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.