Office X for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

appendix a: installation and troubleshooting 677

appendix

a

Installing Office

There are two ways to install Microsoft Office X on your Mac:

• Drag the Microsoft Office X folder from the Office CD-ROM onto your hard

drive. This method is fast and simple, requires 200 MB of hard drive space, and

gives you all four primary programs.

• Run the Office Installer, a more traditional method of installing Mac software.

Use this method if you want to control how Office is installed on your Mac and

specify which components you want.

Both of these methods are described in the following sections.

Installation and

Troubleshooting

Office X Hardware and Software Requirements

To use Microsoft Office X, your computer must have at

least:

• A G3 PowerPC chip.

• Mac OS X, version 10.1 or later.

• 200 MB of disk space for drag-and drop installa-

tion, or an “easy install,” of Office. You get all

four Office programs—Entourage, Excel,

PowerPoint, and Word. You can save disk space

if you don’t install all of these programs.

• A color monitor that can show 800 x 600 pixels

or more. (Tell your boss—or your spouse—that

1024 x 768 is recommended.)

• 128 MB of RAM. If you care about speed, more

is better, of course.

UP TO SPEED

678 office x for macintosh: the missing manual

Regardless of the primary installation method you chose, you can also install a few

eccentric, optional Office components by running something called the Value Pack;

see page 681.

Caution: Microsoft recommends that you install Office on a hard drive that’s been formatted using Mac

OS Extended (HFS +), the default format for OS X. If your Mac came with OS X preinstalled, chances are

excellent that your disk is already formatted in this way.

If, however, your cousin built you a custom Mac on the cheap and you’re not sure how OS X made its way

onto your hard disk, check your disk’s format by running Apple System Profiler, a program in your

Applications→Utilities folder. After launching System Profiler, look in the Devices and Volumes tab, find

the name of your hard disk, and then click its flippy triangle.

If it turns out that your disk uses the wrong format, but you’re not sure how to proceed, be aware that you

are treading firmly on power-user territory. See Mac OS X: The Missing Manual for more information

about disk formatting—or make your cousin solve the problem.

Drag-and-drop Installation

Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit—the people responsible for building Mac pro-

grams at Microsoft—have done a lot of research to find out what Mac people want

in their programs. One finding was, surprisingly enough, people don’t like compli-

cated installers. So Microsoft came up with the drag-and-drop installation, which

set a new world standard for simplicity and speed. (Or, more accurately, it returned

to an old standard. In the early days, all Mac software was installed this way.)

Installing Office

Figure A-1:

The major item of interest in

this window is the Microsoft

Office X folder. To install Office,

drag this folder onto your hard

drive. The most logical place to

put it is in the Applications

folder on your hard disk.