Latest Posts in Working Mac

Expo: Microsoft to enhance Entourage Exchange, SharePoint on the Mac

A quarter-century after it began making products for the Mac, Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit announced future updates to Microsoft Office that will enhance collaboration and sharing.

Entourage will get a makeover, at least under the hood. Microsoft will stop using the WebDAV protocol in favor of the Exchange Web Services—a change the company said would bring better compatibility, performance, and reliability. When using WebDAV, Entourage sends out up to six instructions when communicating with a server, but with Exchange it uses one.

The MacBU plans to release the Entourage update in late January as a public beta. The final release will come later this year and will be free for all Office 2008 users.

The second update to Office for Mac will give Mac users the ability to work with SharePoint Products and Technologies and Office Live Workspaces. With the help of a new application called the Document Collaboration Companion, Mac users will be able to download and upload documents, use document check-out/in, offline document caching, and SharePoint Workspace, Document Library, and Office Live Workspace.

Document Collaboration Companion—Microsoft’s first full Cocoa application—will debut as a private beta in February, with a final release slated for later this year.

By switching to the Exchange technology and giving users a collaboration application, Mac users would be able to work with shared documents and servers just as easily as their Windows counterparts, according to Eric Wilfrid, general manager of the MacBU.

“Compatibility has always been one of the biggest concerns for us,” Wilfrid told Macworld. “The question is always can Mac and Windows users work on the same team and share information?”

The moves by Microsoft fit into a strategy at the company to deliver software plus services on all platforms. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer talked about the company’s vision last October when he introduced the concept of the “Windows Cloud” as an operating system that would help developers write Internet-based applications. Last year, Microsoft announced plans for Office Web, a lightweight version of its Office suite that will run online; Office Web apps are expected to work with the Safari and Firefox Web browsers.

“These releases are the first step for the MacBU in harnessing the power of software plus services on the Mac,” said Wilfrid.

Keep on track with digital reminders

If I were a high-powered executive, I might have an assistant following me around at all times with a notepad and a cell phone, managing my schedule and reminding me of deadlines and appointments. But I'm not, so I rely on my Mac and a new breed of online services to keep me on top of my calendar and tasks.

You may already schedule meetings and to-do items with Leopard's iCal or an online service like the free Google Calendar (); both provide alarms you can use to notify yourself of impending events. But just because your schedule starts with a Mac doesn't mean you have to stay tethered to one. You can receive alerts via e-mail, SMS text messages, RSS feeds, phone calls, and more. I'll show you some of the interesting ways you can remind yourself of important tasks and events.

Creating Calendar Alerts

What's the use of meticulously scheduling appointments and tasks if you don't stick to your schedule? Both iCal and Google Calendar provide multiple types of reminders that can reach you whether you're sitting in front of your Mac or hitting the road.

See It on Screen The most common type of reminder is the standard on-screen pop-up alert. To set one up in iCal, double-click on the event, click on Edit, choose a reminder type from the Alarm pop-up menu (for instance, Message or Message With Sound), and specify when you want the alarm to appear. You can set up multiple types of reminders, or ones that go off at different times, by repeating this procedure.

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Getting started with Bento

Are you a list fiend? If so, your hard drive is probably littered with tables and spreadsheets—from Little League rosters and wedding guest lists, to information about your personal assets. Sure, lists lend themselves to the linear and cellular format of a spreadsheet. But if they grow to more than a few dozen records, or if you’re constantly entering the same information again and again, spreadsheets can quickly become unwieldy.

Databases are ideal for managing large lists, but many people find them intimidating. Thanks to FileMaker’s $49 Bento (), they no longer have reason to fear. Bento is about as easy to use as a database program can get. To show you how easy it can be, I’ll use one scenario to show how it can manage information a spreadsheet can’t.

Save time with OS X services

As a Mac user, you’re primed to look for time-savers that help you be more productive. But you may not be taking advantage of all that OS X has to offer. The Services menu is a case in point. This little known, and even more rarely used, feature deserves more attention than it gets. Services provide systemwide commands that allow you to quickly accomplish a variety of tasks, such as sending Mail messages lickety-split or making a new Stickies note from a selection. If you’re not already using the Services menu, you’ll soon discover how it can boost your productivity.

Locating Services

The Services menu resides in a program’s application menu (in Safari, for instance, go to Safari: Services). When you visit the Services menu, you’ll find both stand-alone commands (such as Spotlight or Search With Google) and the names of certain programs, each with its own submenu of actions. All Apple software works with services. So do many third-party programs, such as The Omni Group’s $80 OmniFocus () and Bare Bones Software’s $125 BBEdit 9 (). Unfortunately, many major third-party programs shun services, including the $400 Microsoft Office and the $1,199 Adobe Creative Suite. Although these programs display the Services menu, they don’t allow you to select any commands.

Programs that don’t support services are Carbon, rather than Cocoa, programs. Cocoa is the native OS X application format; Carbon was initially designed to help port Classic programs to OS X. All Cocoa software automatically recognizes and supports services. Carbon programs work with services only if the developer has specifically coded them to do so (as with BBEdit).

Putting Services to Work

OS X comes with a number of built-in services. There are also third-party ones that are worth checking out.

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Office 2008 survival guide

If you’ve recently upgraded to Microsoft Office 2008, you may like the productivity suite’s new features, but you may also face a few conundrums: some things just don’t work the way they used to, and others don’t work at all. We talked to Macworld editors and scoured newsgroups and forums to find out which problems were plaguing users. Here are answers to some of the most common questions that came up.

iWork and Office: How to share files

Apple says iWork is compatible with Microsoft Office. But what does that really mean and is it true?

It’s true that you can move documents between iWork and Office. But when you do, they may look or function differently than they did in their parent programs. In Macworlds recent feature comparing Word and Pages, Excel and Numbers, and PowerPoint and Keynote, we discussed the differences in features between those programs. But (as several readers pointed out in comments to those stories), we didn’t cover the file-compatibility or interoperability issues that arise when you’re trying to move documents from one suite to another. That’s what I’d like to do here.

Evade e-mail exasperation

If you’re like 99.7 percent of computer users, your e-mail client gets more of a workout than any other software you use. And given the amount of time you spend with this particular software, it’s not surprising that minor annoyances you’d forgive in other programs become a Big Deal when you encounter them hour after hour, day after day. I’ve rounded up some common e-mail problems and provided solutions to help you keep them under control.

Preview’s hidden powers

Apple’s Preview is more than just a fast and efficient program for reading PDFs, viewing graphics, and running slide shows. The version that comes with Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) has some powerful features stashed away in its menus. Now you can enhance your images, annotate and merge PDFs, print multiple images on one page, and more—all without opening a specialized (and often expensive) image editor or PDF tool. Read on to discover eight great things you can do with Preview.

Spice up your slides

Tired of rehashing the same static presentations? Consider adding movement. Used judiciously, animations can add power and pizzazz to your presentations, and they can often illustrate a point better than words alone. Keynote has long been able to move pictures and text on slides (using object builds), but Keynote ’08 (), part of Apple’s $79 iWork suite, ups the ante. I’ll show you how to use Keynote’s new animation tools to take your presentations to the next level—by zipping an object across a slide, adding cool photo effects, and more. (To learn how I used the tools to create a complex animation, see “Bringing It All Together.”)

Fix Mac slowdowns

Does your Mac seem to be getting slower over time? This probably isn’t your imagination. As you use your computer, a number of factors can gradually lead to poorer performance. Things slow down as your CPU becomes busier with more tasks, your RAM fills up with open programs and documents, and your hard drive runs out of free space. In addition, individual programs, such as your Web browser and your e-mail client, occasionally need some tweaks to maintain peak performance. Luckily, it’s easy to solve most slowdowns and restore much of your Mac’s original pep.