The improvements in Word, Excel and PowerPoint make this upgrade worth the cash, especially for Office 2001 users, but the new Project Center needs beefing up.

The debut of the new version of Microsoft's Office for Mac seems anti-climactic after the fuss surrounding Office X. However, when we looked at Office 2004 for Mac, we were pleasantly surprised. The latest revisions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage each have at least one new feature we can't live without. Should you upgrade? If you're still using Office 2001, the answer is 'yes'. Office's new compatibility reports will help ensure that you can still use your older documents. If you're an Office X user, you'll probably appreciate the stability improvements in version 2004, while heavy Word users will appreciate the new Track Changes functionality.

Installing the new Office for Mac is straightforward. The Setup Assistant lets you pick from standard, full or custom installations using a list of check boxes. If you're a power user -- or if you can't be bothered with the setup wizard -- you can simply drag and drop Office 2004 onto your hard drive. Unlike the Windows version of Office, there's no product activation in Office 2004.

You'll need Mac OS 10.2.8 or later to use Office 2004. The full (drag-and-drop) installation will claim a good 525MB of hard drive space, although Microsoft recommends 630MB of free space.

Project Center is Office 2004's big idea for collaboration, but it's only partially successful. A component of Entourage, Project Center brings together all the files, email, events, to-dos and deadlines for a given project. If you're using Office on a network, you can share projects with your fellow users, who will see the latest items and deadlines. Project Center will also back up your project items in one fell swoop, a feature that could come in handy if your server crashes.

The idea of grouping files, email messages and tasks under one project is great; however, Project Center won't satisfy project managers in a serious office environment. You can set a due date for the project but not deadlines in between. You could add multiple deadlines as events in the calendar, but you don't need Project Center to do that. You can group project email by subject, but why not just do that in Entourage? As it stands, Project Center isn't powerful or versatile enough to compete with Microsoft Project, and casual project managers might as well stick with the standard Entourage tools and an organised file directory.

The most eye-catching change for the suite's PIM application, Entourage, is its new three-column layout: your email folders reside in the left column, your list of messages sits in the middle, and the preview pane is on the right. The new layout doesn't save much space, however, and once the novelty wore off, we switched back to having the preview pane below our list of messages.

The good news is that Entourage's email handling gets a shot in the arm with its new ability to group and collapse messages by date, subject, sender, size and so on -- a particularly handy feature when you're ploughing through a year's worth of email. Microsoft also improved Entourage's junk mail filter. In our tests, the filter snared a good 90 percent of the spam targeting our in-box (including the spam missed by Apple Mail, which we've been faithfully training for several months).

One problem with Entourage X was that it was almost impossible to import email or contacts from Apple's Mail and Address Book applications. The new Entourage, on the other hand, absorbed all our Mail and Address Book data like a sponge. You can even drag and drop Address Book contacts directly into Entourage (although any images associated with your contacts will be lost in translation). If you're setting up your email accounts for the first time and are using a well-known ISP, Entourage 2004 will fill in your settings for you. In our tests, Entourage handled our POP accounts with ease, and we were soon sending and receiving messages without a hitch.

We're much happier with the calendar printing options in Entourage 2004 than those in version X. You can now print your calendar in appointment book formats such as Day Time, Day Runner and FranklinCovey, and you can customise which tasks get printed. We ran into trouble with the online calendar, however. We couldn't drag existing events from one time slot to another with finesse. For example, appointments kept snapping into the wrong hour. We also wish appointments were colour-coded according to your status (busy, out of office, free) as they are in Outlook. You can colour-code events with email labels such as Work and Family, but that's not quite the same thing.

Office 2004 heavyweights Word, Excel and PowerPoint sport an impressive arsenal of improvements. One obvious change that cuts across the three big productivity applications involves the floating palettes, which now turn translucent when you're not using them -- a cool if ultimately pointless feature. More substantial is the new Office Toolbox, which pulses red when it detects compatibility problems between your document and other versions of Office (a much-needed addition). In our tests, compatibility between Mac and Windows platforms was pretty seamless. The only compatibility problems that crop up are with Office 2004-specific features. For example, in Notebook Layout View, the Toolbox reported that 'Recorded audio will not be accessible in earlier versions of Word'. Other features of the toolbox include the ability to collect clipboard items in a new scrapbook tool; look up words in the dictionary, thesaurus and encyclopaedia (in Word only); and open the new Project Center (see Setup & ease of use for more details).

Word 2004 gets off on the right foot with the improved Track Changes feature, which adds colour-coded notes for comments and text deletions on the right side of the page. This is an enormous improvement over version X, but why not detail all tracked changes in the comment balloons, instead of just deletions? However, MSN Messenger for Mac is now integrated into Word, so you can send an instant message to your co-worker about a specific comment. We also like the new Smart Buttons, a feature borrowed from Office XP that, among other things, gives you the option of keeping the source formatting of pasted text or matching the format of your current document.

The Navigation Pane is a long overdue feature that gives you a thumbnail view of your pages in the left-hand column (similar to the view you get in Adobe Acrobat). Finally, the new Notebook Layout View lets you take notes in a ruled notebook format, complete with collapsible outline headings and the ability to record and embed audio clips into your notes, which could come in handy if you're in a meeting or conducting an interview. You can even record audio during presentations and time-stamp them for quick reference.

Although Excel 2004 didn't get an extreme makeover like Word did, the spreadsheet warhorse boasts the new Page Layout view -- essentially a page preview mode that lets you edit and manipulate objects (including headers and footers) as they appear on the printed page. As with Word, Excel takes good advantage of Smart Buttons. It's perfect for, say, fixing broken formulas and choosing the sequencing for a series of cells.

PowerPoint 2004 brings an impressive new feature to the conference room: Presenter Tools, which helps orchestrate your presentations -- especially if you have the luxury of using two screens. On one screen, your audience sees the standard PowerPoint presentation; on your screen, you see the current slide, a small window that displays the on-deck slide, a thumbnail view of all the slides in the presentation (clicking a thumbnail jumps to that slide) and an area for the notes you'd typically scribble on index cards. Besides Presenter Tools, the other new features in PowerPoint are unremarkable. You get several new transitions (some more cringe-inducing than others), animation effects (now grouped into Basic, Subtle, Moderate, and Exciting) and more than 200 templates, such as business forms, labels and newsletters.

Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac comes with a robust set of help files that should be able to guide you through the laundry list of features. If you need to troubleshoot, however, you'll probably have to call or email Microsoft for help, and it may end up costing you.

The cheapest way to get help is from the various Microsoft Office newsgroups, which you can access from Microsoft's support site.

Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac
Company: Microsoft
Price: Standard Edition - AU$699; Student and Teacher Edition - AU$299;
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: (02) 9870 2100

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