Wise Buys

Office of the future: If all goes right, Microsoft will finally begin shipping Office 2001 for Macintosh, the first upgrade of the popular Office Suite for the Mac OS, this month. This new version will run with both Mac OS 9 and the forthcoming Mac OS X. In addition to Word, Excel and PowerPoint, Microsoft will include a PIM (personal information manager) and an e-mail package dubbed Entourage. The PowerPoint component will enable users to add QuickTime transition and save presentations as QuickTime movies. Additionally, Mac FileMaker Pro users will be happy to learn that Microsoft intends to offer FileMaker data support in both Excel and Word.

The cookie crumbles: Microsoft has issued a "patch" for Internet Explorer 5.5 (www.microsoft.com/windows/ie) to help squelch the privacy invasion that's been running rampant across the Web in the form of "cookies." Cookies, the small files placed on your machine by the Web sites you visit and used to track your travels on the Web, are a good thing when used to personalize Web pages that you frequent, but can be bad when used without your permission to follow you around the Web. The Microsoft patch will give users a clear warning-in the form of a pop-up screen-that third-parties are attempting to place a cookie on their machines.