What is Microsoft Office X?

Few applications log as much time on our Macs as the Microsoft Office suite: the industry-standard Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, respectively; and Entourage, the popular email client, contact manager, and calendar program. For many of us, the lack of a Mac OS X-native Office was the only barrier to joining the OS X generation. Well, the wait is over and the news is good.

Microsoft Office v.X runs natively under Mac OS X, taking advantage of OS X features such as the Quartz graphics engine and the glitzy Aqua interface. The Office v.X apps are also fast — for all practical purposes, they feel as fast as Office 2001. And they’re solid; in all of our testing, none of the apps crashed once, and only minor redraw errors occurred.

The rest of the news is more mixed. If you’re looking for a new and substantially improved Office, you’ll have to wait — Office v.X is very similar to its immediate predecessor, Office 2001. In fact, besides implementing the Aqua interface across the multitudes of dialog boxes, alerts, and toolbars, Office 2001’s menu items, preferences, and features remain essentially unchanged.

The New Office

The first sign that you're leaving OS 9 Country is Office v.X’s set of bulbous, neon application icons — cryptic shapes that would look right at home on a Star Trek: Voyager uniform. Once you get past the gooey new look, you’ll appreciate the painless installation first introduced in Office 2001: Drag the Office X folder from the CD to your drive, and then well, there is no step two. Another plus inherited from Office 2001 is transparent compatibility back to Office 98 on the Mac, and Windows Office XP, 2000, and 97 on the PC.

Mac OS X doesn’t use extensions, so at startup Office launches a “database daemon,” an invisible app responsible for Office-wide integration and for running background tasks such as Notification for Office apps and MSN Messenger (version 2.1 is bundled). In a nice touch, an alarm clock icon pops up in the Dock displaying the number of waiting Notifications.

The launch speed of Office apps pleasantly surprised us. Word, for example, snaps open in less than 2 seconds on a Dual Power Mac G4/450, and takes just 6 or 7 seconds on a relatively poky iBook G3/500.

Microsoft Word

Word X contains only few new features, but we’re really jazzed about its new noncontiguous selection capability, which Microsoft calls Multi-Selection. Hold down the Command key, and you can select blocks of text at various places throughout a document. It’s a simple concept, but surprisingly powerful: You can apply formatting, perform spelling checks or search and replace, or even get a word count on discrete blocks oftext spread throughout a file.

Word X also introduces Clear Formatting, a tool that removes all formatting from a selection with a single command — much easier than removing formatting one element at a time.

In the move to Mac OS X, of course. Word got the Aqua makeover, and it’s a terrific improvement, making almost every dialog and toolbar clear and sharp. Word makes extensive use of Aqua’s Sheets — dialogs that roll out of title bars like window shades, then roll up again when dismissed. Attached to a specific window, Sheets make it clear which document you’re addressing, and as a bonus, they’re non-modal, so they don’t command the Mac’s full attention. Plus, as in all other Office v.X apps, tool palettes zip in and out of the toolbar via OS X's Genie effect.

In addition to getting a shiny look. Office received some minor tweaks — for example. Word’s Preferences dialog no longer has those annoying jumping tabs, and now lists the preference groups in a panel along the left. Taking advantage of the Quartz graphics engine, the new Word lets you apply some artistic looks (such as Watercolor and Splatter paint effects) to graphics.

Sadly, none of Word’s annoying habits have disappeared. Command-G still doesn’t trigger Find Again; customizing menus is still too complicated; AutoCorrect still won’t capitalize a sentence that starts with a quotation mark... you get the idea. But Word remains solid, reliable, fast, and indispensable in the workplace.

Entourage

Entourage X is a powerful and feature-rich email client, contact manager, and calendar. New features include multiple undos and the ability to embed rich media (such as QuickTime movies) in email messages, provided that you enable HTML formatting. An Import AppleScript on the Office CD lets you import mail from Apple's built-in Mail app. Less visible improvements include better support for the IMAP4 email standard.

Entourage's main window now displays large Mac OS X-style buttons for the PIM (personal information manager) modules: Calendar, Address Book, Notes, and Tasks. In fact, those functions are now accessible only through buttons — they’ve disappeared from the Windows menu. You can open any mode in a separate window by Controlclicking the appropriate button.

The PIM modules have received a makeover, especially Calendar: Clearer and more versatile, it offers multiday events displayed as a banner; buttons for quick access to day, week, and month views; a variety of Custom Views; and the ability to display appointments by Category,

Entourage looks great, but suffers from a lack of interface refinements, relative to Office’s other four apps. It implements drag and drop haphazardly — you still can’t drag email addresses between a contact and the body of an email (though good old cut-and-paste still works). Also missing is Palm integration, but that’s Palm’s fault — the company hasn’t yet released a conduit development kit for OS X.

Excel

Excel’s basic functionality has changed little, but it offers some substantial appearance improvements, such as antialiasing and transparency options. You can now customize keyboard shortcuts, allowing you to restore the keyboard commands lost in Excel 2001 (such as Command-B to blank a cell’s contents) with just a little effort. Excel X also adds an autosave feature called DataRecovery, which creates a snapshot of your workbook at set intervals.

The most obvious change is visual. Excel exploits Mac OS X’s Quartz graphics engine, so you can use real transparency when overlapping elements — our charts never looked so good or were so easy to read. And the Quartz antialiasing smooths out those graphs and charts so you get stunningly vivid results.

PowerPoint

Of the four apps, PowerPoint X exhibits the fewest changes — most notably, it adds ransparency support. Perhaps the most welcome improvement, though, is the ability to save all the components of a presentation in a single folder, which Microsoft calls a PowerPoint Package, making it easier to email or otherwise pass along that presentation. A QuickTime movie of a presentation now acts more like the original, using transitions, hyperlinks, and buttons terrific for posting on the Web.

The Verdict

Rather than spend time and energy fully redesigning and adding a boatload of new features to its productivity suite, Microsoft spent the past year bringing the millions of lines of Office code to Mac OS X. The end result justifies that decision — Office v.X is a set of real Mac OS X applications that smartly implement the Aqua interface. The apps install in a minute, they’re rock solid, and they’re fast. If you need an excuse to move up to Mac OS X, Microsoft Office v.X might just be it.

Holmes, Joseph O. (February 2002). Office v.X. MacAddict. (pgs. 42-43).

Download Microsoft Office X for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 10.1 up to Mac OS 10.6

Compatibility notes

Mac OS X 10.1-10.6.8.

Emulating this? It could probably run under: QEMU