This month, Office:mac 2001 hits store shelves across the United States. Rebranded, repackaged, and updated with new Mac-only features, this is a powerful suite of applications designed specifically for anyone with a PowerPC-enabled Mac. "Macintosh customers have said, 'I want you to create a unique product for me,'" says Microsoft Group Product Manager Mary Rose Becker. Designing Software "Mac users are unique users," explains Becker. "They want things to act differently, feel differently and look differently." She continues: "We had three design goals in mind: the ability to simplify different tasks with the project gallery; taking control of information with Entourage; and a Mac-like interface with the ability to integrate with other applications like FileMaker." From the look of the document-topping chrome bars, which are meant to evoke the translucent ribbed plastic of an iMac, to the ability of Excel to work seamlessly with FileMaker Pro, it's obvious that Microsoft wanted more from this iteration of Office than just another Windows port. In fact, according to Becker, the Macintosh Business Unit team in Redmond, WA, has its own product cycle. That team is more concerned about what features Mac owners want from Office than what features the Windows developers are implementing. Moving Between Platforms Of course, the Office:mac 2001 development team knew that many in the Macintosh community move between Windows and Mac platforms when they go from work to home, so Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents are saved in the same file format as Office 97 and Office 2000 for Windows. It's also possible to append Windows extensions to your files when you perform a Save As command, which makes opening Mac files on a Windows computer easier.