Software Review: Microsoft Office 2004 Professional, Part 1

The De Facto Standard of Office Suites

Once upon a time, Microsoft was playing catch-up with products like WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC platform, and Office component applications like Word and Excel demonstrated real leadership only on the Macintosh platform, where the products were originally created. But by the time Windows 95 appeared, Microsoft had begun devoting huge effort to developing Office for the PC, and it soon became apparent that the PC version of the suite would be taking priority. After moving swiftly to dominate the PC market with Office, development on the Mac platform started catching up once again, and now the two products leapfrog one another via offset release cycles — with the latest features being introduced alternately in the Mac or the PC versions. The Microsoft Office suite is now the de facto standard on both platforms.

With Microsoft’s next PC-based release (Office 12) still at least many months away, the Macintosh version — Microsoft Office 2004 — is currently the ‘latest and greatest’, but even now it is not necessarily at full feature parity with its Windows sibling. One question for Mac OS X-based practitioners is simply this: is Office 2004 enough to enable seamless interoperation with the world of Windows?

In my view, the answer is an unreserved yes: Microsoft has done a better job with this release than any other for more than a decade, since the good old days of applications like Word 5.1. However, the occasional ‘gotcha’ does remain, including one problem with an intermediate update to the software that can leave you with a completely non-functional installation.

A second question is whether a full suite like Microsoft Office is still necessary for the typical mental health professional in private practice — particularly given the upsurge in popularity of open source alternatives. I think the answer to this question is less straightforward, and it depends to a significant degree on how much you need to exchange documents with other professionals, whether you regularly publish articles in print, and whether you frequenty give conference presentations. In my case, I think the full suite is probably not strictly necessary, but it certainly makes life — and running a business — a great deal easier.

What’s Included?

First things first. Microsoft Office is available in several flavours, and at several price points; we reviewed the full Microsoft Office 2004 Professional, which is distinguished primarily by its inclusion of Virtual PC. The full list of Office applications includes:

• Word (word processing)
• Excel (spreadsheet)
• Entourage (email, calendar)
• PowerPoint (presentations)
• Virtual PC (PC emulation)
• MSN Messenger (messaging)

This review will cover all except the last, which is available separately for free and is not a crucial component of the Office suite.

Compatibility Made Easy

As I mentioned above, one of the main questions for anyone working on the Macintosh platform is how easily they can interoperate with colleagues or clients using the dominant Windows platform. For several years, compatibility problems between the two platforms have been shrinking — in part because of direct efforts by both Apple and Microsoft to incorporate cross-platform capabilities into their respective operating systems, and in part because of the growing influence of open standards and of the world wide web. For example, it now makes very little difference whether one uses a Mac or a PC to browse the web, interact with XML data, write email, etc. And when communicating on a LAN, both Windows XP and Mac OS X work together very effectively.

But what happens when a colleague sends you a PowerPoint presentation, or a client wants to send you emails as Word attachments? And if you develop your own practice website, what happens when you develop pages on the Mac — will they displya properly on PCs?

With this latest iteration of its Office suite, Microsoft has made it easier than ever before to accommodate documents created under Windows, as well as to check whether documents created on the Mac will be fully supported by the older version of Office currently running on Windows. A new automated compatibility checking tool will do the job for you, going through a document and flagging anything that could create a problem for Windows users — along with recommended solutions.

Going the other direction, from Windows to the Mac, I’ve tried opening several old documents created by older Office applications and have so far found the process relatively seamless. A few minor problems I encountered when opening PC-created documents with the previous Mac version (called ‘v.X’) seem to have disappeared altogether. I occasionally receive Word or RTF attachments from my online counselling clients, and all these have opened without a hitch.

Office Applications: Microsoft Word

Considered by many to be the centrepiece of the Microsoft Office suite, Word is a very mature piece of software in which I wouldn’t really expect to see any Earth-shattering improvements.

Having said that, Word 2004 does introduce a new ‘Notebook’ layout view, intended to act as a virtual notebook for taking notes, attaching audio annotations, and flag items for follow-up via the Project Center, a part of Entourage. I personally don’t find the function particularly useful: I don’t believe Word is particularly well suited for this type of task in the first place. (If I am really taking notes, for example, I am usually working extremely quickly, struggling to keep up with something that is being spoken in real time, and I certainly do not have time to wander off and flag a task for myself to complete by some specified date.)

A more significant improvement comes with Word’s tracking of changes within a document. If you’ve ever tried to collaborate on a document using Word’s change tracking feature, you’ll know how functional yet primitive the feature has been. This revision introduces major advances in change tracking and even offers some degree of integration with MSN Messenger.

Finally, Word also incorporates a reference tool panel which offers a nice improvement over the old dictionary and thesaurus functions — plus a one-click direct link to the online Encarta encyclopedia. Microsoft has also integrated MSN internet search into the panel, although I believe most web users would agree that Microsoft is some distance behind search leaders Google and Yahoo in terms of search quality.

Overall, my personal experience of Microsoft Word has been extremely positive. I wrote my first book primarily in Word 6, and it was the bane of my existence. Compared with Word 5.1 or even Word 4, in which I also wrote hundreds of pages, Word 6 was a bug-ridden resource hog that regularly crashed and mangled my documents. As a result of that anxiety-ridden experience, I feel more critical and hyper-watchful of Word than of almost any other application. With Word 2004, I once again feel like I can relax a bit with my documents and trust that Microsoft has managed to get it right this time!

(Having said that, during several months of testing, I did experience one Word crash while manipulating tables. As the application went down, it offered me the option of recovering my document and restarting Word, but this turned out to be a bad joke: the application restarted just fine, but my ‘recovered’ document was nowhere to be found. I wound up going back to the most recently saved version, losing 20-30 minutes of work.)

Office Applications: Excel

Many of those for whom Word is not the centre of the office suite universe probably place that honour squarely on the shoulders of Excel, the suite’s spreadsheet application. Like Word, Excel features a new viewing mode: page layout view, like its namesake in its word processing sibling, enables you to see just how a document will look once its printed. Back in the dark ages, a spreadsheet was just a spreadsheet, and I don’t imagine too many people spent a great deal of time worrying about how their spreadsheets looked on paper. These days, however, many users create visually sophisticated documents using spreadsheets, and for those who take advantage of such capabilities, the new page layout view is no doubt a very welcome evolution.

Some less significant improvements in charting capability and formula editing round out the new features in this application which, like Word, is already a very mature product.

Continue to Part 2…