Microsoft Office 98 for Macintosh

Office 4.21 is one of the greatest examples of what not to do when developing applications for Mac OS. It is slow. The 34 installation disks should have included thumbscrews in preference to boot times. The interface was pure Windows, a grey-rendered cosmetic insult to the masses of Word and Excel faithful. The handful of functional new features were hidden away in the 90M install, with a 160M hard disk still the Apple default. Users stayed away in droves, or installed only what they needed to continue to share files with Windows co-workers, watching as their versions progressed through Office 95 and 97.
The Office 98 install still occupies 90M of disk space, but it does so at a time where this represents less than 10% of the capacity of the drives shipped with a current Power Mac. The installation surprisingly consists of no extensions; the shared libraries are installed by the applications on first startup. No extensions means less RAM being used and no more extension conflicts. Secondly, the applications are self-repairing. Should the libraries be accidentally deleted, the application will simply reinstall them on the next use, rather than the user having to reinstall all of Office.
As a whole, Office 98 carries over enough of the interface theme to resemble Office 97 for Windows, but with enough of its own changes to render its own identity. In Word 98, fonts can be changed using the same drop-down toolbar menu as in Word 6.0, or using the new WYSIWYG Font menu, which shows the font name written in the font (a la ClarisWorks). Recognising the number of power users still refusing to budge from Word 5.1, Word 98 includes an option for using Word 5.1 menus to make the transition easier. Word 98 also uses contextual menus for quick access to spelling and grammar suggestions (problems are identified as they are typed, with spelling underlined in red and grammar in green). An added feature showcased in Word 98: the contextual menu also accesses a thesaurus for on-the-fly changes.
All three applications have added features designed to integrate with the Inter net. A Web toolbar can be accessed with a single click, providing an interface with Internet Explorer. Other useful features include the ability to import and export HTML, and the ability to use Excel to gather data such as stock quotes from Web pages for automatic graphing and so on. A Web page wizard in Word 98 makes the production of simple Web pages using Word a quick and uncomplicated process, allowing users with no HTML experience a chance to produce pages without having to learn another application.
Office 98 has been designed so the separate applications integrate by using Apple technologies, with full drag-and-drop capability and support for QuickTime and QuickTime VR. Macro function- ality is now supported through all applications using the Visual Basic for Applications programming system. Office 98 applications scan files for viruses before opening them, giving the user the option of suppressing the macro system when a virus-infected file is about to be opened.
Just like the Windows version, Office 98 includes the Animated Assistants, the default being a two-legged Mac SE named Max. The assistants provide an interface to the application help and provide frequent, if ultimately trying, suggestions for improving work using features such as AutoFormat, AutoSummarize and Auto-Correct.
Excel can now cope with up to 32,000 characters in each cell, and 65,535 rows in each sheet. Collaboration has also been improved. Multiple users can edit the same cell; changes are tracked with multiple colours, and annotations spring up from highlighting added by the reviewers of a document. All previous versions of a spreadsheet can be stored in the same file, so there is no need to save multiple documents to track multiple versions.
Microsoft has made it easier to start a new PowerPoint document. The templates produce attractive presentations almost instantly, and the clip-art gallery also stores sounds and movies for multimedia presentations. New animation effects combine with soundtrack support for exciting presentations, and there’s the ability to vary the subset of frames saved to produce different versions of the same presentation for different audiences.
Ultimately, it’s the small tweaks that make Office 98 so superior to Office 4.21. The proofing tools are more intelligent, recognising that personal names are not spelling errors,
and including the names of companies from the Fortune 1000 in the dictionary. The multiple levels of undo and redo save time and headaches, while the extensive shared code between the applications results in time savings. The consistent interfaces and feature implementation throughout means using one application is much like using another.
Office 98 seems to herald a new age of non-patronising Macintosh ports of other applications. The new features of Office 98 bring the Mac up to speed with Windows, and the elegance and simplicity of the Mac implementation surpass it.