Product Reviews

Microsoft's Mac development team has spent some time putting trademark flourishes onto the look and feel of the various Office applications. From the interface frivolity of Word's fading Formatting palette to the QuickTime-based cube transitions of the new PowerPoint, Office 2004 is suited and booted in the latest looks.

As we've already observed, this upgrade is far more than just a facelift. Microsoft has spent time and effort making the suite as a whole feel more than just a collection of business-oriented applications. The Encarta dictionary, thesaurus, and online Encarta encyclopaedia are high-level, value-adding components, and help make the Office 2004 suite worth buying a Mac to use. The suite-wide Toolbox palette - the Scrapbook panel in particular - makes using content between different Office applications very simple. The Scrapbook is a little like the Library feature found in some DTP applications; a handy place for storing various items for future use. If you want something that will help move data between other applications and Office 2004 products, you'll need to look for third-party alternatives, but this can be pretty useful for working within the Office walls.

The MSN Messenger chat client now works better from behind a firewall, a problem that made it effectively useless for some office-based communications in the previous version. Whether you'll use this in place of iChat is entirely your choice, but it's good news to see such a basic problem finally squashed.

The upgrade isn't just about adding features: it's also about compatibility. This new version will fix the problems that have been surfacing with Office applications running in Mac OS X 10.3. Of course, Apple will preview OS X 10.4 (codenamed Tiger) at its developer conference in June, but even if problems do arise with that, there should be time for things to be worked out before both products hit the market. If Microsoft's engineers have spent much time working closely with the Mac OS behaviour standards, this release should be the most robust yet.

In terms of its own file format and feature compatibility, the built-in Compatibility Reports feature will help you avoid using tricks and techniques that won't work with your colleagues' versions of Office. This is something that would have been useful in the past, and with all the new OS X-specific

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goodies in different parts of this suite, it's likely to be invaluable. It's a shame the compatibility drive hasn't extended to cleaning up Word's HTML export.

The one thing that's still not provided in the Mac version of Office is any kind of database application. (True, Excel can be press-ganged into providing database behaviour of sorts, but this is hardly the same thing.) The Windows Office suites come with Access, a fairly powerful, if arguably just as obtuse, database tool used widely on the PC for both desktop and basic server-managed work. Here on the Mac, FileMaker owns the lion's share of the desktop database market, so it seems Microsoft feels it isn't worth the trouble fighting such a well entrenched product, even by using the whole Office suite as a Trojan horse to get it installed along with the rest of the software on desktops. Having some experience of Access, we have mixed feelings about this; it isn't a particularly pleasing package to use, so there's no loss in that respect. However, the lack of a Mac version of this 'Office-standard' database application sometimes makes potential platform switchers have second thoughts.

Office 2004 is a substantial upgrade that, as we expected, reaffirms Microsoft's commitment to the Mac platform. In many ways, this is the best version of Microsoft Office on either platform, although this does tend to be something that swings back and forth every year or so as Microsoft's separate Mac and Windows Office development teams unveil their efforts. If you're a heavy Office user, there's no question of whether you'll upgrade or on, just when that will be. If you don't spend most of your working life using Office, you may not feel the same pull at your wallet. Of course, as you upgrade to new versions of the Mac OS, you'll find that Office upgrades become mandatory.

Microsoft has said anyone who bought Office v.X during this year is eligible for a free upgrade to Office 2004. If you fall outside this timeframe, the upgrade cost will be £219, and new copies will be £369. There are two versions of the suite on offer. The Standard Edition includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Entourage and MSN Messenger (the Student and Teacher Edition is just this at a lower price), and the Professional Edition also includes Virtual PC 7 with Windows XP Professional. No pricing is yet avaliable for the Pro Edition of Office but if it's as expensive as the previous version, it should only be bought by those with a proven need for Virtual PC. The Standard Edition's £369 price tag, though, while not peanuts by any means, is likely to pull in the punters.

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