Product Reviews

When Microsoft bundled its popular office applications into one suite it ensured they'd be permanent fixtures in every Dock. It's surprising, then, that this upgrade slipped out with so little fanfare. In Office for Mac v.X Professional Edition, the regular Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage modules are joined by Virtual PC version 6.1 with Windows XP Professional.

Microsoft is selling this latest combo on the basis that Virtual PC lets you run Windows versions of the applications left out of Office - namely the Access database, the Visio drawing and planning tool, and Microsoft Project. You could argue there's already a host of competent Mac software to plug those gaps, including FileMaker, OmniGraffle and everything in between, but of more interest to the Web designer is that the bundled

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copy of Windows XP lets you test sites cross-platform. Being the Pro edition, it includes the essential Web server components for testing database-driven sites, or those that use PHP or Perl scripts.

It's certainly not the best way to run Windows, though. XP's system properties saw our 800MHz iBook as having a 396MHz processor, and although we increased the default 128Mb memory allocation to almost 400Mb, it still ran painfully slowly. Interestingly, it also claimed we had a working internal floppy drive. That said, installation is a breeze and when run for the first time it adds the Windows Start menu to the OS X Dock for speedy access to your Windows applications.

Mind the gaps

XP needs to be activated within the first 30 days of use. This is a painless process where your Mac and Microsoft's servers swap data and the software is authorised to carry on running. Fortunately, Office - on the Mac, at least - sticks to its old ways, and will happily run without any activation or registration.

When you consider you'd pay £120 on top of the asking price for Office and Virtual PC in separate boxes, this bundle is a bargain; we're just not convinced it's the way to go if you want to plug the obvious gaps in Office. Native OS X applications will run faster on lower-specced machines and, as you won't be paying for a run-time environment, they work out cheaper, too.