If you've been cursing the big price tag and lack of VBA support in Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, OpenOffice.org is coming to your rescue. Last September, the OpenOffice.org dev team announced that they would be porting the suite to run natively on the Mac. Previous versions ran under the X11 environment, which not only hogged resources, but didn't have the Aqua look and feel we all love.
OpenOffice.org 3.0 is still beta, but a quick test-drive of the application showed that it is almost ready for prime time. OOo is a full-featured office suite, complete with word processor (Writer), spreadsheet (Calc), presentation package (Impress), drawing app (Draw), as well as database tools (Base) that are sadly lacking in other office suites.
The feature set of OpenOffice.org 3 is impressive:
Imports Microsoft Office binary (.doc, .ppt, .xls) and Office 2007/Office 2008 for Mac (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) files
A solver component for solving optimization problems, something lacking in Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac
Spreadsheet workbook sharing
Display of multiple Writer pages while editing
MS Office-like comments in Writer
Limited VBA macro support -- which is still better than no support
Extensibility with Mozilla Thunderbird and Lightning, Sun Wiki Publisher and Report Builder
The price of OpenOffice.org 3 is, as always, free! If you're up to test-driving beta ware that may not necessarily be as stable or fast as your other office suite(s), click here to be transported to the beta site.
When Microsoft released Office 2008 for Mac, they did something that I must applaud -- they joined the ranks of Mac developers creating Automator-able applications. When you do a search in Automator for "Microsoft," it will reveal all of the Automator actions that ship with Microsoft Office 2008. There is lots of great stuff included, so we'll be covering some of it in this four part Mac Automation series. I will take you through how to automate each of the Microsoft Office applications: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage.
First off, let's take a look at what you can automate in Word 2008. Doing a search for "Word" in Automator will display the available actions for Microsoft Word. As you can see, there are plenty of actions that you can automate. For this how-to, we'll focus on a workflow that does the following:
Creates a new document
Sets document properties
Gathers text from the clipboard
Places a watermark in the document
Saves the document
Prints the document
Continue reading to learn how to create this workflow.
Hey, you there! Yes, you, Microsoft Word user -- you in the blue shirt. Do you want to have the contents of your computer's memory overwritten with malicious code? Really... you sure? We could take care of that for you, no problem. Are you positive about this? Lots of people seem to enjoy having their memory overwritten with malicious code, so we thought you might... OK, OK, no need to get snippy about it.
If you're certain you don't want your memory overwritten (c'mon, think of it like a weekend in Cabo -- what harm could it do?) then perhaps we could interest you in the Microsoft Office 2004 11.3.8 updater, which patches a vulnerability in Word (also present in Word 2000 and Word XP, but not in 2003 or 2007) that could allow the aforementioned overwriting. It's a 9.1 MB download or you can snag it from Office's Microsoft Auto-Update tool. Note that this is a patch only for 11.3.7, just in case you're a bit behind on your update schedule. As an added treat, the update is available in eight languages. Nice.
If you've been gnashing your teeth as more and more Office 2007 files come your way from your innocent, early-adopter Windows colleagues and friends, time to quit your gnashing. Microsoft's beta of the mellifluously named Microsoft Office Open XML File Format Converter for Mac can now be downloaded from the big M's website. This initial version of the standalone converter tool supports Word 2007 files and is one-way: the resulting RTF output can be resaved as Office 2004 .doc files, but not as Office 2007 .docx files. Support for the newfangled PowerPoint and Excel document formats will be coming later this summer.
As previously noted, the final integrated format conversion bundle that will live inside Office 2004 will not ship until after Mac Office 2008 hits the street. So it goes.
Happy Friday everyone! From Down Under it emerges (via APC, the Aussie computer magazine): a preview article on Office 2008, including the tempting tidbit that the suite is now in private beta, with the 'Escher' graphics engine and plenty of shiny bits. MBU managers also admit that the initial attempts at a new, more Windows-ish interface for the Mac productivity suite met with blank stares and frustration:
"[T]he Mac developers had already had one radical redesign tested and rejected after user feedback, said MacBU group product manager Mary Starman. 'We had what we thought was going to be this perfect UI solution, and the first time we put it in the labs, no-one understood it! It was so different they were completely confused!'"
I don't know whether to be happy that they listened to the test groups, or discouraged that they were surprised when a radical UI change caused user confusion. *sigh* Check out the full APC article for screenshots and more.
Since switching to an Intel Mac right after Macworld 2006 I've been trying to move away from Microsoft Word on my system, both because I don't like running a PPC app, and because I wanted to escape from Word itself, which I've often found to be ridiculously frustrating (two words: widows and orphans). Given the fact that Word Docs are more or less a de facto standard in academia (in the humanities, at least), it's not possible to get away from it altogether. However, I have started writing my professional papers with Mellel, a powerful, if quirky, word processor from RedleX. Mellel was originally designed to work with Hebrew (and other right to left languages) which have traditionally been under-supported in word processing programs. However, it has grown into a full featured word processor that produces beautiful documents, especially documents that mix different languages with different alphabets. That is, it can produce beautiful documents, if you can bring yourself to understand and effectively use its unique text style and auto-titling systems.
The newest release, version 2.2, adds support for more advanced "bibliography integration" and citation management. Mellel can be a useful tool for producing extremely polished final documents, but I've found that you really do have to spend some time with the software (particularly if you're coming from Word) in order to make the best use of it.
Mellel sells for $49 (though an education license is available for $34.99) and a 30 day demo is available.
I managed to swing by the Microsoft Office booth just in time for a demo of Office 2008, and I snapped a few screenshots. The presentation was made with Word since, as the demo folk pointed out, it is the app they have completed the most code on. As Scott mentioned, the words "page layout" were used quite often while emphasizing many of Word's new features, but of course the two big show-stoppers are Universal Binary status and a revamped UI that melds the Mac way of doing things with the impressive new 'Ribbon' UI in Office 2007 for Windows. My 425-px screen shot in this post doesn't really do it justice, but my pics in the gallery should offer a few more details for prying eyes. It sounds like we'll still have to wait for demos or a peek at any of the other Office components, however, as I couldn't squeeze anything else out of the booth attendants.
Discovering Automator is a new book from Hanaan Rosenthal that delves into the many facets of making your Mac
do more work in less time for you with the power of Mac OS X Tiger's Automator. From Automator World's
description, Discovering Automator details "the ins-and-outs of Automator: basic workflow construction,
deployment, debugging and advanced topics such as creating shell scripts, Applescripts and plug-ins." The
book also comes with over 70 Automator actions, including many requested actions for Microsoft Word, Excel and
PowerPoint.
Discovering Automator sells for $14.99 at Amazon.com,
but if you'd like a taste, you can download both a sample chapter and the table of contents at Hanaan's site.
MacTech has
published what I am fairly certain are the comprehensive Office 2004 on Rosetta test
results for Intel Macs. Honestly, there is so much literature and testing in this article that I simply skimmed
most of it and skipped ahead to the conclusion: "in general, Office 2004 under Rosetta works "well
enough" to "very well," and in some cases, it's even faster than on the PowerPC baseline
machine." Having recently acquired a MacBook Pro, I have to agree. However, I think Word has a slightly
longer startup time than on my previous PowerBook, but I would attribute that to Rosetta having to work some magic in
the background.
Don't take my word though: check out MacTech's article for more than
you'd ever want to know about how well Office 2004 will perform on Intel Macs.
It
appears that while typing a word in many OS X apps, such as iChat and Yojimbo, hitting the Esc key will present a
drop-down list of word completion options. I *think* this might be a Cocoa-related service of Mac OS X (sorry, Firefox
users), but I'm always hesitant to toss out a guess like that because I am constantly surprised as to which apps are
actually Cocoa (Finder, for example, is still Carbon, even in Tiger). I get this popup in Ecto, Stickies and Mail as
well, but not in any input areas on websites in Safari, so feel free to experiment with this handy but (as far as I
know) undocumented feature.
Looks like my wrath at Google for releasing a Word to Blogger plugin that was Windows only wasn't entirely their fault. Jason Shellen notes on his blog: "As Ev mentioned in his post, the biggest tradeoff is that this is Windows-only. As a Mac-fan I tried to find a good developer to do a Mac version and came up short. If you have any recommendations, I'm all ears."
It's nice to know that Mac-support was at least considered, but I'm holding on to my gripe. The "we couldn't find a Mac developer" translates into they didn't try hard enough. I mean, someone at Google couldn't find a Mac Developer. What's wrong with that picture?
Have you heard the really cool news? There's a new Blogger for Word toolbar that lets you post directly to your Blogger-brand blog via the world's most prevalent word processor: Microsoft Word. However, it's not Mac compatible.
I'm used to things not being Mac compatible, but this really irks me. Why? Because the Internet isn't a Windows world. It's not a Mac world. It's not a Unix or Linux world. The Internet is the great melting pot of Operating Systems. All computers want to work with the Internet and everyone on the Internet (interested in reaching the largest audience possible) wants to work with all computers.
Why then, do Internet companies, like Google, continue to release software and functionality that is tailor made for only one computing platform? If you are a huge Internet-based company who would seem to one day want to become the Internet OS (tm), then it *might* be in your best interest to ensure that everything that you release to interface with the Internet will work on the widest variety possible of computers. I'm tired of Google releasing Mac-compatability as an afterthought. I'm tired of there still not being a Picasa for Mac, and I'm very ticked off that this new cutting edge technology, this Blogger for Word, only works with old Word on old 2000 / XP. There's a much newer OS out here. Not Vista. Tiger. //rant off
If you've been cursing the big price tag and lack of VBA support in Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, OpenOffice.org is coming to your rescue. Last September, the OpenOffice.org dev team announced that they would be porting the suite to run natively on the Mac. Previous versions ran under the X11 environment, which not only hogged resources, but didn't have the Aqua look and feel we all love. 
When Microsoft released Office 2008 for Mac, they did something that I must applaud -- they joined the ranks of Mac developers creating Automator-able applications. When you do a search in Automator for "Microsoft," it will reveal all of the Automator actions that ship with Microsoft Office 2008. There is lots of great stuff included, so we'll be covering some of it in this four part Mac Automation series. I will take you through how to automate each of the Microsoft Office applications: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage.
Hey, you there! Yes, you, 
If you've been gnashing your teeth as more and more Office 2007 files come your way from your innocent, early-adopter Windows colleagues and friends, time to quit your gnashing. Microsoft's beta of the mellifluously named 
Happy Friday everyone! From Down Under it emerges (via 
Since switching to an Intel Mac right after Macworld 2006 I've been trying to move away from Microsoft Word on my system, both because I don't like running a PPC app, and because I wanted to escape from Word itself, which I've often found to be ridiculously frustrating (two words: widows and orphans). Given the fact that Word Docs are more or less a de facto standard in academia (in the humanities, at least), it's not possible to get away from it altogether. However, I have started writing my professional papers with 
Discovering Automator is a new book from Hanaan Rosenthal that delves into the many facets of making your Mac
do more work in less time for you with the power of Mac OS X Tiger's Automator. From 
MacTech has
published what I am fairly certain are the comprehensive 
It
appears that while typing a word in many OS X apps, such as iChat and Yojimbo, hitting the Esc key will present a
drop-down list of word completion options. I *think* this might be a Cocoa-related service of Mac OS X (sorry, Firefox
users), but I'm always hesitant to toss out a guess like that because I am constantly surprised as to which apps are
actually Cocoa (Finder, for example, is still Carbon, even in Tiger). I get this popup in Ecto, Stickies and Mail as
well, but not in any input areas on websites in Safari, so feel free to experiment with this handy but (as far as I
know) undocumented feature.
Looks like 
Have you heard the really cool news? There's a new 
