Office 2004 for Mac Ships

Office 2004 for Mac includes several new features designed to increase individual productivity and illustrates the difference in priorities between the Mac Business Unit and the Windows Office team. Unlike the Windows team, which has been focused almost exclusively on integrating Office with Microsoft’s server platforms and applications, the Mac Business Unit has opted to concentrate on improvements to individual Office applications.

New Features Focus on Users

Most of the new features of Office 2004 for Mac are designed to improve individual user productivity, either by enhancing particular applications or by simplifying the process of sharing information between the applications.

Project Center is a new feature that allows users to associate information, such as calendar events, task list items, e-mail messages, and documents, with a project. When creating a project, users can also create a pair of Watch Folders: one on the desktop that can associate any file (even non-Office files) with the project, and one inside of Entourage (the e-mail and personal information management application for Mac Office) that associates e-mail messages with the project. In addition, Entourage can be configured to scan incoming e-mail and automatically mark messages as part of a project, based on the sender or subject line. The Save and Open dialog boxes in each Office application include a Project Gallery tab for quickly associating or finding items associated with a project. (See the illustration, “Project Center Brings Documents Together“.)