ExpertsOn™ Software Review

Microsoft Word

Microsoft Office X for Macintosh

Beauty and the Beast by Jay Gamel

January 2001

There’s no denying that OFX is a beautiful adaptation to the Macintosh’s new operating system. But make no mistake, there’s a beast lurking in it’s lovely depths; a beast that can make using your computer a nightmare for a while. In fact, it’s an entomologist’s dream.

To be honest, both OSX and OFX are beta products: both have a long way to go to be robustly stable. OSX is an old UNIX system with some new parts added on and MS isn’t famous for adapting to other platforms.

The conflict between the two highlights one of the weaker aspects of the programming field — fonts. It’s one of those things that nobody wants to deal with. Several powerful companies (Adobe not the least) monger most of the fonts in proprietary formats. What few standards exist in the field are observed in the breach for the most part.

Hell, there’s 128 different ASCII sets, much less any agreement on how to build a font suite.

Installing the suite of office utilities, Microsoft’s Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage is a breeze. Once the CD opens (and this can take awhile, even on a new Quicksilver 867) just drag the folder with the programs to your Application folder. That’s it. Theoretically, you’re ready to go.

In some cases, however, the installation adventure isn’t over. The first time I clicked on Word to fire up the registration process, the registration window was OK, but after that things went to hell pretty quick.

Word, Excel and PowerPoint crashed on boot. Entourage bloomed noisily on the screen, eager to suck up information from older mail programs as well as a variety of personal information managers and take over your e-mail, address, calendar and note functions. But as for the rest … no luck.

My first instinct is never to try Microsoft help first. Just worked out that way over 15 years of using their products. I turned to macfixit.com and sure enough, there was a long thread of messages posted to the board from people having the same problem, most of whom managed to solve it in one of several ways.

While the fixes varied from disabling iTunes helper to getting rid of one/some/all of the System 9 fonts, the problem was the same: Word, Excel and PowerPoint wouldn’t boot. Fonts seem to be the major culprit.

The Microsoft font engineer who worked on the suite even weighed in on the ongoing discussion, pretty much blaming the problem on OSX. It’s not as forgiving as 9, blah blah et cetera et cetera. This is a fairly standard Microsoft response to product criticisms: blame the other guy.

Apple has a long history of doing the same thing, too. Their system is perfect; the other guy just doesn’t know how to use it or is doing something wrong. Neither one is particularly helpful to the client/customer who has shelled out a lot of money for both products.

I don’t really care whose fault it is, I just want the problem fixed. OSX doesn’t exist in a vacuum and applications have to run on the system that’s there. I don’t want to hear what they don’t like about each other. I want the product to work.

In this case, I have to suspect the Microsoft is the bigger culprit. Everything else was working just fine until OFX was installed. Then the problems cropped up. I can’t believe that a major product from the worlds major software company can be sold with such a major flaw. Did I mention, “major?”

A secondary problem that developed was that I couldn’t boot Classic. At least one other person in the macfixit forum had the same problem. Mine went away after I booted in 9 and then went back to X. The application boot problem was fixed by taking Hoefler Text out of the OS9 folder.

Also, after installing OFX, I had problems booting from OSX. The red spinning ball wouldn’t stop spinning. Since I’m not dead sure OFX was the culprit, I won’t lay the blame here since I haven’t seen any other reports of this particular problem associated with this MS product. The fix was relatively simple, involving a firmware update, but I’m reserving judgment on this aspect of the install.

Once they are working, look forward to enjoying a well thought-out suite of office products. MS has effectively translated to the carbonaceous period, employing the Aqua interface and cleaning up a lot of clumsier interfaces in the process.

Tool bars are cleaner and more amenable to resizing and positioning, which is useful when working with larger monitors and multiple documents.

Menus are fully customizable, of course, but the new set of icons are bigger, cleaner and their functions are readily apparent from the pop up descriptions that seem quicker than Word 98.

One delightful addition is that there is no need to save back to Word 98 for your less fortunate friends. 2001 documents can be opened by several earlier Word versions. Although I don’t have a complete list, Word 98 in OS9 opened the OSX documents without a problem.

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