Product Reviews

The wait is over - almost. Microsoft has released a public beta version of its flagship application, Word, for Mac OS X, with the rest of the Office suite to be released in full in November.

Word is the de facto standard for word processing on the Mac for the simple reason that it long ago won the battle to have the most features of any word processor. With the version that shipped with Office 98, Microsoft raised the game for usability and produced a genuine Mac product that balanced all these features with an interface that was relatively easy to use. And Word 2001 compounded this usability by adding the Formatting Palette, which is a great way to access all the formatting tools in one place.

What Word v. X brings to the party is Carbonization. The product has been built to run natively under Mac OS X, without users having to run the Classic Mac OS 9 environment. This delivers several things, including better performance, reliability and a consistent OS X look and feel.

What Word v. X doesn't bring is any new features. Although the look and feel reflects the OS X Aqua interface rather than the old OS 9 one, every tool that you're familiar with is in the same place and functions in a virtually identical way. As the first application in the new Office suit to be unleashed on the world, albeit in pre-release form, it's unsurprising that Word has the least new features. Entourage, Excel, and PowerPoint all promise to have more new bells and whistles.

Keeping score

This familiarity has its pluses and minuses. On the minus side, it means that Microsoft is continuing with a ludicrously obtuse way of setting preferences, where virtually every tool has its own preferences, which are set using the tool's menu option, rather than in the generic Preferences option under the Edit menu.

For example, if you want to turn off the auto-formatting of numbered lists, you can't simply go to Preferences and do

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so. Instead, you have to select AutoCorrect from the Tools menu, select the AutoFormat as you Type tab and uncheck the Automatic numbered lists option. Why couldn't this be set via a global preference instead?

The flipside is that every tool you've ever wanted as a writer is here, and many more besides. For professional writers, the revision management is a godsend, allowing you to store older versions of a piece in the same file as the current version, comparing versions and even rolling back to a previous version if you need to.

The table tool, which lets you draw a table with a pencil tool on screen, is still a very easy way to get exactly the table you want. The mail merge, spelling and grammar tools are second to none. And the Document Map feature allows users to write long documents without major structural problems, re-ordering sections as required.

There are obviously some problems with the pre-release version, all of which should be fixed when the product is released. The live word count doesn't appear at the bottom of the screen, which is a minor irritation. The helpful little Mac that walks you through problems occasionally disappears completely, leaving only a strange floating, talking blank square. And, as a way of saving download time, you can't print from this beta version. You'll have to wait for the full version for that.

What's more, as is often the case with pre-release software, Word v. X is a little sluggish. When you're editing a document of as little as 700 words, it's not too hard for a competent typist to type ahead of the cursor, even on a fairly brisk machine like a 500MHz iBook. This is one of the key reasons why Microsoft insists on the product being installed on Mac OS X 10.1, which is much faster than its predecessors. And, hopefully, this will be fixed when the full version is released.

However, all of this is completely forgiven when you consider that this pre-release software that feels extremely solid and is reliable. It brings to OS X one of the most-used applications out there and does a commendable if unspectacular job of porting it.

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Ultimately, this is a good-looking and timely release and for many people will make the difference between OS X being usable and pointless. Once a few more key applications are ready for release, there will be less and less reason to ever venture back into the Classic environment, and Mac users will be able to start enjoying the kind of reliable, trouble-free computing that they deserve.