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When Apple CEO Steve Jobs can bring himself to say he likes a product made by Microsoft, expectations for the product run high.
At a publishing conference last month, Jobs did just that -- he said that Microsoft's next version of Office for the Macintosh, called Office X, is "possibly the most important application for Mac OS X."
After a brief demonstration by Microsoft reps, it's easy to see why Jobs was so enamored: It's beautiful. The Mac team at Microsoft has taken Office's tired suite of productivity applications -- the ubiquitous word processor, spreadsheet, presentation and e-mail programs -- and converted them into high art.
This is not a full review of the new Office: For all its beauty, Office X is still just a standard productivity program, so there's no need, really, to pick apart its every feature. Virtually everyone who's used a computer is familiar with Office's four applications -- Word, Excel, PowerPoint and the e-mail program, which is called Outlook in the Windows version and Entourage in the Mac version.
Instead, this is an appreciation of a great-looking application, something so pretty it almost doesn't look like real software -- it's more like concept software, a product that designers dream of but never quite achieve, given the exigencies of coders and the particular limitations of an operating system.
But Office X is made for Mac OS X, which practically exists to make software look pretty. Mac OS X has a much-hyped "Quartz" graphic engine and "Aqua" user interface, which offer programmers the ability to create transparent menus and easily animated dialog boxes -- the kind of stuff that's difficult to do in most operating systems.
The 160-person Mac team at Microsoft set out to create an application that fully incorporated these operating system features, according to Mike Connolly, the Office group manager at Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit.
In that effort, the team had to completely rethink Office's user interface. Designers came up with about 800 brand new dialog boxes -- those boxes that pop up on your screen to ask for some kind of input -- and more than 700 icons.
The group did add some of the features that Microsoft first introduced in the last Windows version of Office -- Office XP, which was released last spring -- "but about 50 percent of the stuff we've added in here, we created from scratch for the Mac," Connolly said.
"What we especially did was think of what features would appeal to end users," he added. What he means by "end user" is the regular Joe who uses Office all the time, as opposed to "corporate I.T. guys" -- who tend to be the target audience for Windows versions of Office, Connolly said.
To that end, Office X is chock full of features that have the potential to make office life much easier. Multiple text selection, for example, which allows you to highlight several different phrases in Word and edit them simultaneously. Or a foolproof "list manager" feature in Excel that lets users quickly add formulas to worksheets without requiring them to consult online help.
But the best part about the program is how it handles graphics.
The new Word, for example, offers a pretty good, poor-man's graphics editing studio. Taking advantage of the OS X's graphics features, it let's you add "high-end" effects to photos -- so if you've ever wanted to "fresco" a photograph you've added to a document, you can now do that. Excel, too, offers great graphics capabilities -- razor-sharp pie charts and transparent 3-D bar graphs that look stunning.
The advanced features in PowerPoint -- like adding animations to a slide -- were previously only available to "Powerpoint nerds," Connolly said, but Office X makes those features "brain-dead easy."
"Now we can all be PowerPoint nerds if we want," Connolly said.
And that's probably the only bad thing about Office X. Other than that, Office X looks like a great Mac application. It's hard to fathom that it comes from a company best known for another OS.
The one strike that the Mac always had against it, remember, was that it didn't offer very good versions of Windows programs. Now that's changed -- the Mac version of Office makes the Windows version look like something designed in the last century.
And that, of course, prompts the question -- why do we need Windows, again?
