Microsoft’s Mac Valentine

Mac users enjoy a love-hate relationship with Microsoft–in which love is defined as “resigned tolerance” and hate as “lava-hot rancor fueled by the fire of a thousand burning suns.” Microsoft keeps trying to win Mac hearts, adding goodies to its flagship products. Case in point: the Office 2001 upgrade. Mac users may never embrace Microsoft … but at least they’ll have a lot of new Office tools for writing angry letters to Redmond.

  Entourage 2001, a new personal information manager application for Office, combines e-mail, calendaring, contact management, and a task manager.

  Project Gallery offers customizable document templates for Microsoft Office applications to help users get started faster. Don’t need the templates? Office lets you turn off the feature.

  Formatting Palette centralizes Office formatting tools on a single window to simplify common tasks.

  Image Effects adds built-in tools for importing and editing graphics and pictures in Office documents.

  PowerPoint Movies lets you save files as QuickTime movies, and the retooled PowerPoint allows you to incorporate QuickTime transitions into presentations.