Microsoft Office for Macintosh 2001

List Price: $359.99

Customer Reviews:

Why Make it More Complex? [Posted on 2001-10-14]
Every time I upgrade, some features are better but many more have become over-complex. Lets face it - how many people are capable of using even a quarter of the features of Word? Who wants 150 templates? I never use them - I make my own.

There seem to be some serious problems with Word. Tables in Word on the Mac are a nightmare. Its all so unpredictable and can be very slow compared to a PC. For no apparent reason (usually when I've cut'n pasted a row - or reduced the font size using keystrokes rather than the mouse)it crashes. It even took Excel with it last time.

I hate the new drop-down autofill in Excel 2001. The old one was fine and quicker. Why "improve" something just for the sake of it? They have done something really odd to the sort function with numbering. At one time it sorted 2 after 20 ...another "improvement"?

As for the multilevel numbering. If only they would stop changing it. I just get my head round the latest version and they change it again! The contortions one has to go through to miss out a level ....

Overall I like the look of Office 2001 and some of the features are great. I even like Entourage - contrary to popular opinion.

Why isn't there a decent built-in fax facility? I am having a dreadful time with Symantec - it won't open with anything I posess!

In desperation I was going to try Appleworks but was put off by the reviews ....

Very pleased with the PowerPoint improvements [Posted on 2002-05-07]
Once you get over the learning curve of Office for Mac 2001, it is far superior to the Windows counterpart. They moved items around, came up with a new format window, and moved controls over to the left hand side of the screen. However, I am impressed with the overall flow and feel of the products. There isn't too much in the way of new functionality here, which was a bit of a disappointment. Resolution of imported graphics into PowerPoint has to be unbelievably high to get a good projection on a large screen. As a person who works with graphics and color quite a bit, the improved options for choosing almost any color you can think of is quite welcome. I haven't made the jump to OS-X yet, so I haven't experienced that version. But if you are still running 9.x - I highly recommend this version.

Very pleased with the PowerPoint improvements [Posted on 2002-05-07]
Once you get over the learning curve of Office for Mac 2001, it is far superior to the Windows counterpart. They moved items around, came up with a new format window, and moved controls over to the left hand side of the screen. However, I am impressed with the overall flow and feel of the products. There isn't too much in the way of new functionality here, which was a bit of a disappointment. Resolution of imported graphics into PowerPoint has to be unbelievably high to get a good projection on a large screen. As a person who works with graphics and color quite a bit, the improved options for choosing almost any color you can think of is quite welcome. I haven't made the jump to OS-X yet, so I haven't experienced that version. But if you are still running 9.x - I highly recommend this version.

($$$) ... [Posted on 2002-09-01]
High priced, low grade programs. Apple needs to develop office programs of their own.

Too much Windoze; not enough Mac. [Posted on 2002-12-07]
Like a good boy, I had been regularly purchasing various Microsoft-for-the-Mac upgrades for a very long time. How long has it been? It's been so long that my first copy of Excel (1.0, in 1985) was free, because at the time I possessed registered copies of MS Multiplan and MS Chart. That's a long time by anyone's measure.

My most recent Excel upgrade prior to MS Office for the Mac 2001 was Excel 95; I took a bye on Office 98 principally because I've never been particularly fond of MS Word (even in the Mac versions that had worked reasonably well). For most of the fifteen years or so that I've been using Macs almost exclusively, my word processor of choice has been WriteNow: Lean, mean, full of most of the features that I need, still running on OS 9.2.2, and, regrettably, discontinued (abandoned would be a more appropriate term) several years ago.

However, with the ever-increasing hegemony of Windoze-based business networks, and with the fact that Excel 95 cannot run on a G4 Mac with OS 9.0 or newer, I bit the bullet and purchased this Office 2001 package. And, while I've now pretty much climbed its learning curve, the experience hasn't exactly been one that I'd write home about.

Here are a few nits I choose to pick (some small, some not so small):

* Somewhere between Excel 95 and Office 2001, Microsoft programmers seem to have lost track of the fact that Macs have both "Return" and "Enter" keys. (Windoze machines have no "Return" key.) The "Return" key no longer functions as it did, scrolling down one cell in an Excel spreadsheet; it now does precisely the same thing the "Enter" key does (which is limited to whatever one chooses from the "Preferences" menu). Not very bright!

* In like fashion, the MS programmers decided to reassign several of the common "Command" key functions (Fill Down, Fill Across, Insert, Delete, Clear, etc.) to the "Control" key, again in some ill-founded effort at "cross-platform"compatibility. (Imagine my surprise when I first went to insert a row or column, only to find that my selection was formatted in italics!) In the process, the ergonomic superiority of the Mac keyboard, requiring less "stretch" effort to activate these keyboard shortcuts, has now been sacrificed to the Bill Gates God of Uniformity. And Microsoft continues to place the Font menu on a toolbar, not as a Mac-standard menu. Not very bright!

* While tools have been added to the toolbox library, the ability to customize toolbars for one's own use has actually been reduced! And the tools don't always load consistently, suggesting some bugginess that requires a Microsoft patch or two, not yet available. And, unlike previous Excel upgrades in my experience, this one appears to provide no additional chart types. Not very bright!

* Word is incompatible with RamDoubler 9.0 (another patch still not available). But, for once, my newest (G4) Mac has more memory than RamDoubler can deal with. Nevertheless: Not very bright!

* Word files - as always - are bloated for reasons that have little to do with content or formatting. (As a comparison, a 25-page file, containing a few tables and some minor formatting, which occupies 91K of HD space as a WriteNow 4.0 file and 96K as a WordPerfect 3.5e file, occupies 194K as a Word 2001 file.) If not "Not very bright!", then "Why?"

* The ubiquitous Windoze paperclip "Advisor" has been transmogrified to a less-than-winsome "flex-toy Mac." Gimmee a break!

* Entourage is incompatible with Outlook or Outlook Express. Its inclusion is specious at best, and one wonders how many will use this module.

* Once again, as far as a database module is concerned, Mac users are left in the lurch. Access continues to be notable by its absence (not that it is every database user's "dream program"), and FoxPro has long been history as far as Microsoft support is concerned. Moreover, a Mac port of SQL is just a fantasy. And VisualBasic is only present in crippled form, to support the modules that are VB-capable.

There are a few (very few, I'm sad to say) gains:

* PowerPoint works fine. But I have little need for it, save for the odd PP file that gets attached to my e-mail thanks to some chain letter or other.

* The modules run acceptably fast. But I think this has as much or more to do with G4 speed and available RAM as it does to "tight" coding by software engineers.

* Word works acceptably well (but not particularly great) as a platform for HTML coding.

* I've got the cross-platform compatibility that my business-related activities require.

For those G4 users needing a single module but not needing "full" cross-platform compatibility for other applications, my advice is to limit yourselves to just the Office 2001 module (saving some bucks), hang on to your WriteNow 4.0 program (it'll run just fine on OS 9.x G4's) or download a free copy of WordPerfect 3.5e, take a bye on Entourage (Outlook Express works just fine, and is bundled free with Explorer), and, if you need a database program, there's always FileMaker Pro.

Summary: A "forced" upgrade for G4 Mac users who must use Excel. More steps backward than forward for those of us who prefer Macs but need the cross-platform compatibility. At best, three stars, and then only with the greatest of reluctance.

Bob Zeidler

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