Computing News: Microsoft Office v.X for Mac OS X

Microsoft Office v.X for Mac OS X, the latest version of Microsoft's suite of software applications for the Mac OS, includes Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. As of November 19th, 2001, Office v.X for Mac OS X is available for Mac OS X versions 10.1 and above.

Information Systems & Computing (ISC) will support the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint components of Office v.X for Mac OS X for its clients, including off-campus students. ISC recommends that most users adopt a "wait and see" attitude, continuing to use previous versions of Office until after the initial bugs in Office v.X for Mac OS X are identified and fixed.

Microsoft Office v.X for Mac OS X has significantly greater system requirements than previous versions of Microsoft Office. ISC suggests the following minimum system requirements:

• 128 megabytes of RAM
• 233 MHz PowerPC G3
• Approximately 450 megabytes of free hard drive space

Note that Office v.X for Mac OS X will not run on Mac OS 8.x/9.x-based systems. ISC suggest continuing to use Office 98 and Office 2001 on these systems.

Office v.X for Mac OS X is available from the Computer Connection.

Like Office 98 and Office 2001, Office v.X for Mac OS X is an evolutionary revision of Microsoft's application suite, and Office v.X for Mac OS X applications include a more modern 'Aqua' look and feel. Office v.X for Mac OS X also offers better inter-application integration and improved HTML code generation.

Office v.X for Mac OS X builds more document recovery tools its applications - Word v.X, Excel v.X, and PowerPoint v.X will now let you save open documents after they crash or lock up and will attempt to automatically repair damaged files when you try to open them.

Issues

There are a number of known issues with Office v.X for Mac OS X, several of which are especially relevant to Penn’s users:

• As stated above, Office v.X for Mac OS X does not run on Mac OS 8.x/9.x.
• Office v.X for Mac OS X's size: as an example, Office XP Professional requires an average of 450 megabytes of free hard drive space.
• Most of the file formats in Office v.X for Mac OS X remain the same, but...

--John Mulhern III, IT Project Leader, and Robert DeSilets, Jr., IT Support Specialist, ISC Technology Support Services (November 25, 2001)