac users, and their attachment to technologies such as Drag and Drop and Quick Time.

The Macintosh business unit has also conducted user surveys over the past three years on what should go into the product, and found "the promise of simplicity was the top reason people chose to buy a Macintosh."

So what do you get when you open the plastic scallop shell in which the software arrives? No manual, for a start, neither with the box nor in software format.

There are help files, of course, and some stuff at microsoft.com/mac. You are also pointed in the direction of the "helpful books from Microsoft Press."

At a full price of $1299, I'd have thought a manual would be included. The $999 price (also sans manual) if you are upgrading from a previous version is a bit of a shock, too.

That's right. If you bought the Office suite within the past two years, you will have to pay the same again to upgrade (although copies bought since July qualify for a free upgrade).

Challenged about this at the product launch, Microsoft New Zealand staff did not have any good reason for the relatively minor upgrade discount. It is even more inexplicable when compared with the United States list price of $US499 ($1252) for the full version and $US299 for the upgrade.

If people were buying similar-featured packages on price, Corel would be a lot healthier than it is right now. And AppleWorks (or Claris Works) still works fine for many users.

So what might tempt you to buy or upgrade? The new application in Office:mac 2001 is Entourage, which is basically the Outlook Express e-mail software (available by free download) with an address book, calendar and task list tacked on.

Since I have never bothered to get a calendar or organiser software, it has appeal. I went through it and copied my appointments for the next few weeks, adding relevant e-mails.

But will I dump Eudora and use it for mail? I think not. And it will take some experimenting with the printing and mail merge functions before I decide whether to move over from my shareware address book.

Word and Excel have some improvements on Office 98. The clunky formatting tool bars at the top have been replaced by a Formatting Palette which floats alongside.

Tables and mail merge capacities in Word 2001 have been improved, and the Collect and Paste feature allows plagiarists out there to collect multiple blocks of text or pictures from one or more documents, e-mails, websites, or other files and paste them into any Office application. There is also a Save As feature, familiar to users of Apple Works.

Excel 2001 includes new tools to help people do what they do most with the application - make lists. For those who want to use it as a spreadsheet, you can work out the calculation on the new floating calculator, and when you are done, Excel inserts the formula into the cell you have been working in.

The latest version of the most popular Mac database, FileMaker Pro, allows users to turn Excel files into FileMaker databases. Excel 2001 returns the favour, allowing FileMaker database files to be imported directly into Excel worksheets.

For PowerPoint 2001, Microsoft has given up trying to develop a proprietary viewer, and instead allows presentations to be saved as Quick Time movies.

So, if your boss insists you use Microsoft, push for an upgrade on the grounds that it will increase productivity.

But if you have gone this long without Microsoft, there is no compelling reason, at the current price, to change.