Office X for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

4 office x for macintosh: the missing manual

• A single spelling checker looks over your Word essays, Excel spreadsheets, Power-

Point slide shows, and even Entourage email.

• You can now scan or import digital camera images directly into any of the pro-

grams.

• The new Project Gallery lets you start a new Word, Excel, Entourage, or PowerPoint

document from within any of the other programs.

Rather than marketing the programs individually, Microsoft pushes the Office suite

for the same reason that there’s one Missing Manual that covers all four programs:

If you use only one of the Office programs without the others, you miss out on a lot

of timesaving shortcuts.

What’s New in Office X

When you get right down to it, Office X has only one big new feature: Mac OS X

compatibility.

That’s not to say that it offers no improvements over its predecessor, Office 2001. On

the contrary, a handful of small new goodies awaits you.

New Features: Word

• Multiselection. We’ve lived so long without being able to select nonconsecutive

chunks of text, that it can be hard to remember to use it. Keep pinching yourself,

and press c as you select as many additional bits of text as you like. Then you can

cut, copy, or format them all at once.

• Clear formatting. This addition to the Edit and Style menus changes any selected

text to your Normal style.

New Features: Excel

• Transparent charts. Mac OS X’s Quartz transparency really shows its true colors

in Excel. As shown on page 507, 3-D charts become much easier to decipher

when you can see through the layers.

• Do-it-yourself keyboard shortcuts. Excel fans can now assign any keyboard short-

cuts they like to the program’s commands, just as Word fans have been able to do

for years.

• ODBC queries. If you know that ODBC stands for Open Database Connectivity,

then run, don’t walk, to www.mactopia.com to download Service Release 1. This

update restores Excel X’s ability to query ODBC databases, as described in the

box on page 537. (If you work only with FileMaker Pro databases—or no data-

bases—then never mind.)

• Importing from FileMaker Pro. Although Excel 2001 could import databases

from FileMaker Pro into Excel worksheets, Excel X does it more easily and suc-

cessfully than ever.

A New Day

at the Office