REDMOND, Wash., June 15, 2000 — Microsoft Corp. today announced new first-for-the-Mac features in the upcoming release of Microsoft® Office 2001 Macintosh® Edition that simplify difficult tasks. Office 2001 is designed to help people start and complete projects more easily, with innovative new features that provide the right tools for the job, help people get more out of their information and make it easy to create brilliant presentations. The upcoming release of Office Macintosh Edition, the world’s most popular productivity suite for the Macintosh, is scheduled to be available in the second half of this year.
“Our customers have told us that starting and completing projects is too difficult,”
said Kevin Browne, general manager of the Macintosh Business Unit at Microsoft.
“Extensive research and usability testing of Word, Excel and PowerPoint® 2001 have helped us simplify the applications and the way in which everyday tasks are completed.”
Start and Complete Projects Quickly
Office 2001 introduces the Project Gallery, a task-based starting point that is common to each application.
“We’ve learned from customers that getting started and determining which application to use can be the most difficult part of a project,”
Browne said. The Project Gallery is the ideal starting point for any project because it helps people select the most appropriate design to match a project’s needs before deciding which application to use, as any Office application or template may be launched from the Project Gallery. Office 2001 includes 400 customizable and color-rich templates that include specially designed wizards, helping people quickly create professional-looking documents such as invoices, catalogs, newsletters and journals.
Use the Right Tools
Customer feedback has highlighted the need to simplify user interfaces while continuing to provide easy access to the right tools for the job.
“In many instances, we simply wanted to make existing functionality more discoverable for our customers,”
Browne said. Each of the Office 2001 applications includes the context-sensitive Formatting Palette, which displays the most important and commonly used settings and tools to format text, images and documents. The Formatting Palette reduces the need to disrupt one’s workflow by interacting with a dialog box. The Image Effects features, available throughout Office 2001, provide editing tools to correct and enhance pictures easily, including red-eye reduction, scratch removal, automatic color correction and image rotation, as well as Picture Effects — powerful filters that change the entire look of an image.
Get More Out of Information
Internal research at Microsoft has shown that nearly 60 percent of spreadsheets are simple lists, such as CD collections and inventories, yet applications have not made it easy enough to maintain lists. Excel 2001 introduces List Manager to simplify the chore of list management through simple interface controls that include sorting, filtering, formatting and printing to help both novices and advanced users. Mail Merge has been one of the most widely performed tasks in Word, but also one of the most difficult. Word 2001 introduces the Data Merge Manager, a feature available first for the Mac that simplifies and consolidates into a single window the entire process of using data to conduct mass communications via e-mail or letter. Tight integration with the new e-mail and personal information manager makes it easy to merge contacts from the Address Book into a bulk mailing.
Create Brilliant Presentations
The new Tri-pane View in PowerPoint 2001 combines the previously separate Slide, Outline and Notes views. The single, combined view makes it easy to add slides, edit text within a slide and enter notes while creating a presentation. With the new PowerPoint Movie feature, presentations can be saved in the popular QuickTime format and shared with anyone who has the QuickTime player installed.
“PowerPoint Movies make it dramatically easier for anybody to create media-rich presentations and share them with friends, family and customers, even if they don’t have PowerPoint 2001,”
Browne said. PowerPoint also provides numerous QuickTime Transitions to enhance the look of a presentation or movie.
More information about Office 2001 Macintosh Edition can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/mac/ .
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