I look forward to each new version of Microsoft's Office for Mac with great enthusiasm because this suite of business applications (Word, Entourage, Excel and PowerPoint) is where Mac users spend most of their time. But I have long been aware that few, if any, users employ or even know about most of the features in the suite. The fact is, each of these applications is so huge that no one other than a reviewer has time to discover all the bells and whistles hidden therein. I was reminded of this when, during my first hour of exploring Microsoft's Office 2004, I uncovered three stunning new features only to realise they were already in the previous version. Oh well, they are still cool features and they are new to me. As a result, I changed the focus of this week's column to make note of changes that are worth discovering for the sake of productivity. The first and foremost is that Office now remembers. For example, the old Office would always flag my name as a spelling error. I would add it to the dictionary and the next time I typed it, voila, as if by magic, there was the red underline that claimed that my name was an error. I contacted the Microsoft tech support expert and he quickly showed me how to force the dictionary to remember my name. An hour after I hung up the phone, the red line came back and I have lived with it since. The old Office would also forget my style so that every time I created a new document I would have to reselect my favourite font and format touches. Well, all of that grief is gone - hallelujah! Gone too, is that annoying little assistant that would spend 10 minutes waving at you after you dismissed it. (Well, it seemed like 10 minutes.) And gone is the dictionary that you would have to close before you could look up another word and the thesaurus that you would have to dismiss before you could continue with your work. These little annoyances are all fixed. In Office 2004, you select a word and press shift and F7, and the Reference Centre pops up with the selected word defined and its synonyms listed in the thesaurus. If you click the Encarta Encyclopedia button in that window, the same word will be explored in depth with Microsoft's online tools. Simple, easy and obvious, except for the keyboard shortcut, but the new Help window is now a big help there. The Help's new form is clear, much more usable and fast, and will be how most people find out about the Office 2004 features they end up using. The Reference Centre window has three other modes that offer suite-wide new features designed to enhance productivity. Whether they do depends on you taking a few moments to learn how they work. The first is the Scrapbook tool. Scrapbook stores frequently used images and text for handy future use. It is integrated with other new productivity tools and functions, much like the Mac Shareware CopyPaste, which gives you many clipboards. During your workday, certain images (such as logos) or text clippings (such as resum?s or legal caveats) get used over and over. Having them all in your Office applications is really handy. The only flaws are that you cannot drag and drop from non-Office applications (but you can cut and paste) and the fact that Scrapbook does not show the full clipping. If you paste a web page in the Scrapbook, you have to open a new document and drag the page into it to see it later. All in all, Scrapbook will end up being useful for most and if you want more utility, get CopyPaste. Another new component is the Project Palette. It is an Office manager that corrals all your documents, e-mail, calendars, meetings and tasks, and associates them with one or more projects. When you open the Project window, buttons within allow you to add the document or e-mail you are working on to a project or associate it with a calendar event. The window handily displays all the pertinent e-mail, contacts, notes or documents for each project. Spend an hour or so figuring out how it works, and the results will be rewarding. The tightness, improved look and feel, and cross-application integration have made Office 2004 for Mac a worthwhile upgrade if for no other reason than it remembers who I am and what I want it to do from one day to the next. E-mail Dave Horrigan at horrigan@electriciti.com with your Mac queries
