Like a good boy, I had been regularly purchasing my MicroSoft Excel upgrades for a very long time. How long has it been? It's been so long that my first copy of Excel (1.0, in 1985) was free, because at the time I possessed registered copies of MS Multiplan and MS Chart. That's a long time by anyone's measure.
My most recent Excel upgrade prior to MS Office for the Mac 2001 was Excel 95; I took a bye on Office 98 principally because I've never been particularly fond of MS Word (even in the Mac versions that had worked reasonably well). For most of the fifteen years or so that I've been using Macs almost exclusively, my word processor of choice has been WriteNow: Lean, mean, full of most of the features that I need, still running on OS 9.2.2, and, regrettably, discontinued (abandoned would be a more appropriate term) several years ago.
However, with the ever-increasing hegemony of Windows-based business networks, and with the fact that Excel 95 cannot run on a G4 Mac with OS 9.0 or newer, I bit the bullet and purchased this Office 2001 upgrade. And, while I've now pretty much climbed its learning curve, the experience hasn't exactly been one that I'd rave about.
Here are a few nits I choose to pick (some small, some not so small):
* Somewhere between Excel 95 and Office 2001, Microsoft programmers seem to have lost track of the fact that Macs have both "Return" and "Enter" keys. (Wintel machines have no "Return" key.) The "Return" key no longer functions as it did, scrolling down one cell in an Excel spreadsheet; it now does precisely the same thing the "Enter" key does (which is limited to whatever one chooses from the "Preferences" menu). Dumb!
* In like fashion, the MS programmers decided to reassign several of the common "Command" key functions (Fill Down, Fill Across, Insert, Delete, Clear, etc.) to the "Control" key, again in some ill-founded effort at "cross-platform"compatibility. (Imagine my surprise when I first went to insert a row or column, only to find that my selection was formatted in italics!) In the process, the ergonomic superiority of the Mac keyboard, requiring less "stretch" effort to activate these keyboard shortcuts, has now been sacrificed to the Bill Gates God of Uniformity. And Microsoft continues to place the Font menu on a toolbar, not as a Mac-standard menu. Dumb!
* While tools have been added to the toolbox library, the ability to customize toolbars for one's own use has actually been reduced! And the tools don't always load consistently, suggesting some bugginess that requires a Microsoft patch or two, not yet available. And, unlike previous Excel upgrades in my experience, this one appears to provide no additional chart types. Dumb!
* Word is incompatible with RamDoubler 9.0 (another patch still not available). But, for once, my newest (G4) Mac has more memory than RamDoubler can deal with. Nevertheless: Dumb!
* Word files - as always - are bloated for reasons that have little to do with content or formatting. (As a comparison, a 25-page file, containing a few tables and some minor formatting, which occupies 91K of HD space as a WriteNow 4.0 file and 96K as a WordPerfect 3.5e file, occupies 194K as a Word 2001 file.) If not "Dumb!", then "Why?"
* The ubiquitous Wintel paperclip "Advisor" has been transmogrified to a less-than-winsome "flex-toy Mac." Gimmee a break!
* Entourage is incompatible with Outlook or Outlook Express. Its inclusion is specious at best, and one wonders how many will use this module.
* Once again, as far as a database module is concerned, Mac users are left in the lurch. Access continues to be notable by its absence (not that it is every database user's "dream program"), and FoxPro has long been history as far as Microsoft support is concerned. Moreover, a Mac port of SQL is just a fantasy. And VisualBasic is only present in crippled form, to support the modules that are VB-capable.
There are a few (very few, I'm sad to say) gains:
* PowerPoint works fine. But I have little need for it, save for the odd PP file that gets attached to my e-mail thanks to some chain letter or other.
* The modules run acceptably fast. But I think this has as much or more to do with G4 speed and available RAM as it does to "tight" coding by software engineers.
* Word works acceptably well (but not particularly great) as a platform for HTML coding.
* I've got the cross-platform compatibility that my business-related activities require.
For those G4 users needing Excel but not needing "full" cross-platform compatibility for other applications, my advice is to limit yourselves to just the Excel 2001 upgrade (saving some bucks), hang on to your WriteNow 4.0 program (it'll run just fine on OS 9.x G4's) or download a free copy of WordPerfect 3.5e, take a bye on Entourage (Outlook Express works just fine, and is bundled free with Explorer), and, if you need a database program, there's always FileMaker Pro.
Summary: A "forced" upgrade for G4 Mac users who must use Excel. More steps backward than forward for those of us who prefer Macs but need the cross-platform compatibility. At best, three stars, and then only with the greatest of reluctance.
Bob ZeidlerGet more detail about Microsoft Office: Mac 2001 Upgrade.
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