Office X for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

2 office x for macintosh: the missing manual

• In one of Office X’s most highly touted features, its drawing and picture editing

tools take advantage of Apple’s new Quartz graphics technology. If your copy of

Office is up to date (page 12), your everyday word processing text shows up with

softened, smooth, antialiased edges.

Note: Although you can apply Mac OS X-style transparency effects to images in Word and PowerPoint, as

well as to charts in Excel, the transparency doesn’t always show up in printouts (page 509).

More Integrated Than Ever

Word, Excel, and PowerPoint started out as individual, disparate programs. Starting

with Office 2001, Microsoft began to design the programs of the suite as a cohesive

whole. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint started to look and work more alike, and even

share each other’s components. For example:

• In your Entourage email, you can now use Word features like AutoCorrect and

AutoFormat for bulleted lists and other fancy formatting.

• The names and addresses entered in Entourage become AutoText entries in Word,

so that you can type just a few letters of a person’s name to paste in the full

address when typing up a letter. In fact, the Contact toolbar lets you select, find,

update, and use contacts in any Office program, without even launching Entou-

rage.

A New Day

at the Office

Figure I-1:

Burrowing down

through folders is easier

than ever in Office X,

thanks to the horizontal

scroll bar in the Open

dialog box. Another

timesaver is the From

pop-up menu, which

contains a list of the

most-used and recently-

used folders. The Add to

Favorites button places

documents in the

Favorites menu, also

shown here—another

standard Mac OS X

feature that can pay off

when you’re working in

Office X.

introduction 3

• Any text, picture, or table that you select can be dragged-and-dropped from any

Office application into any other—or even to the desktop. If you’ve ever needed

to put clip art in a spreadsheet, here’s your chance.

• Office X has an abundance of drawing tools and picture editing tools (red-eye

removal, cropping, and so on) in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

• The Office Clipboard is another one of those “why didn’t they think of it before?”

features. Finally, you can copy or cut items to a multiple-capacity clipboard and

then paste them—one by one or all at once—into any Office document.

• By clicking a new flag icon on Word, Entourage, Excel, and PowerPoint toolbars,

you can set up onscreen reminders that get added to the Entourage calendar.

When the time comes, a dialog box appears on the screen to remind you when to

follow up on a specific document or project.

A New Day

at the Office

In the beginning, not many people bought Office X for

Macintosh. Sales were far below Microsoft’s expectations.

Soon enough, a war of words heated up between Apple

and Microsoft.

Apple claimed that the reason for the slow sales was that

Microsoft had priced Office much too high ($500). Microsoft

claimed that the reason was slow adoption of Mac OS X—

and that was Apple’s fault.

Following a period of public-relations tension, both sides

backed down. Apple began assisting with the dissemina-

tion of Office X (by including a “test drive” version on ev-

ery Mac), and Microsoft began to experiment with lower

prices.

Starting in August, 2003 Microsoft reduced the price of

Office X across the board and started offering, for the first

time, standard and pro versions. Here are your options:

Standard Edition.

The basic suite of four programs dis-

cussed in this book: Word, Excel, Power Point, and Entou-

rage, plus perks like Windows Media Player and Microsoft

Graph. (This book covers these freebies, as well, in Chap-

ter 18.) The whole lot goes for $400. If you own a copy of

Office 2001 or Office 98, you can save even more money;

Having it Your Way

UP TO SPEED

an upgrade sets you back only $240. (Prices are even lower

if you shop online.)

Professional Edition.

The same as Standard, with one

major addition: Virtual PC for Mac, a Windows PC emula-

tor developed by a company called Connectix, which Mi-

crosoft purchased in 2003. (Presumably, Microsoft named

it “professional” under the assumption that professionals

are more likely to need to use Windows programs on their

Macs.)

Professional Edition costs $500 (Virtual PC by itself costs

$250). There’s just one hitch: Virtual PC doesn’t include

the Windows operating system itself. You have to buy your

own copy of Windows before you can run actual Windows

programs.

Note: If you’re thinking of buying the Professional Edition

so you can play Windows-based games on your Mac, think

twice. Not only do you have to buy Windows, which will

run you a couple hundred more dollars, but your games

will run a lot slower than on an actual Windows PC.

Student Edition.

Same as Standard, but only costs $149 if

you’re a teacher, student, or the parent of a student.