Review: Microsoft Office 2004, Part 2, Excel and Entourage

Product Name: Excel 2004
Company: Microsoft
URL: http://www.microsoft.com/mac/
Category: Spreadsheet and charting program
Price:
- $499 Office 2004 Professional edition (includes Virtual PC 7)
- $299 Office 2004 Standard edition
- $239 Office 2004 Upgrade
- $149 Office 2004 Student and teacher edition
- $239 Excel 2004 Retail package
- $109 Excel 2004 Upgrade
Requirements:
- G3 PowerMac
- OS X 10.2.8
- at least 450 MB hard disk space for full Office suite
Rating: 3 bounces (2 bounces as an upgrade from Excel v. X) - Lustworthy

Product Name: Entourage 2004
Company: Microsoft
URL: http://www.microsoft.com/mac/
Category: E-mail, personal information, and project management software
Price:
- $499 Office 2004 Professional edition (includes Virtual PC 7)
- $299 Office 2004 Standard edition
- $239 Office 2004 Upgrade
- $149 Office 2004 Student and teacher edition
- Entourage not available as a standalone product
Requirements:
- G3 PowerMac
- OS X 10.2.8
- at least 450 MB hard disk space for full Office suite
Rating: 3 bounces - Lustworthy

In the first part of this series we looked at PowerPoint, for many years the benchmark application for presentations, and while certainly not perfect is definitely an improvement over previous versions. This time we're looking at Excel and Entourage. Excel is a spreadsheet program that incorporates a powerful macro-building tool for running numerical analyses on data sets. Excel doesn't have a complete monopoly though, and there are alternatives, such as DeltaGraph, which I reviewed a while ago. Certainly one important consideration when looking at Excel is whether a tool designed primarily for business people is necessarily the right choice for users in other markets, such as education. Entourage is very different to the previous version of the program, combining its original e-mail and personal information management tools with a new project management tool called Project Center.

Installing and configuring Microsoft Office 2004 was described in the preceding part of this article, and needn't be repeated here. Suffice it to say that installation is simple, but it is a good idea to use the installation wizard rather than the drag-and-drop installer if you want to fine-tune what gets copied across in terms of clip art, templates, foreign dictionaries, and other tools. Let's begin the review by looking at Excel 2004.

Microsoft Excel 2004

Excel is probably the most popular spreadsheet program on both Macintosh and Windows platforms, in part because it has always been powerful but easy to use, but also because versions of Excel on either platform happily read and write to the same files making it easy for people to share data with one another. While there are more specialised tools for financial control and budgeting (such as Quicken and MYOB), Excel remains one of the most popular tools for small businesses and accountants. Though money management is Excel's raison d'être, its versatility for all sorts of other mathematical applications has made it a standard tool in many other markets, from education through to scientific research.

Surprisingly enough, Excel is probably the least changed component of the entire Office 2004 package, and while it remains a good and solid performer, as far as an upgrade over Excel v. X goes, it can be dealt with relatively briefly. The main change is in the page layout view, which is the default view for Excel now. (If you rarely print Excel spreadsheets, you'll probably want to change the default to the traditional normal view in the preferences.) Instead of seeing a boundless document window, you see the spreadsheet spread across pieces of paper. The active 'page' looks normal while the others are dimmed. Anything added to the page is shown as it will be printed, for example headers and footers, graphics, charts, and so on.

The big change to Excel is to the page layout view, the default view now, which divides the spreadsheet into an active page (the normal looking one) and inactive pages (which are dimmed).

Putting data into Excel hasn't been changed much, the main new feature being how it handles formulas. Traditionally, these are the backbone to any good spreadsheet, allowing the user to perform complex calculations on lots of numbers instantly. The problem with formulas has been that they are not always easy to use, and for newcomers especially figuring out how to phrase a formula so that it performs the desired calculation can be tricky. Excel 2004 now comes with a feature called Range Finder, which uses coloured boxes to show which cells are being referred to by the formula. When a formula is being edited, each cell reference has a colour, and the same colour fringes the actual cell on the spreadsheet. This makes it easier to solve at least one kind of common problem, where cells are incorrectly ordered or used within a formula.

The integrated help has been beefed up, and combined with the colour coded Range Finder makes it easier to fix faulty formulae.

Along with Range Finder, another new feature is Function ScreenTips that appear when the user is typing in a formula. These help explain the syntax of a given function, and so work towards preventing another common problem with formulas, syntax errors. Backing up all of this is an impressive help facility.

The integrated help (top) has been beefed up, and onscreen tips (below) appear to help the explain the correct syntax for a formula while you type.

Charts

Once the data is entered, the next thing most users turn to is the charting tool, and this again is basically the same as before, but with some improvements. As with PowerPoint, the Formatting Palette now gives the user much quicker access to most of the key tools, and will be a welcome addition. The changes to the graphics are essentially the same as those outlined last time with PowerPoint: better use of fonts, new transparencies and shadows, nicer colour blends, and so on. It is now far easier to make presentation quality graphs and charts than ever before.

A new Formatting Palette brings together all the important.

Charts can also be edited in other programs much more easily and cleanly. Simply copying and pasting into Word works well, and gives instant access to things like colours and typography, allowing the user to greatly enhance the chart for inclusion in publications or PowerPoint slides. They can also be exported in a variety of formats including Macintosh PICT files, GIFs, and JPEGs (though without any settings for things like compression and colour palette).

Bugs

I found only one consistently repeatable bug while I was using Excel, and that concerned importing text files. The wizard used to do this offering the user the ability to set delimiters other than the usual ones like tabs and spaces, for examples "@" symbols. In this case, I was importing a bunch of e-mail addresses, and wanted the user names as one column, and the domains as a second column, and hence needed to use the "@" symbol as my delimiter. After entering the symbol into the relevant box, you can choose either "Next" or "Finish" depending on what you want to do, and if I pressed "Finish" Excel would invariably crash. I informed Microsoft of this problem, and I'm pleased to say that after running the Office 2004 Auto Updater and thus updating Excel to version 11.1, the bug no longer exists.

Under some situations, importing text files lead to a crash.

Entourage 2004

Setting up Entourage is straightforward enough using a setup wizard. One thing did strike me though. Microsoft needs to learn the difference between "No" and "Cancel" in a dialogue box. The first thing the wizard does is ask the user if they want to make Entourage the default e-mail program, a fair enough question. But the dialogue box offers two choices, "Cancel" and "Make Default". To the uninitiated, "Cancel" can be easily read to mean cancel the entire wizard, rather than refuse this particular option. The same thing happens when you quit the program, and Entourage 2004 tells you it is about to empty the junk mail mailbox. Instead of giving clear "OK - empty the Junk" and "No - leave the Junk alone" messages, you get "Cancel" and "OK". Will "Cancel" stop the Junk mail mailbox from being emptied, or, stop the program from quitting? The former: the program quits, but the junk is left alone.

A wizard handles most of the setting up process, though a badly worded dialogue box right at the start could be a stumbling block.

What makes this doubly annoying is that besides being misleading, Microsoft Office 2004 isn't even consistent when it comes to what "Cancel" means. Try this: open up a Microsoft Word 2004 document, make a couple of changes, and then press Command-Q to quit. What happens? It asks do you want to not save the changes ("Don't Save"), cancel your command to quit the program ("Cancel"), or save your changes and then quit ("Save"). So in Word, "Cancel" stops the process, but in Entourage, "Cancel" can mean "No, don't do whatever it is you asked me".

Entourage as an E-mailer

E-mail messages and accounts can be imported from a variety of e-mail programs including older versions of Entourage and programs like Eudora and Mail. This step is surprisingly quick even with large e-mails archives: Entourage 2004 imported around 2000 messages from my e-mail program spread across half a dozen accounts in about three minutes. Note that while Entourage 2004 can transfer addresses from some personal information managers, such as Claris Organizer and Now Up-To-Date, it does not import them from the OS X Address Book program.

One feature of Entourage 2004 touted in the manual is the ability to use the popular free Hotmail e-mail accounts, but alas, by the time this reviewer attempted to try out this feature, this was no longer possible. To use Entourage 2004 to read your Hotmail account, you'll need to upgrade to one of the "pro" versions of the service, at a cost of about twenty dollars a year. I think this is a shame; with so many Mac users relying on the free (and highly integrated) e-mail program built into OS X, Microsoft is going to have a tough time getting them to switch. Providing Entourage 2004 users with access to a free e-mail account could go a long way to making Entourage a more attractive deal. On the other hand, Entourage 2004 is a full-featured and easy to use newsgroup reader, and you can automatically read the Microsoft newsgroups for free even without a newsgroup server from your ISP.

Though the manual says you can access free Hotmail accounts with Entourage 2004, you can't.

The first thing the user will notice when using Entourage is that it has a much more complex interface than something like Apple's Mail program, though not much changed from Entourage v. X. This comes down to the program being able to do rather more, of course, but it also makes it look and feel much less intuitive than simple, one-purpose e-mail programs. In the top left are six buttons that toggle the main window between its six different modes (mail, address book, calendar, and so on). Each time one of these buttons is pressed a different set of buttons appear along the top of the main windows, relevant to particular mode Entourage 2004 is being used in.

The Entourage interface is complex but reasonably easy to use.

In mail mode, Entourage 2004 operates in a three-pane Window. The smallest pane runs along the left hand side and contains the accounts and mailboxes. Mailbox with new messages are lettered in bold to make them stand out from mailboxes without new messages, and clicking on a mailbox cause summaries of the messages in that mailbox to be shown in the second pane. By default, messages are arranged by date, but this can be changed to another criteria as required. Some of the built-in ones include sorting by sender, subject, and size, but if those aren't enough, custom criteria can be created. One option is to create a filter that sorts the messages by junk mail likelihood, arranging them into three groups of messages having either a low, medium, or high likelihood of being spam. A nice feature is that clicking on the title above a given groups messages causes all the messages within that group to be selected. This is useful for batch processing messages, for example if you want to apply your anti-spam rules only to the batch having a high likelihood of being junk mail.

Finally, the largest pane occupying the central and right hand side of the window is where you can read and manipulate the actual message. Messages are rendered as HTML but graphics that need to be viewed from a remote server are not automatically downloaded. This is a useful anti-spam tool (many spammers use the demand for the graphic when it is received by their server as confirmation of your address, and hence a trigger for being sent yet more spam). Similarly, attachments are not automatically downloaded. About my only gripe with Entourage as an e-mail viewer was that alert messages, for example why a certain graphic wasn't shown or some text was incorrectly displayed, were often cropped and the only way to see them fully was to resize the entire window.

One flaw in the message window is cropping its own alert messages. The only way to read the message is to resize the window, which might not be possible on computers with a small screen.

Spam

Entourage has a nice feature for showing you what's being downloaded when you check your e-mail. A small floating window at the bottom left of your screen shows the sender and subject, and gives you the option for deleting the message straight away. You can also choose to download only part of a message and leave the rest behind (above some setting you choose, but the default is to download the first 20 kb). This is great for when you are using a modem and you don't want to spend time and money downloading spam or pictures of the grandkids. Even with only a small part of the e-mail message you can easily decide whether to bin a large message or one with attachments because it's spam, or else leave it on the server until you get back home to your nice and fast Ethernet link, in the case of the family photos.

Entourage comes with sophisticated spam management tools; though out of the box they struck me as being less effective than those of Mail. Of 31 messages transferred to my inbox, 13 were spam, but apart from a very obvious one about Viagra, the messages it missed didn't look a lot like the average spam mail. A little more worrying were the messages that Entourage classed as spam and removed to my junk mail folder. There were 3 proper message included among 126 classified as spam, a false-positive rate of a bit over 2%. Training should improve this score, with false-positives marked as not junk, and spam messages Entourage didn't catch marked as spam, but as with any e-mail program, the user should not assume that automatic junk mail filtering is perfect. Entourage 2004 includes a "safe domain" list that can be used to prevent message originating from a particular server (such as aol.com or amazon.com) being treated as spam.

The Project Center and Other Goodies

The personal information management tools in Entourage divide up into the Address Book, Calendar, Notes, and Tasks. The Address Book and Calendar are self-explanatory and don't contain many surprises, but they do have some nice features that will make them attractive to professionals. The Address Book, for example, obviously integrates with the e-mail module in Entourage, but it also allows you to copy the name and address to the clipboard for pasting into word processor documents, or to find an address on a map via the Internet. Another example of integration between modules is that new jobs created in the Tasks panel appear in the Calendar. The Calendar itself can be printed off, and these look very nice.

Control-clicking an address in the Address Book takes you to an online map web site.

The Project Center is an interesting tool that combines elements of a calendar, personal information manager, and file manager. The simplest way to create a project is to build one around a folder containing all the relevant files. For a single user, this will probably be on the user's computer, but where more than one person is involved it will more likely be on a shared server. Each time a document within that folder is changed, it is added to a "Recent Items" list in Project Center window. This allows all the people working on that project to see what has changed. Rules can be created to flag e-mail messages under a "New & Recent Mail" list, making it easier to track correspondence between the people working on a project. Tasks associated with the project appear in its own special calendar view (as well as the main Calendar). Two of the neatest features are easy file sharing and a simple backing-up process that safely archives not just the project files, but also mail, contacts, and all the other ancillary files that Entourage manages.

The Project Center allows one or more user to manage projects, integrating deadlines, e-mail correspondence, backups, and other useful features.

Bugs

Entourage only threw a couple of odd behaviours up. One was its insistence on making an Office Projects folder even if I had selected some other folder to base a project on. This empty Office Projects folder could be deleted of course, but was recreated every time I created a new project. Another annoyance came from the sound effects; for example, if Entourage went to get my mail, and there was an error in logging on, it would play one alert sound, and almost immediately afterwards, a second, quieter sound for no reason that was obvious to me. Finally, there were times Entourage ignored my Ethernet or wireless connection and attempted to dial-up my mail server using my modem. The only way to correct this was to quit Entourage and try again.

Conclusion

Of the two programs looked at here, Excel is the least changed from its predecessor and most of the new features are more a timely evolution in its graphical capabilities than anything else. It still does everything it should do, but where it was looking a little old, in its charting abilities, Microsoft have tweaked and polished, and Excel will easily hold its place in the number-crunching market for a good few years yet. On the other hand, just like PowerPoint, there isn't a huge amount to compel users of Excel v. X to upgrade to Excel 2004, so as an upgrade it cannot really get more than a two-bounce rating. But taking Excel 2004 on its own, and the combination of page layout view, nicer graphics, and the better formula-building tools make it an attractive and worthwhile package, and solidly deserving a three-bounce rating.

In contrast, I don't need to be so ambivalent about Entourage. Entourage comfortably earns a three-bounce rating. It's much better than it was, and the Project Center especially reveals some real creativity in the Macintosh Business Unit at Microsoft. There really isn't anything on Mac OS X that pulls together file management, document sharing, communication, and back-ups, and these things form the basis of successful teamwork. Though often overlooked in favour of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, for small home and office businesses, Entourage could prove to be a surprisingly useful and interesting upgrade in the entire Office 2004 package. I don't think casual Mac users are going to switch from Mail or Eudora to Entourage, but if e-mail (or Microsoft Messenger) are a major part of how you get your work done, and the bulk of you work consists of Office documents of one sort or another, definitely take a look at Entourage and see if pulling your work into projects is the way to go.

- Dr. Neale Monks

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