First Comments--Office:mac 2001

Microsoft's latest office application suite is almost a winner. The interface clearly embraces the Mac paradigm and is very easy to use. So far we have encountered no major glitches nor incompatibilities with files created by Office 98's Word, Excel or PowerPoint. Entourage is much like the free Outlook Express 5.0.2 for the Mac but we haven't explored all of its features yet. The new Project Gallery is a bit like AppleWorks 6 Starting Point but it is an improvement. We have used Office 98 since its inception and welcome the 2001 upgrade but can not recommend it just yet.

There are at least three significant negatives. First, there are far fewer translators for saving documents in other formats. Word 98 has 28 but Word 2001 has only 18, none of them are WordPerfect formats which are still very common despite Microsoft's best efforts. There are no PC Word 97 nor Word 2000 formats. This is a major deficiency, one that extends to Apple's AppleWorks 6 as well. Second, Office:mac 2001 in NOT Carbonized despite what you may have read elsewhere. Even installing Office:mac 2001 in Mac OS X's Applications folder still results in the Classic Environment opening to run Office:mac 2001. In contrast, launching the Carbonized AppleWorks 6 in Mac OS X results in it running under Mac OS X without opening the Classic Environment even if it is installed with Mac OS 9.0.4 on another partition or drive. Third, the upgrade cost is a too-steep $299 ($499 first time purchase). Hopefully, Microsoft will address these issues.