New Office for Macintosh

Things have come a long way since the disaster that was Word for Macintosh 6.0 (hey, Mac users have long memories, what can I say?), and now Microsoft’s new iteration of its Office suite boasts plenty of features and optimisations for OS X .

New features include a Project Centre for keeping track of documents, contacts, notes and emails relating to individual projects and a rather useful Compatibility Report feature for checking if your document is going to appear anything like you intended on a colleagues PC.

Handy features like these are collected together in the new Toolbox, allowing users to access them from inside any Office application.

The version of Internet Explorer is still the somewhat elderly 5.0, but then it’s highly unlikely that MS would ever be able compete with Apple’s own legendary Safari browser.

Office 2004 for Macintosh costs US$399 (€331).

Microsoft Office for Macintosh

Or there’s always OpenOffice for Mac – it’s free

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Fraser Lovatt

Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people. Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon. At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC. After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video. These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?