Office X for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

introduction 5

New Features: PowerPoint

• Transparency. You can now dress up your PowerPoint presentations with see-

through graphics, thanks to Mac OS X’s Quartz graphics technology.

• Save as Package. This new command (page 592) automatically saves all of the

movies and large sound files from your presentation into a single folder. You no

longer need to worry about copying them to a laptop or CD along with the rest

of your presentations.

• Improved PowerPoint movies. Ever since PowerPoint 2001, you’ve been able to

save your presentation as a QuickTime movie. Movies in PowerPoint X can now

display all transitions and features in the original presentation, and look better,

too. For instance, the fade in/fade out effects are enhanced by transparency.

New Features: Entourage

Although the primary offering in Entourage X is a much-improved design, you also

benefit from smaller touches like these:

• Improved calendar and other views. Entourage X’s views are easier to customize

and switch between than ever. You can also view your tasks and calendar at the

same time.

• Office notifications. Entourage’s Flag for Follow-Up feature has been upgraded

to Office Notifications (page 397), which is compatible with Microsoft’s .NET

Alerts in MSN Messenger.

New Features: Office as a Whole

• Antialiasing. If you have Mac OS X version 10.1.5 or later and Office X (with

Service Release 1 installed), all text in your documents appears with smoothed

edges (or antialiased edges, as the geeks would say). This effect makes large type

look smoother and more professional, but can make smaller type look fuzzy.

Fortunately, you can turn this feature off if you like; it’s a checkbox called “En-

able Quartz text smoothing” in the General panel of each program’s Preferences

dialog box.

• Compatibility. Office X can open and work with documents from Office 98 and

2001 for Mac; Office 97, 2000, and XP for Windows; and AppleWorks 6.

• New Project Gallery options. As described on page 15, the Project Gallery offers

a wider variety of templates and wizards, as well as the new Based on Recent

feature.

• Help easier to search. Office’s Help system now uses a full-text search engine, as

opposed to a question-based formula. The benefit to you is that Help is more

likely to find the topic you’re seeking.

• Customizable toolbar buttons. For real customization mavens, you can now cre-

ate your own button icons (in Photoshop, for example) and use them on any of

Office’s toolbars.

What’s New in

Office X