Product ReviewsOffice software
Apple's ability to swing the whole Mac world over to Mac OS X depends on having all the familiar big-name applications running natively and providing a continuity of experience across the transition. Nowhere does this apply more strongly than in core business applications, such as Microsoft Office and FileMaker Pro, whose users aren't techies or tinkerers, but simply need to carry on working with minimum disruption. With Office v. X, Microsoft has Carbonized the whole suite of applications. The scale of this operation shouldn't be underestimated: it involved changing 25 million lines of code, redesigning 800 dialog boxes and creating 700 new icons, plus a lot more besides. The aim - and it was surely the right one - was to concentrate on getting this large-scale rebuild right rather than trying to add significant new features to Office. Whatever qualms may remain about OS X and its Aqua interface, this isn't a transition that can be ignored or reversed. Microsoft Office 2001 remains on sale, but will no longer be extended or upgraded, except for some possible maintenance releases. At some point, it will be terminated. You'll need the latest OS X 10.1 to run Office v. X, so be prepared for the extra cost of upgrading your operating system even if you're already using OS X 10.0.4. If you're not yet ready to make the jump, you can continue to use Office 2001, either under Mac OS 9 or within OS X's Classic environment. However, sooner or later everyone will have to move to OS X, but is Office v. X good enough to drive the take-up of the new operating system that Apple needs? Read on to find out. Entourage X There's one area where Mac users can justifiably claim they have the best software on any platform, and that's personal information management (PIM) applications. And, ironically, the best PIM is made by Apple's arch rival in the operating system market, Microsoft. Entourage, the PIM that comes as part of the Office suite, is much more powerful than Outlook, its equivalent on Windows. Not only is Entourage better looking (as you'd expect from a Mac application), but it includes features such as built-in support for IMAP and NNTP protocols, as well as a system for inviting others to meetings that requires no additional server software. The version of Entourage in Office v. X has probably had the most changes of any of the bundled applications. Although none of the changes are too radical or add spectacular new features, all help to cement Entourage's place as the best PIM on the market and one of the nicest OS X applications yet released. Interface The biggest change to Entourage is in the interface. The occasionally clumsy look of the last version has been replaced with a more simple interface that adds a set of six buttons in the top left corner, giving you quick access to the main features of the application: Mail, Address Book, Calendar, Notes, Tasks and Custom Views. Below this is a panel for view, allowing you fast access to Mail folders and servers (in the Mail aspect of the application) and customisable views that let you set up filters for your information. Microsoft is particularly proud of Office's buttons, and, indeed, the buttons and toolbars in Entourage are very well done. The artwork is clear and easy to read even at high resolutions. Toolbars contain well thought-out sets of buttons, although they can't be customised. The overall look is a smart, Aqua-based interface that's clear and easy to use. As with all good interfaces, almost all the most common actions can be done without going to the menu bar, let alone having to search through endless submenus. Where you do have to go to the menu bar - for example, for changing the settings on an account - the interface is generally very clear. The only real quibble is that preferences and settings are scattered around several menus, rather than being in a single, coherent place. There are several new features of note within the mail parts of Entourage. First, the program now supports Hotmail accounts. Hotmail support works well in Entourage, preserving any folders you've set up on your account and letting you save mail you've sent locally as well as on the server. Of course, Hotmail isn't the only email service that can be accessed from the Web and other services - most notably Yahoo!'s - allow you to collect mail using any POP or IMAP-based client. But the addition of support for Hotmail is certainly welcome. There's good news, too, for anyone who has used Entourage with an IMAP server: Microsoft claims it has significantly improved the level of support of IMAP in the application. In the last version of Entourage, IMAP was effectively unusable, as connections between the client and server would repeatedly time out. If Microsoft has managed to deliver on its promise of improved support for IMAP, it will give the application a
Several more minor improvements are nevertheless welcome. Entourage now supports the Keychain in OS X, which means you only have to remember a single password to unlock all the passwords you're likely to come across, including all your mail accounts. How much use you'll make of this depends on how many accounts you use. One feature that will benefit everyone is the enhanced version of autocomplete for email addresses. In the last version, when typing an email address that was in the contacts list Entourage would provide you with a pop-up list that matched what you'd typed. For example, start typing 'Ian' and it would pop up with all the Ians in your address book, so you could select which one you wanted. The new version takes this a stage further by expanding the returned list to include the last 150 addresses you've sent an email to. This is extremely useful if you need to send a series of emails to someone but don't have their address in your contacts list. Of course, this version of Entourage retains the same features that made it great on OS 9. The ability to link any item to another - for example linking a meeting to an email - is a great time-saver. The application also notes when you last mailed a contact and provides a link to the email from the bottom of the contact's details. And the mailing list manager makes it extremely easy to filter traffic from mailing lists into folders, or even direct it straight to the Trash. As an email application alone, Entourage is a match for anything else on the market. Calendar, notes and tasks The changes to the Calendar are mostly visual, with one-button selection of daily, work week, weekly and monthly views. Tasks are listed on the right hand side for all except the monthly views and the revamped interface is clear and simple to use. Entourage for OS X retains the delightful and well thought-out features of its predecessor, such as the ability to send and receive invites to meetings in iCalendar format. This is an open standard for sending invites that lets you press a single button to accept the invitation, return a confirmatory email and insert it in your diary. This will be a big time-saver for anyone who has to arrange meetings. Notes and Tasks have had few changes. Tasks, as before, can have reminders attached to them, as well as being categorised so you can sort personal and home tasks from business ones at the click of a button. Notes can be categorised and can hold pictures, Web links and even QuickTime movies and sounds. Address Book The Address Book has had few improvements, other than the Aqua makeover. The biggest single improvement is the addition of better support for international-formatted addresses. For example, some countries have the postal code listed before the state or county, others list it the other way around, while some postal services insist on correct addressing, or they won't deliver. Entourage now not only includes correct formatting for many major countries, but allows you to define your own addressing formats as well. This will be useful to any business that uses Office to produce mail-merged documents for different countries around the world. As with the previous version, if you don't know a person's email address, you can use the built-in support for the LDAP protocol to look them up on a wide variety of services on the Internet. You can then directly import that information into your Address Book for permanent use. Addresses can also be imported and exported in vCard format for use with virtually any other contacts application. Missing in action Entourage still lacks support for accessing Mail and Calendar information from Microsoft Exchange servers. Although Exchange remains a minority interest among Mac-only businesses, it's popular in the Windows world, and not including support for Exchange effectively makes Entourage useless for Macs in those businesses. You can use the Outlook client for Mac (not to be confused with the Outlook Express email client), but uniting Exchange support with Entourage would surely make more sense. Perhaps this will be included in a future release. Also missing is support for synchronisation with Palm OS handhelds. This feature, which was included with the previous version of Entourage (the only Microsoft product to come with out-of-the-box support for synching with Palms), is missing because Palm has yet to build the HotSync technology that would allow Microsoft to create a conduit for Entourage. Once Palm has released an OS X version of its software, it shouldn't be long before an Entourage conduit appears. Information is power Overall, Microsoft has taken a great product and added sensible improvements. There's no single new feature here that will make Entourage a must for everyone, but the combination of small upgrades, a better interface and fixes for such things as IMAP support will mean there's less of a reason to avoid Entourage even if you're happy with another package. If you're converting from another package, you'll be pleased to find that we imported addresses and mail from Palm Desktop, Mail and Eudora with ease. Entourage combines all the functions of a PIM with a world-class email client and manages to do so without a cluttered, hard-to-use interface. As such, it's highly recommended. By |
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