A review by Russ Aaronson

Office v.X Review

There’s something particularly unsettling about reviews of software like Microsoft Office:mac v.X.  Along with Photoshop and QuarkXpress, Office is the kind of program that maintains a vast lead over its competitors in terms of market share and, as a result, offers few surprises from one revision to another.  And, again like its contemporaries, Office is a productivity application that enjoys near ubiquity in the workplace, which guarantees enough upgrade purchases to justify endless revisions.  Couple these facts with the price tag of such software and we’re left to wonder why both print and electronic Mac publications routinely bludgeon their consumer-oriented readers with lengthy reviews.

The answer, you may be screaming, is credibility.  Any Mac publication serious about reviews knows that readers expect the obligatory Office review.  To ignore Office is to either risk enervating the professional/ prosumer by omitting commentary on mission-critical software, or to arouse doubt in the minds of consumer readers who might think you can’t even score a review copy of the software in question.

Now consider the companies that produce such behemoths.  Adobe, Quark, and Microsoft may be the giants of the publishing industry, but their customer service reputations hardly inspire emulation.  Maybe the arrogance and cynicism we attribute to these companies is some self-loathing manifestation of our own anger about products without serious competition (InDesign and AppleWorks fans, please go play a few rounds of Airburst or some other “alternative” game before adding your flames to my article forum), but reviewers who lavish praise on these companies achieve sell-out status faster than No Doubt.  As a result, a reviewer stands little to gain by tackling an industry monolith.

Having taken all of these points into account, and knowing that my name isn’t Hunter S. Thompson, rest assured that what follows is an actual review of Office v.X, the OS X-only iteration of the four-headed creature from Redmond forest.  Before your collective groaning starts to sound like Tom Waits with a chest cold, let me set some standards that should make things somewhat more bearable:

• I won’t waste time with deep analysis of features you’ve read about everywhere else.
• I won’t pretend to be an expert in all four Office components.
• I will insert screenshots of at least one Quartz-rendered bar graph, because 1) I believe in the value of traditions, and 2) it will remind you of why Macs are better.
• I won’t interview “Kevin Browne of Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit, or MacBU,” because enough is enough, already. It’s not like interviewing Syd Field, or anything [shameless plug].
• I will try to make it fun along the way; but remember, there are at least thirty seven reasons why it’s not called Microsoft Deathmatch Cavalcade of Fun (unless you translate “Office v.X” into Japanese, then back into English again, or so I’m told).

So prepare to be bludgeoned, but remember why we’re all here.

I. Installation, Registration, and Documentation

Office v.X continues the ease of installation tradition that made some kid with an iPod in CompUSA famous.  Just drag the Office icon to a hard drive, and you’re up and running in no time.  The only real concern here is that the installer screen doesn’t tell you to put Office in your Applications folder.  OS X is nothing if not retentive about file organization, and placing Office somewhere else could cause the unsuspecting user some serious problems in the future.  Consider yourself warned.

Ah, but as you might have expected, Microsoft product registration soon rears its ugly head.  When you first launch any component of Office, you’re encouraged to register the software by entering some personal information and the product key from the CD sleeve.  Office then gives you a Product ID — something so phenomenally important to your Office ownership that Microsoft doesn’t even tell you to write it down in a secure place.  You’ll need that key to complete the software registration process, or to transfer your license to someone else should you no longer require Office’s services in the future.

It is at this point that Office v.X differs tremendously from Office XP.  Though Microsoft would prefer that you think otherwise, Satan’s minions will not drag you to the underworld if you don’t actually register your Mac version of Office.  But if you fail to register any Microsoft XP software in a timely manner, your software will be disabled until you do.  Upon hearing this, I imagined what would happen if the same policy applied to the purchase of, oh, let’s say, a refrigerator.  I doubt the “instant reactivation upon registration” policy would matter to that piece of thirteen year-old wedding cake in your freezer.

But why dwell on Windows product features?  When you agree to register Office v.X, you’ll be whisked off to Microsoft Mactopia (somewhat of an oxymoron if you ask me) and, Product ID in hand, you’ll be registered, lickety-split.  The only downside to this whole process is the fact that Word (or whichever component you launched first) is launching in the background at the same time, which makes for some interesting graphic gymnastics on the Mac’s part.  Fortunately, you’re running the world’s most stable consumer operating system, so everything should turn out fine.

Office does take the liberty of installing a “Welcome” application on your hard drive that outlines the rich, nougatty goodness at the heart of the program.  This is a verbatim recreation of the information in the CD sleeve, but it does make for a pleasant use of OS X and its Aqua interface muscle, and it will only take up about eight megs of hard drive space until you toss it in the trash.  Then again, the included license agreement is about the length of a Nicholas Sparks novella, so it’s like having an ebook with you wherever you go.  Another product feature!

Who cares about Fair Use?  Just read your EULA!

If the tremendous speed and ease of installation leaves you feeling a bit empty, check out the Value Pack on the installation CD.  Loaded with extra templates, sounds, fonts, designs, clip art, and program components, you can sleep easy knowing that the Microsoft penchant for software bloat hasn’t ebbed away.  Heck, they even throw in Windows Media Player (one of the worst OS X products available) and a trial version of REALBasic with the price of admission.  Truth be told, there’s some phenomenally useful stuff in the value pack, and the easily customized installer lets you tack on only what you want.

This leads us to the topic of documentation.  As you’ll discover from the rest of this review, Office v.X is a relatively intuitive program these days; but if you ever hope to go beyond the basics in any of the application’s components, you’ll need more than the Office Assistant to help you.  I think some semblance of a paper manual would be awfully nice, and I can hear you out there in the darkness, chastising me for my cavalier callousness for the plight of the tree.  I hear your pain, brother, but I wonder how much electricity I’m wasting as I try to get that stupid Mac Classic with the legs (otherwise known as the Office Assistant) to answer my questions.  Furthermore, if Microsoft is so concerned about paper, why did they send a stupid “Enhancement Guide” along with the software for this review.

Yeah, you heard me.  The Office:mac v.X CD sleeve came nestled in a fifty page reviewers guide, featuring tabbed sections, spiral binding, full color screenshots, and a clear plastic cover sheet. It’s a useful publication for newbie reviewers, but the average consumer wouldn’t get this information, so why should I be so privileged? This is exactly the sort of cheesy promotional gimmick that makes folks angry with Microsoft, and if anyone at MacBU is reading this, please note my hearty “thanks, but no thanks.”

II. OS X and Aqua appearance and performance

Of course, the big deal with the new Office can be summed up in one word: Carbon.  Microsoft gleefully made the switch to full-on Carbon applications and, essentially, ended all development for the old OS.  I’m sure this angers some old-guard Mac folks, but if we had to make the Office upgrade decision based solely on non-Carbon improvements and additions to the suite, I doubt many of us would bite (just look at the weak sales of Office:mac 2001 upgrades for evidence).  There really isn’t much in the way of killer features in this upgrade aside from benefits solely derived from OS X stability, Aqua interface enhancements, and the Quartz rendering engine.

What’s that?  You don’t think that OS X refinements are enough for an upgrade?  Cue the inevitable screenshot, please—

We’ve come a long way from Word 5.1, folks.  The document views are clean and simple, the toolbar buttons are just the right size, and things still tend to work the way I’m used to.  And then there’s the Formatting Palette.  It takes most of the essential settings for each application and nestles them in a floating palette that can be gradually and selectively retracted by category (Font, Alignment and Spacing, Borders and Shading, and Document categories are provided in Word).  If you decide you need the screen real estate more than the palette, one click of the Formatting Palette button in the main toolbar and the whole magilla whooshes up in grand, OS X genie-effect fashion. I know what you’re thinking: just what we need, more OS X eye candy.  And generally speaking, I agree with the sentiment (unless I’m showing off the new OS to people who like a little dash to their desktop, the genie effect stays off).  Then I realized that Office actually puts the genie effect to practical use.  Now I can hide a variety of vital controls with the click of a button, and the genie effect actually shows me which button to click if I want them all back.  No digging through nested menus, and no confusion about where the thing went.  This might not seem like much of a change, but experiments with the toolbar in past Office incarnations was at best, inelegant, and annoying at worst.

Aside from the Formatting Palette and the bigger buttons, this new Office isn’t so much beautiful as it is less dreary.  I’d even say that the Aqua implementation is better than AppleWorks and its Kaboom! cereal-box garishness. For once, it appears that Microsoft felt content to avoid overdoing it. Good thing, too, because all of this Aqua seems to have slowed things down just a smidge.  Running Office on my 400 mhz TiBook with 192mb of RAM reminded me that happiness in OS X means gobs and gobs of memory, and that’s a reality that many users like me have had a problem settling down to.

Then again, it’s also nice to run Office without crashing.  Ever.  Having just completed a two-month-long PowerPoint project with my Humanities classes, I have a keener appreciation for the detrimental effects of lock-ups and crashes on potential consumer confidence.  Students across the country have learned to think of Macs as “those crappy school computers that crash all the time,” even though Windows goes belly up at least as often.  Apple has a chance to change this with OS X, and it seems ironic that Microsoft Office could be just the application to help them.

Microsoft is asking for plenty of money in exchange for Carbon, but if you’re getting sick of hopping in and out of Classic just to work on a simple letter, you now have a reason to upgrade (especially if you’ve been working in Office 98 or earlier).

Continued...