• A productivity suite with a host of ground-breaking new features

• Access e-mail, documents, contacts, and more from one central location

• Take notes, flag information, and record audio directly into documents

• Convenient Excel page-layout view and PowerPoint presenter tools

• Improved junk e-mail protection

Wow. I also remember saying this when I say the gigantic headed Bill Gates up on the video screen behind Steve Jobs a few years ago when Apple and Microsoft agreed to play nice. (OK, there was more to it than just "play nice," but as usual, I digress.)

I do really like Office 2004. I like what I can do better with it. And, there is now also an envy factor. Not only do I have a better operating system at home than at work (my employer is still stuck in XP-land), but I now have a better Office software suite.

Allow me to tell you that I have been an Microsoft Office user for a few years, on both Windows and Mac OS 9. I was very happy with having Office X work so well on cross-platform work (when I travel without my Powerbook, I carry my USB thumb-drive and Office documents are quickly interchanged across operating systems.)

So, I have been very pleased with this latest version of Office. The 2004 suite installs very smoothly (I recommend following the install program, but you can drag-n-drop the entire suite also.)

I won't go into great detail about many of the different features (many Mac websites and magazines are filled with the current buzz about Office) but I will mention some high points and a few quirks.

I loved Project Center. This made Entourage a win for me. Prior to this, I had Office X, but I used Apple's Mail exclusively. Now, I use both (I'll mention this in one of my reviewed quirks below.) The ability to organize, track, and group all my electronic work together (emails, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, contacts, calendars ...) has been very useful. Plus I like the reorganized Entourage viewing panel for reading emails (the email opens and can be viewed to the right of the screen, rather than the traditional top and bottom view.)

Plus I really liked Word's updates in two key areas: Notebook layout and the formatting palette's transparency. The notebook layout helps me to take notes smoothly during presentations. Plus, it has a sound recording option. This was really neat. At a recent User Group meeting on databases, I sat and took notes during the presentation, and recorded the presenter's voice. During playback (90 minutes for about 8 megabytes), my notes are marked to the side by where in the presentation the recorded voice is currently. I'm almost willing to go back to college with this tool! But I can see where it will be useful in my current day to day work also. (I have a colander for a memory retention device, and I'm always taking notes in some form or another.)

Plus, I like the new feature of the formatting palette. When idle (maybe 10 seconds, if I counted), the palette allows the window below to show through, so that I can read my stuff a whole lot easier. Formatting for output is easier with this palette.

I use Excel, and I like it as a simple database. But I didn't see any really killer upgrades (but then I'm not a power user in the Excel world.) I do like how the charts and diagrams seem a whole lot easier now.

I've been a PowerPoint fan for quite a while now. But Apple's Keynote took away most of PowerPoint's thunder with its release. In 2004, PowerPoint fires back and wins back some issues on "Gee-whiz" tricks of animation and preview. The little addition of a timer makes the preview ability (the presentation on a separate screen/projector and the preview screen on your laptop) a key issue for the combination of making smooth and organized presentations. There are a whole new bunch of animation transitions and tricks. But, Keynote still wins in slide transition (the cube transform in PowerPoint falls flat.)

With this segue, I'll mention some of the downsides to Office 2004 which I experienced. In setting up Entourage, I brought over both an IMAP account (my .mac address) and a POP account (another email address). The IMAP works well enough, but I am used to "seeing" the email the Apple Mail way, and it took me a while to get used to seeing my .mac emails not move around as easily in filing (I'd have to copy the email somewhere, then delete it from the IMAP inbox. And my POP account (which worked so easily in Mail), never did get set up. I'm not smart enough to figure it out yet, so I still use Mail. And if Apple gives Mail a revision with at least an option to view emails from the side, rather then from above, I might switch back. All I know is that I like Entourage, but I don't really like it.

And, I encountered a series of application failures in PowerPoint when building a presentation for this review. Every one seemed somehow related to slide animations, but I couldn't see any one issue. For every one, I allowed the program to send its report to Microsoft with some hopes that this might get resolved.

And now, I'll finish by letting you know that Mom always said if I had nothing nice to say, that I ought not say anything at all. I have gotten in trouble with not listening to my Mom before. So with that, I offer my review of MSN Messenger: iChat Rules! But if you want full functionality of Entourage, load Messenger, but don't run it. With it installed, Entourage will let you preview emails when you are running other applications in the foreground (definitely useful feature.)

Lastly, as mentioned at the beginning, I use different Office versions, and I move documents around routinely to others. This Office version has one other neat trick -- a compatibility report. I can check my 2004 documents for compatibility with other versions to see what items might not work well. This is a nice simple feature, and I see this helping me out some also.

30 of 35 found the following review helpful:


Great Product but...  Jan 29, 2006 By Jvalant N. Sampat
Microsoft makes the best office suite - period. However, I still do believe that the price is a bit of a rip-off. I have been using Open Office (...) which is developed by Sun Microsystems and is FREE. It is also compatible with MS Office - you can save the files in Word, PowerPoint etc. format. The more I use it, the more I wish I had it during my undergrad days. If money is not your concern - MS Office is definitely the best productivity suite out there. However, if you are a student and wish to make presentations or documents for school/university work I would definitely recommend Open Office as you simply cannot get anything better for free and it shall suit all your needs. I mean at the end of the day - you are graded on your work now how the slides come flying in. But Open has the flying slides too - thought the MS ones still look cooler:) I particularly liked exporting Word Files to PDF format within Open Office. For the record I am not anti-Microsoft - they have some good products - I just wish they would make them more affordable. I hope this helps.

11 of 12 found the following review helpful:


OK  Oct 22, 2005 By Alex Patterson
You should only get this if you really nead it ... unfortunately, you probably do. Although overall this is a fairly decent attempt by Microsoft to make something asthetically pleasing and Mac like, it is hampered by the usual Microsoft problems:

1. It keeps 'helping' you when you don't want it to. Although you can presumably turn most of these features off you probably wont have the time or inclination to find out how to. So you'll have the pleasure of being confronted by offers to create Powerpoint slides when you open up Word, have brackets turned into smilies as well as a host of other random edits and substitutions that are correct maybe 10% of the time.

2. It is bloated with features most of which still don't work correctly. I would say this is slightly worse than the Windows version. For instance, the bulleting and numbering seems to go wrong or randomly switch between styles more often and the styles and header numbering is even less stable.

In addition to these standard MS problems they've managed to make the whole thing run really very slowly. I'm using a G4 Powerbook and Word cannot even always keep up with my moderate touch typing speed (i.e. there is a noticable lag between typing and words appearing). If you are editing a document with lots of numbering then you will notice delays in the order of seconds when, for instance, deleting selections - even small ones.

Overall: a decent looking release hampered by the usual Microsoft problems and a general sluggishness.

5 of 5 found the following review helpful:


Works Great!  May 24, 2007 By Ron Sullivan
Office is still, pretty much, the business standard of today. Truly one of Microsoft's better products, it preforms up to it's high standards here as well.

The only thing that bugs me is that this version is coming up on four-years old!

5 of 5 found the following review helpful:


Not all it could be, but still the standard  Apr 29, 2007 By Dennis R. Cohen
Frankly, I was disappointed by Office 2004 for the Mac. I purchased it as an upgrade from Office X. While it did add a few new features, most really weren't of significant interest to me. What I wanted was for Excel's Pivot Table features to match those of the Windows version -- they didn't. Then, to top it off, Word's revision tracking features were changed in such a manner as to make them far less useful and a lot more intrusive (and I have to use Word for all my work as an author and editor). Entourage was significantly improved from previous versions. I won't speak to PowerPoint as that is a part of the product I don't use. While other applications can read or write Office files, none do so with the fidelity or the full feature set of the "real Office." So, if real compatibility is what you need, this is the best game in town.

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