This alternative Kindle, called the DX, is a super-size version of the popular Kindle 2, which arrived earlier this year. It sports a 9.7-inch screen, some 2.5 times as big as the surface area of the Kindle 2’s 6-inch display. It also sports a higher price tag — $489, versus $359 for its smaller sibling, which remains on the market.

Amazon’s Kindle DX

Like previous models, the Kindle DX allows you to shop for, and wirelessly download, any e-book in Amazon’s (AMZN) growing catalog — now about 275,000 titles. It uses the same easy-on-the-eyes screen technology as the smaller model but at a higher resolution. It still lacks color, and renders images only in gray scale. But the new DX adds a new capability: auto-rotation, which allows you to read in landscape mode.

This new, larger model isn’t primarily aimed at readers of standard books. It is targeted at three markets: textbooks, newspapers and other periodicals, and business documents in either Microsoft’s (MSFT) Word format or Adobe’s (ADBE) PDF format.

Unfortunately, I’ve been testing the Kindle DX and I didn’t like it nearly as much as the Kindle 2, which I own and enjoy using daily. While it performs its promised tasks adequately, I found that its size and weight made it awkward and tiring to hold for long periods of reading. It’s still fairly thin and light, but it’s 85% larger and heavier than the standard Kindle.

In addition, Amazon has degraded the user interface. To prevent the device from being even larger, the company had to remove the left-side page-turning buttons, confining all the controls to a vertical strip on the right. The keyboard at the bottom is also more vertically cramped.

If you’re left-handed, you have to spin the device around and rotate the screen to get buttons on the left, where they appear with their labels upside-down.

Similarly, if you choose to read in landscape mode, all the navigation controls, including the joystick for moving the cursor, will be awkwardly placed at either the top or bottom, far from where your hands are holding the device, and the keyboard essentially will be unusable.

In my view, the Kindle DX would have been a better product with on-screen touch controls that could instantly adapt to its size and orientation.

In reading standard books on the DX, I also encountered instances where the text on a page varied in shade from light gray to black.

I had mixed results with business documents. As with previous Kindles, you can either email personal documents to your device, for a fee, or drag them onto the Kindle via a cable, for free. But, unlike the smaller models, the new DX has PDF display capability built in, so it renders PDF files much more accurately than the older Kindles. That is a big improvement. It also allows you to view Excel and PowerPoint files if you save them in PDF format before sending them to your Kindle DX.

The Kindle DX, right, is a large-screen version of the popular Kindle e-reader, left.

I tried a variety of documents, and in many cases the results were great. The text was crisp, and the tables and graphics looked like they should. But I found that on some of these PDF documents, the text was too small to read. Yet, the Kindle lacks the ability to zoom in on PDF documents. You often can make the type larger by rotating to landscape mode, but this splits the PDFs into multiple pages, sometimes breaking them awkwardly.

Also, Amazon has raised its fees for converting and delivering business documents via email to all Kindles. The charge was formerly 10 cents a document. Now, it’s 15 cents per megabyte, which can add up if you load up your Kindle with lots of large documents. Most of my test documents, which were fairly small, cost over $1 each.

Newspapers looked about the same on the DX as they do on the smaller Kindles. Despite the larger screen, they don’t use traditional print or Web layouts, but a special Kindle layout that some users like a lot, but which I find annoying because it makes it harder to quickly scan multiple headlines.

The Kindle DX does have some nice touches. For the extra money, you not only get a larger screen, but also about twice the storage capacity. Also, because the screen is wider, you can adjust the margins on the DX, to obtain a line length that’s comfortable for your eyes and optimal for reading speed.

Amazon claims the same multiday battery life for the DX as for the Kindle 2. In my tests, I was able to go for several days of moderate reading without recharging, and much more if I turned off the wireless capability.

Although I wasn’t able to test college textbooks, I suspect they may be the killer app for this product. Many already are so expensive and heavy they could make the weight and price of the Kindle DX seem trivial in comparison.

But for standard books, I’d stick with the smaller, more comfortable Kindle 2.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

Time Machine is a key selling point for Leopard and the Mac. It is more complete, and yet simpler, than the built-in backup feature in Vista Home Premium, the most popular home version of Windows.

But Time Machine has a major drawback: It works much better on desktop Macs than on laptop models. That’s because it’s primarily designed to operate with backup hard drives you connect directly to the computer. And it’s a pain to plug a backup drive into a laptop, which can move around the house. While Time Machine will work with a remote hard disk under certain circumstances, that option requires a second Mac running Leopard, a costly condition.

Now, Apple (AAPL) has attempted to fix the problem with an unusual new companion product called Time Capsule. This is a $299 stand-alone networked gadget that packs both a giant hard disk and a speedy Wi-Fi wireless router into one slender case. It just plugs into your existing home network, and any laptop within wireless range can connect to it. It can back up multiple computers.

Time Capsule is designed to seamlessly work with Leopard’s Time Machine. But it can also be used as a wireless Internet connection, and/or a remote hard drive, for manually storing and retrieving files by Windows PCs running either Vista or Windows XP, or by Macs running Apple’s older Tiger operating system. And you can also use it with certain other backup programs, such as the ones built into Windows XP or Tiger.

In my tests over the past week, Time Capsule worked well in all of these scenarios. However, Time Capsule isn’t meant to do as many different tasks as some other networked drives.

Apple stresses that Time Capsule is a limited, targeted device meant primarily for backup — especially with Time Machine — and as a wireless base station. Unlike some other networked storage devices, like Hewlett-Packard’s MediaSmart home server, Time Capsule doesn’t allow users to simultaneously stream music or videos to multiple PCs, to easily access its contents via the Web or to stream videos to TV sets.

The $299 Time Capsule model comes with a 500 gigabyte hard disk inside, and there’s also a $499 model with hard disk that can hold one terabyte of data, or roughly 1,000 gigabytes. Both models use the same “n” class of Wi-Fi, the fastest version with the longest range. Both also work with computers equipped with the older “g” and “b” versions of Wi-Fi.

You can buy networked hard disks in these sizes for less money and simply use them with your existing Wi-Fi router. However, Time Machine won’t work with them, according to Apple. The company says the only standalone networked hard disk Time Machine can use is Time Capsule.

In my tests, Time Capsule performed perfectly with Time Machine. It also was easily recognized by several of my Windows machines running Vista and Windows XP. On all of these machines, I was able to speedily access the Internet via Time Capsule. Time Capsule can be set up to either replace or supplement your existing Wi-Fi router.

All the machines, even the Windows ones, also could recognize the Time Capsule as a remote hard disk, and save files to it and retrieve files from it. For instance, I manually copied a song, a photo and a Word document from a Mac laptop running Leopard onto the Time Capsule. On a Dell running Vista, I then opened the Time Capsule and launched that same Word document in the Windows version of Word, opened the photo in Vista’s Photo Gallery program, and played the song in Windows Media Player. This same process worked in reverse.

Apple doesn’t guarantee that Time Capsule will work with all backup programs. But it says it will work with the backup software built into Tiger and will likely work with some other backup software.

In my tests, the built-in backup program in Windows XP Pro worked fine with Time Capsule. But the built-in backup program in Vista failed. Microsoft said the problem I encountered was due to a new Vista security feature for backups that foils some remote hard disks, not just Apple’s.

Setting up Time Capsule was easy, using a step-by-step utility program that Apple supplies in both Mac and Windows versions. The device has a USB port that can be used to add either an additional hard disk or a networked printer. And it can be connected to a network via a wired connection if you don’t want to use its wireless functionality.

If you use Time Machine on a Mac laptop, then Time Capsule’s $299 price is money well spent. If you don’t, there are cheaper or more versatile solutions to the backup problem.

• Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online, free, at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

The arrival of a large update like this isn’t a sign of trouble, or even unusual. Microsoft has routinely issued these large “service packs” periodically for Windows. And just this week, its competitor, Apple, unleashed an even larger update for its new operating system, Leopard.

Even though they can take a long time to download and install, such updates are generally a good thing for consumers. Microsoft will automatically deliver SP1, as the company calls it, through its normal updating mechanism, built into Windows. The update is free.

However, based on my tests of Vista SP1, I believe that for most average consumers, it will likely be a nonevent, and for others it will be disappointing. Many of its benefits are aimed at corporations and power users, or are under-the-hood fixes that are hard to discern. For mainstream users, it adds no significant, visible features to Vista, and changes little or nothing about the way the operating system looks and works.

Also, SP1 doesn’t resolve some of the most annoying flaws in Vista, including slow start-ups and reboots, and a security system that nags you too much and requires add-on anti-virus software. I guess these problems will either never be fixed fully or will have to wait for SP2.

While Vista SP1 does deliver some performance improvements in certain scenarios, it can actually temporarily degrade performance — including making reboots even slower — because of a quirk in the update process. This slowdown should go away in a few days, the company says.

On balance, the update is probably worth installing, especially since Microsoft will deliver it automatically. But I wouldn’t rush to grab it and I wouldn’t expect much from it. One note: you can’t install SP1 until you have installed a couple of other patches first. These will also be distributed automatically.

I installed Vista SP1 on two computers that had come with the original Vista preinstalled: a 10-month-old Sony Vaio SZ laptop and a two-month-old Dell XPS One desktop. Because the automatic download distribution isn’t yet in place, Microsoft sent me the update on a disk, which also included the prerequisite patches. In each case, the upgrade took a little over an hour and went smoothly. During the process, the computers rebooted multiple times, but it was all automatic and didn’t require user intervention.

After the installation, the computers functioned normally. I tested three of the performance improvements Microsoft claims for SP1. The first involved speeding up the copying of hefty folders containing large numbers of files. On both machines, copying a folder containing over 700 files totaling almost 700 megabytes took less than half as long with SP1 as it had with the original Vista.

I also tested how long it took both machines to awaken from a hibernation or sleep state and be ready for work. For these tests, I began with each machine running Microsoft Word, Microsoft Outlook and the Firefox Web browser, then I forced them into sleep and hibernation mode.

By my definition, “ready for work” means that Vista’s circular delay indicator has gone away, the software that loads at start-up has finished launching and the computer has fully reconnected to its wired or wireless network. On both of my test machines, SP1 improved the recovery time from sleep or hibernation, shaving one to 10 seconds from the procedures.

Microsoft doesn’t claim SP1 will improve the speed of cold starts and reboots under Vista, but I tested these anyway. To my horror, I found that SP1 actually made rebooting — already slower than on comparable Windows XP computers or Macintoshes — even slower.

Microsoft explained that this was due to the fact that installing SP1 erases certain data used by Vista to speed up program launching. It takes the system a few days to build this data back up, the company says. Until then, it says, overall performance, including reboots, can be slower under SP1 than under original Vista.

Microsoft provided me with a method that would rebuild this program-launching data more quickly, at least for the common programs I was using in my tests. Once I followed that method, rebooting time returned to its former state — still too slow for my taste, but at least not worse.

In briefing me on SP1, Microsoft made a big point of saying that great progress had been made in the past year in making Vista work properly with add-on devices, such as printers. I tried my 2003-vintage Hewlett-Packard printer, which hadn’t worked properly with the original Vista. It still didn’t work well with SP1.

So, Vista SP1 is a step forward, at least after a few days of use. But it’s not a big step.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online, free, at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

Hard-disk drives, or HDDs, are mechanical devices. They work by recording data on a spinning magnetic platter or platters. By contrast, solid-state drives are made of chips and have no moving parts. They are close cousins to the so-called flash memory used in digital cameras, cellphones and smaller-capacity music players. They record data to special memory chips that retain their contents even when the device is turned off.

Solid-state drives have some key advantages. Because they lack moving parts, they are faster, draw less power, are harder to damage and are quieter than hard drives. Unfortunately, today’s early versions of SSDs for laptops also have two big drawbacks when compared with hard drives: They offer much lower capacity and have much higher prices.

For instance, on the newly announced Apple MacBook Air ultrathin laptop, the HDD version costs $1,799 and stores 80 gigabytes. The SSD version costs $2,798, but actually stores less — just 64 gigabytes. On the Toshiba Portege R500 subnotebook, the basic hard-drive version costs $1,999 and stores 120 gigabytes. The cheapest SSD version is $2,699 and also stores just 64 gigabytes.

Despite these limitations, I believe SSDs are likely to become more common and more popular as their capacities increase and their prices drop. Samsung, which makes the 64-gigabyte SSDs in both the Apple and the Toshiba, has already announced an SSD with twice the capacity that costs much less per gigabyte of storage.

I’ve been testing the SSD models of the Portege R500 and the MacBook Air to see how they measure up to their HDD counterparts. My verdict is that the SSD does deliver on its promises, but, in some cases, just barely.

For the small slice of users who are deeply and constantly worried about hard-disk failures, it may be worth it to pay a huge premium today for an SSD that stores less. Because SSDs aren’t subject to mechanical failures, your data are probably safer on them. But for mainstream users, my conclusion is that it’s too early to take the plunge on SSDs, and the best strategy is to wait for prices to drop sharply and for capacity to rise.

In my tests, I focused solely on comparing the hard-drive and SSD models of each machine, which I had had already reviewed in earlier columns. On the same computer, I wondered, would the SSD make a significant difference in speed and in battery life?

To measure battery life, I conducted my usual harsh test, where I turn off all power-saving software, set screen brightness to maximum, turn on the Wi-Fi and play an endless loop of music.

In this test, the SSD made little difference in the MacBook Air and, in fairness, Apple is making no claims of any significant battery-life gains on its SSD model. The SSD MacBook gave me just five more minutes of battery life. Apple says this is because its hard-drive model already uses a very low-power drive.

On the Portege R500, my first battery test with the SSD model actually yielded significantly less battery life than the hard-drive model. The reason: Toshiba ships the base SSD model with a battery with only half of the capacity of the hard-drive model.

When I swapped in the normal battery, which costs $117 extra, the SSD model gave me an added 1 hour and 21 minutes of battery life, about a 36% increase. That extra battery life likely would translate to nearly 2½ hours in more normal usage. It may be worth the huge price premium for some folks.

On both computers, the SSD was faster than the HDD models. The SSD version of the Apple booted up from a cold start, and rebooted with several programs running, about 40% faster. But the gain isn’t as impressive as it seems because even the hard-drive versions of the MacBook Air booted up in under a minute and rebooted in just a little over a minute.

On the Toshiba, which was running Windows XP, the SSD model knocked about 40 seconds off a cold boot time on the HDD version of 2 minutes and 7 seconds. On my reboot test, starting with several programs running, the SSD model was 80 seconds faster. I imagine that on laptops with the slow-booting Windows Vista, the improvements might be more meaningful.

I also tested launching Microsoft Word and Excel, and opening a couple of hefty PDF files on both machines. The SSD versions were faster. But in most cases, the gains were just a few seconds or even fractions of a second.

All in all, the SSD is a promising improvement over the hard drive, but now is not the time for most users to buy it.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online, free, at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

On Jan. 15, Microsoft will be releasing its first new version of Office for the Mac in nearly four years. It is called Office 2008, and it has two big changes from the current version, Office 2004.

For one, it is the first edition of Mac Office designed specifically for the new Intel-based Macs that Apple began rolling out two years ago. While the old Office ran adequately on the new Macs, it was slow to launch and slow to perform certain operations.

Second, the new Mac Office now reads and writes a new set of file formats Microsoft introduced a year ago in the latest Windows version of Office, called Office 2007. Mac owners receiving files in these new formats had been forced to employ separate and clumsy file converter programs.

Now, once again, the Mac version of Office can handle all the same Word, Excel and PowerPoint files — in both old and new formats — created in Windows and vice versa. No translation or conversion is necessary. The files just open and save as they do in the Windows version.

I’ve been testing the new Mac Office on two different Intel-based Macs: an early MacBook Pro laptop and a new iMac desktop. On both machines, Office 2008 launched and ran far more rapidly and smoothly than Office 2004 did.

I also tested Office 2008 with a variety of documents created in the Windows version using the new file formats, which can be identified by four-letter file name extensions that end in the letter “x.” All opened rapidly and perfectly in the new Mac version.

As in the latest Windows version, the new Mac Office 2008 allows you to opt to continue to save automatically all your files in the old, familiar formats-DOC for Word, XLS for Excel and PPT for PowerPoint. But, if you want to switch to the new formats, or need to use a file you receive that was created in them, you can now do so with ease.

Like its predecessors, the new Mac Office differs in one major respect from its Windows cousin: It lacks Outlook, the famed, if bloated, program for handling email, calendar and contacts. Instead, Office 2008 has a new version of Microsoft’s Mac counterpart to Outlook, called Entourage, which performs the same tasks but doesn’t use Outlook’s file format. Like Outlook, Entourage can work with the Microsoft Exchange servers used by corporations, as well as with consumer email systems.

Office 2008 for the Mac has some new features, but it isn’t nearly as radical an overhaul as the latest Windows version was. While the latter junked all the menus and traditional toolbars in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, the new Mac version retains the familiar menus and toolbars. It doesn’t use the so-called Ribbon, a band of icons that is the signature feature of Windows Office 2007.

The new Mac Office, however, does include a new user-interface feature called the Elements Gallery, a narrow strip across the top of the document that lets you easily summon and insert canned features for laying out documents. For example, in Word, you can quickly insert a handsome cover page. In Excel, you can rapidly add a specific type of chart or a spreadsheet preconfigured, for instance, as an invoice. In PowerPoint, you can quickly add customized slide themes and layouts.

There is also a Publishing Layout View in Word that speeds the creation of things like newsletters, and a Ledger Sheet feature in Excel for creating home and small-business budgets.

In my tests, I ran into a few minor glitches. I had to edit my rules for sorting email in Entourage to get them to work and, at first, I was unable to add new spellings to my custom dictionary in Word, though that problem went away. But, generally, the program worked well.

The standard edition of the new Office costs $400, or $240 to upgrade your current version. There is a deluxe edition, which includes a professional media-management program, for $500, or an upgrade price of $300.

For most average users, however, I recommend the Home and Student edition for just $150 that can be legally installed on up to three different Macs. This inexpensive edition has full versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage, but doesn’t work with Exchange servers.

Microsoft is also running a sale, through Jan. 14, under which anyone buying Office 2004 gets a coupon that allows them to receive the high-end version of Office 2008 for just a shipping and handling fee of $6.99.

Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac is a solid program that I can recommend for anyone with a new Mac. It’s not revolutionary, but it does the job.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online, free, at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

But in recent weeks, I’ve been bombarded by reader emails asking for Mac-buying advice. So, here’s a quick guide — a sort of Mac FAQ — to shopping for a Macintosh. As with my Windows guides, this is aimed at average, mainstream users doing typical tasks, not techies or businesses or hobbyists.

Q. Who should consider a Mac?

A. Pretty much every average consumer using a computer should at least look at the Mac. It combines gorgeous hardware with an operating system I consider superior to Windows, with better built-in software. It can even run Windows programs if you buy and install a copy of Windows. And unless you do that, you won’t be vulnerable to the vast array of viruses and spyware that threaten Windows users. Only a handful, so far, have been written to run on the Mac operating system, OS X.

Q. Who shouldn’t consider the Mac?

A. People who spend much of their time playing cutting-edge games should stick to Windows computers, because there are far fewer games written for OS X. Apple doesn’t offer hardware tuned for serious gaming. People looking for the lowest-price PCs should also avoid the Mac, because Apple’s cheapest model, the Mac Mini, costs $599.

Another group that should shun Apple’s computers are people who depend for support on corporate IT departments that are either ignorant about, or hostile to, the Mac. Finally, if you know and like Windows, and expect mainly to use Windows programs, stick with a Windows PC.

Q. Can I run Microsoft Office on a Mac?

A. Yes. Microsoft makes a Mac version of Office, which uses the same file formats that Word, Excel and PowerPoint for Windows have used for years. A new version of Office for the Mac is due in January and it will handle the new file formats Microsoft introduced this year. But the Mac version of Office omits Outlook. It has a similar program called Entourage, but Entourage can’t use Outlook data files. If you want a Mac but must have Outlook, you will have to install Windows.

Q. Can I use all my Windows files on a Mac?

A. Out of the box, Macs can handle all the common file types Windows machines create, including text files, pictures, songs and Adobe PDF files. The Mac even comes with a simple word processor that can open Microsoft Word files.

However, some specialized Windows programs create files that the Mac can’t handle out of the box. And the Mac version of Quicken has a difficult time properly handling Windows Quicken files. If you are a Quicken fan, install Windows and run the Windows version.

Q. Can I mix Macs and Windows on the same home network?

A. Macs can plug and play with most brand-name wired and wireless routers, and can share Internet connections with Windows PCs.

Q. How are Macs at Web surfing?

A. Fine. Apple’s built-in Safari browser is very good and the Mac version of Firefox is essentially identical to the Windows version. However, Macs lack an up-to-date version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, so you will have to install Windows if you need IE.

Q. Can Macs run standard peripheral hardware?

A. Macs can run nearly all keyboards, mice and printers that use USB connections, even ones that don’t explicitly say they run on Macs.

Q. What desktops does Apple offer for consumers?

A. Apple’s main consumer desktop is the one-piece iMac, which I regard as the best consumer desktop on the market. It comes in four models, with built-in 20-inch or 24-inch, flat-panel screens at starting prices ranging from $1,199 to $2,299.

Q. How about Mac laptops?

A. There are two. The entry-level MacBook has a 13-inch screen and a starting price of $1,099. The high-end MacBook Pro comes with either a 15-inch or 17-inch screen and starts at $1,999. Apple currently doesn’t offer a smaller laptop for road warriors, but there are persistent rumors that it will do so soon.

Q. What minimum specs should I look for on a Mac?

A. All Macs come with at least one gigabyte of memory — twice the minimum required for the new version of OS X, called Leopard. If you can, get two gigabytes. Apple charges a lot for extra memory, but you can buy it for less at stores and online providers.

Macs use the same dual-core Intel processors and graphics systems as many mainstream Windows computers; and, as with Windows, I wouldn’t pay extra for greater processor speed.

The iMac comes with at least a 250-gigabyte hard disk, and Mac laptop hard disks start at 80 gigabytes. Mainstream Windows desktops typically start with larger hard disks. But Apple offers much larger disks as options, which you should consider if you store a lot of photos, music and video files.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online free at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

And yet, last week, Apple brought out a new spreadsheet program called Numbers, thus completing one of its least-known products: a productivity suite called iWork. The iWork ‘08 suite, which competes with the Macintosh version of Microsoft Office, also includes a word-processing program called Pages and a presentation program called Keynote. The two were upgraded last week. IWork costs $79, about half the price of the lowest-cost version of Microsoft Office, which sells for $149.

In the past 10 years, Apple has out-designed Microsoft and its hardware partners in a number of key areas. But can Apple really take on Microsoft in the category of productivity software, where Office rules on both Windows and the Mac? To find out, I’ve been testing the new iWork, which runs only on the Mac, against the Mac version of Office.

My verdict: iWork ‘08 is a nice product, capable of turning out sophisticated and attractive word-processing, presentation and spreadsheet documents. It can even read Microsoft Office documents, whether created on the Mac or on Windows computers, and can save documents in Microsoft Office formats so they can be opened in Office on the Mac or on Windows.

But iWork simply isn’t as powerful or versatile as Microsoft Office, especially when it comes to word processing and spreadsheets. And it suffers from a design that places far more emphasis on making documents look beautiful than on the nuts and bolts of the actual process of writing and number-crunching.

There’s one big omission in iWork: It has no integrated email, contacts and calendar module comparable to Outlook in Windows or to Entourage, the Outlook equivalent that’s a part of the Mac version of Microsoft Office. Apple decided to rely on the very good email, calendar and address book programs that it builds into every Mac.

But iWork has one big plus: It’s the first Mac office suite that can open (though not create) files in the new formats Microsoft introduced in the Windows version of Office earlier this year. The Mac version of Office won’t do that until Office 2008 is out in January.

The new Numbers spreadsheet has some refreshing innovation that makes it far more approachable for casual spreadsheet users than Microsoft Excel often is. Numbers allows you to place multiple spreadsheet tables, plus charts and graphics, on a blank canvas that you can arrange any way you want. Each of the spreadsheet tables functions like an Excel spreadsheet with individual cells able to hold numbers, text or formulas.

Numbers has some other nice features to make things simpler. Any cell meant to contain a value you type in can be controlled with a slider or up-and-down arrows, so you can rapidly see how different numeric values would alter calculations without a lot of retyping.

I also found that Numbers made it easier than Excel to sort columns, and to add or move columns and rows. It’s also easier to create formulas using the actual names of columns and rows rather than their number/letter coordinates. And Numbers lets you drag and drop common formulas, such as Sum and Average, to the bottom of a column of numbers.

For real spreadsheet jockeys, however, Numbers is wimpier than Excel. It has only about half as many functions for making calculations and doesn’t do pivot tables.

The Pages program was originally more of a page-layout program than a writing tool. The new version attempts to fix this imbalance with a less artsy word-processing mode. But the effort is only partly successful. It still de-emphasizes some writer-friendly features. For instance, its auto-correct function is much weaker than Word’s. Another example: In Word, to see how many words your document contains, you just glance at the bottom of the screen. In Pages, you must dig down into a submenu to find the answer. The command for showing invisible formatting marks also is harder to find than in Word.

The strongest part of iWork is Keynote, the presentation program, which still makes it easier than Microsoft’s PowerPoint does to make rich, beautiful slide shows. The new version isn’t a major overhaul, but it includes a new feature called Instant Alpha that makes it easy to eliminate unwanted backgrounds from photos.

In my tests, importing and exporting documents between iWork and Office worked fine for simple files. But fidelity isn’t always perfect, especially in Numbers, where missing Excel functions or Numbers-only features don’t carry over.

If you’re a Mac user with basic word-processing and spreadsheet needs, and a strong emphasis on design, iWork is good choice, especially if perfect compatibility with Microsoft Office isn’t a high priority. But for office-suite users more concerned with function than form, I’d recommend sticking with Office.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online free at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

In classrooms and offices, homes and coffee shops, Macs are far more visible in the U.S. than they were just a few years ago. Part of this success results from the fact that Macs are excellent machines that handle the most important and common tasks as well as — or better than — computers running Microsoft Windows.

But the new popularity of the Mac is also partly due to the fact that it can now run Windows along with Apple’s superior Mac OS X operating system. That means that if there’s a program you need that comes only in a Windows version, you can run it on any current Mac model, speedily and with all its features.

Starting next week, there will be a new way to do this. A company called VMWare, long the leader in what’s called “virtualization” — running multiple operating systems simultaneously on a single computer — will be selling a program called Fusion that allows Windows, and Windows programs, to run on a Mac.

I’ve been testing Fusion, and I’ve found it works well. For instance, as I write this column on a Mac laptop using the Mac version of Microsoft Word, Fusion is allowing me to simultaneously run several popular Windows programs — Microsoft Outlook, Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer. Each is running in its own window, just as if it were a native Mac program. I can switch from one to the other rapidly and smoothly. Their icons show up on the Mac’s “Dock,” just like the icons for Mac programs.

In my tests, Fusion never slowed down my MacBook Pro laptop or two other Macs on which I tested it. As I write this, the Mac version of Word and all three Windows programs are performing normally, even though I am also running five other Mac programs. My MacBook Pro, which isn’t the latest or most powerful model, has two gigabytes of memory and an Intel processor that is a generation behind the current model.

Fusion, which will be available for $80 at vmware.com, becomes the third major option for running Windows software on a Mac. It will go up against a fine program called Parallels Desktop, also available for $80 at parallels.com and at retail stores. The third option is Apple’s own Boot Camp, currently a free product available at apple.com/bootcamp. Boot Camp will become a built-in feature of the next version of Apple’s Mac OS X operating system, due in October.

All three programs require users to purchase a full version of Windows and install it on the Mac. Like Fusion, Parallels is a virtualization program that allows you to run Windows and Windows programs simultaneously with the Mac operating system and Mac programs. Boot Camp works differently: It requires that you restart the Mac to switch into Windows, and it runs only one of the operating systems at a time.

In my tests, I compared Fusion and Parallels, which is its closest competitor. I used Windows XP Professional. Each also works with the new Windows Vista (and with older versions of Windows and various versions of the Linux operating system). But Microsoft has imposed a legal prohibition on installing the most common consumer versions of Vista, Home Basic and Home Premium, via virtualization programs.

The two programs are very similar. In most scenarios, they function nearly identically. Both allow you to run the full Windows desktop either in a window on your Mac or in full-screen mode. Alternatively, both allow Windows programs to float on their own, with the Windows desktop hidden, so they look and feel just like Mac programs. Both permit you to fetch and save files from folders already on your Mac. Both support copying and pasting between Mac and Windows programs. Both automatically use your Mac’s Internet connection.

Parallels has more features than Fusion. It comes with a set of utilities Fusion lacks, such as a program that can migrate the contents of a physical Windows PC into a Parallels virtual Windows PC, and another that allows you to retrieve files from the virtual Windows machine even when Parallels isn’t running. Parallels also has a nice feature that lets you assign any file to automatically open in a Windows program instead of a Mac program. And it makes it much easier to use a printer over a network than Fusion does.

But I found Fusion puts less strain on the computer overall. While I like Parallels and have used it since it came out, it sometimes slows down my Mac, especially when it is starting up Windows or performing some other major task. Fusion has a much smaller impact on the Mac’s overall performance.

You won’t go wrong with either program. Both give the Macintosh a level of versatility that can’t be matched by Windows-only machines.

• Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online free at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

Vista is much prettier than previous versions of Windows. Its icons look better, windows have translucent borders, and items in the taskbar and in folders can display little previews of what they contain. Security is supposedly vastly better; there are some new free, included programs; and fast, universal search is now built in. There are hundreds of other, smaller, improvements and additions throughout the system, including parental controls and even a slicker version of Solitaire.

After months of testing Vista on multiple computers, new and old, I believe it is the best version of Windows that Microsoft has produced. However, while navigation has been improved, Vista isn’t a breakthrough in ease of use. Overall, it works pretty much the same way as Windows XP. Windows hasn’t been given nearly as radical an overhaul as Microsoft just applied to its other big product, Office.

Vista’s Flip 3D feature lets you scroll through images of currently running programs. The sidebar (right) contains miniapplications. The Windows Photo Gallery (left) is for organizing and editing photos.

Nearly all of the major, visible new features in Vista are already available in Apple’s operating system, called Mac OS X, which came out in 2001 and received its last major upgrade in 2005. And Apple is about to leap ahead again with a new version of OS X, called Leopard, due this spring.

There are some big downsides to this new version of Windows. To get the full benefits of Vista, especially the new look and user interface, which is called Aero, you will need a hefty new computer, or a hefty one that you purchased fairly recently. The vast majority of existing Windows PCs won’t be able to use all of Vista’s features without major hardware upgrades. They will be able to run only a stripped-down version, and even then may run very slowly.

In fact, in my tests, some elements of Vista could be maddeningly slow even on new, well-configured computers.

Also, despite Vista’s claimed security improvements, you will still have to run, and keep updating, security programs, which can be annoying and burdensome. Microsoft has thrown in one such program free, but you will have to buy at least one more. That means that, while Vista has eased some of the burden on users imposed by the Windows security crisis, it will still force you to spend more time managing the computer than I believe people should have to devote.

Here’s a quick guide to the highlights of the new operating system.

Versions and Upgrading

Vista comes in six versions, two of which are primarily aimed at consumers. One, called Home Premium, is the one most consumers will want. It contains the full Aero interface, and it includes the functionality of Windows Media Center and Windows Tablet edition, which have been discontinued as separate products. Home Premium costs $239, or $159 if you are upgrading from an earlier version of Windows. It will come preloaded on most midrange and some high-end consumer PCs.

The other main consumer edition of Vista is the stripped-down version, called Home Basic. It includes the improved security and search but leaves out the new Aero interface and the Media Center and Tablet functions. It will be preloaded on low-price PCs. Home Basic will cost $199, or $100 for upgraders.

A third version, called Ultimate, will wrap up everything in Home Premium with some additional features from the business versions of Vista. This is for power users, and it is likely to be preloaded on high-end PCs. But some regular users may need Vista Ultimate if their companies have particular network configurations that make it impossible to connect to the company network from home with Home Basic or Home Premium. Vista Ultimate will cost $399, or $259 as an upgrade.

Even if you buy the Home Premium or Ultimate editions, Vista will revert to the Basic features if it detects that your machine is too wimpy to run the new user interface.

For most users who want Vista, I strongly recommend buying a new PC with the new operating system preloaded. I wouldn’t even consider trying to upgrade a computer older than 18 months, and even some of them may be unsuitable candidates. Microsoft offers a free, downloadable Upgrade Advisor program that can tell you how ready your XP machine is. It’s available at: microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/upgradeadvisor.

If you bought a PC in the past few months, and it had a “Vista Capable” sticker on it, it should be able to run at least Home Basic. If it was labeled “Premium Ready,” it should be able to handle Premium and probably Ultimate.

Microsoft says that Home Basic can run on a PC with half a gigabyte of memory and that Premium and Ultimate will work on a PC with one gigabyte of memory. I strongly advise doubling those numbers. To get all the features of Vista, you should have two gigabytes of memory, far more than most people own.

Even more important is your graphics card, a component most people know little about. Home Basic can run on almost any graphics system. But Premium and Ultimate will need a powerful, modern graphics system to run well.

Performance

I tested Vista on three computers. On a new, top-of-the-line Hewlett-Packard laptop, with Vista preinstalled, it worked smoothly and quickly. It was a pleasure.

On a three-year-old H-P desktop, a Vista upgrade installed itself fine. But even though this computer had a full gigabyte of memory and what was once a high-end graphics card, Vista Ultimate reverted to the Basic user interface. And even then, it ran so slowly and unsteadily as to make the PC essentially unusable.

The third machine was a new, small Dell XPS M1210 laptop. In general, Vista ran smoothly and well on this Dell, but some operations were annoyingly slow, including creating a new message in the built-in Windows Mail program. This surprised me, because the Dell had two gigabytes of memory and a fast processor.

Security

Microsoft says Vista is much more secure than any other operating system. But this is hard to prove, especially at the beginning of its life, when few hackers and malefactors have access to it. One visible security feature asks for your permission before you do potentially dangerous tasks, like installing new software. This is a good thing, and it’s been on the Macintosh for years. But unlike the Mac version, the Vista version of this permission feature doesn’t necessarily require you to type in a password, so a stranger or a child using your PC could grant permission for something you yourself might not allow.

Vista also has built-in parental controls so you can restrict what a child can do on the computer. This is also already on the Macintosh, though the Vista controls are more elaborate.

Microsoft includes a free antispyware program in Vista, called Windows Defender. But PC Magazine regards it as inferior to paid programs like Spy Sweeper and Spy Doctor. So you may want to buy one of these. You should also buy an antivirus program, which isn’t included.

User Interface

The new Aero interface is lovely, and it makes using a PC more pleasant and efficient. It apes some elements on the Macintosh but retains a distinct look and feel. Icons of folders look three dimensional, and they pop. Most file icons are thumbnails that show a tiny preview of the underlying document.

Like the rest of Vista, the Start Menu has a prettier, more refined look.

The old hourglass icon that appeared during delays has been replaced by a gleaming, spinning blue circle. The cutesy names for standard folders, like “My Pictures,” have been changed to simpler ones, like “Pictures.”

As on the Mac, you can now drag favorite folders into a list at the left of open windows, so it’s easy to get to them.

A new feature called Flip 3D shows a 3D view of all the programs you’re running and lets you scroll through them. It’s like the Mac’s excellent Exposé feature, though not quite as handy.

Another new feature, called the Sidebar, is a vertical strip at the side of the screen that can contain tiny programs, called Gadgets, displaying things like favorite photos, news headlines, stock prices and the weather. Once again, this is awfully similar to a Macintosh feature called Dashboard, which displays tiny programs called Widgets.

Some familiar Windows features have new names. The old Display control panel, where you chose screen savers and desktop pictures, is now called Personalization. The Add or Remove Programs control panel is now called Programs and Features.

Search

Like the Mac, Windows now has rapid, universal, built-in search, a very welcome thing. The main search box is contained at the bottom of the Start menu, and it works well. Other search boxes appear in every open window.

You can also save searches as virtual folders, which will keep collecting files that meet your search criteria. This is another feature introduced earlier by Apple.

Built-In Programs

The Outlook Express email program has been given a face-lift and renamed Windows Mail. But it’s pretty much the same, except for a new junk-mail filter. The Windows Address Book has been renamed Windows Contacts and, oddly, turned into a sort of file folder.

The latest version of the Internet Explorer Web browser, with tabbed browsing, is included, though it’s also available for Windows XP.

As on the Mac, Windows now has a nice, centralized Calendar program. And there’s a new photo-organizing program, Windows Photo Gallery, but it’s inferior to Apple’s iPhoto because it doesn’t allow you to create photo books, or add music to slide shows. There’s also a pretty rudimentary DVD-burning program.

The familiar WordPad program can no longer open Microsoft Word files (ironically, Apple’s free built-in word processor does).

Gradually, all Windows computers will be Vista computers, and that’s a good thing, if only for security reasons. But you may want to keep your older Windows XP box around awhile longer, until you can afford new hardware that can handle Vista.

• Email me at mossberg@wsj.com.

All of the familiar Office toolbars and menus have been replaced by the Ribbon, a super toolbar divided into seven tabs grouped by commands.

So, when Microsoft makes significant changes to Office, it’s a big deal. And the latest version of the software suite, called Office 2007, due out Jan. 30, is a radical revision, the most dramatic overhaul in a decade or more.

I don’t use the word “radical” lightly. The entire user interface, the way you do things in these familiar old programs, has been thrown out and replaced with something new. In Word, Excel and PowerPoint, all of the menus are gone — every one. None of the familiar toolbars have survived, either. In their place is a wide, tabbed band of icons at the top of the screen called the Ribbon. And there is no option to go back to the classic interface.

In Outlook, the Ribbon hasn’t kicked out the menus and toolbars in the program’s main screens, but if you compose an email, or set up a new contact or appointment, you’ll see it.

As if this weren’t enough, Microsoft has also changed the standard file format for Office files. Older versions of Office, on both Windows and Macintosh computers, won’t be able to read these new file types without special conversion software. The new version can, however, read files created in the older versions, on both Windows and Mac, without any conversion software.

These changes in Office, while much less publicized, are far bolder and more important than the mostly cosmetic user interface changes in the highly hyped new version of Windows, called Vista, which comes out on the same day.

After months of working with the Ribbon and other new features of Office, I believe they are an improvement. They replace years of confusing accretions with a logical layout of commands and functions. They add easy and elegant new options for making documents look good. And they make it much simpler to find many of the 1,500 commands that Office offers, but had buried in the past.

In the new Word, above, the round Office button replaces the file menu in the old Word, below, which had commands spread across many menus and toolbars. New features include contextual spell checking and translations into other languages.

So, Microsoft deserves credit for being bold and creative in designing Office 2007. It has taken a good product and made it better and fresher.

But there is a big downside to this gutsy redesign: It requires a steep learning curve that many people might rather avoid. In my own tests, I was cursing the program for weeks because I couldn’t find familiar functions and commands, even though Microsoft provides lots of help and guidance.

It’s as if Toyota decided to switch the position of choices on the automobile shift lever, or Motorola decided to rearrange the buttons on the cellphone key pad. Even if the companies could conclusively show that the changes made life easier, many people would be annoyed at best, and furious at worst.

In the case of the new Office, I think the changes are most beneficial for users concerned with the layout and design of documents. The commands that are now better arranged and easier to find are mainly those that relate to formatting, layout, graphics and design.

By contrast, basic composition and editing are aided by the new design either very little or not at all. If you mostly compose plain Word documents, simple presentations and plain spreadsheets, the new design may not be worth the effort to master it, and you might want to stick with an older version of Office. People with the new version will still be able to read your documents and you can get free conversion software so you can read new files.

The old Word.

The other group of users who might be better off skipping Office 2007 are power users who know many commands and have customized their menus and toolbars heavily. The new Office is much less customizable.

In fact, you can’t customize the Ribbon. To add favorite commands, all you can do is customize a tiny minitoolbar in the upper left corner of the screen, called the Quick Access Toolbar.

For people who mostly control Office via keyboard commands, and rarely use menus and toolbars, all of the basic keyboard commands are the same.

There are other nice additions. In Word, Outlook and PowerPoint, there is now contextual spell checking, which points to a wrong word, even if the spelling is in the dictionary. For example, if you type “their” instead of “they’re,” Office catches the mistake. It really works.

In addition, throughout Office, there is a function that translates a word or sentence into other languages. In PowerPoint and Excel, there are new, better-looking graphics for charts and tables.

And all the programs have Live Preview, a feature long offered by WordPerfect, which shows a formatting change before you commit to it. You can see what a new font or style would look like by hovering over the choice with the mouse.

Outlook, the least changed of the programs, finally catches up to other email programs with a fast search capability and the ability to preview attachments without opening them.

But the Ribbon is the biggest change. It’s essentially a super toolbar divided into seven logical tabs, which attempt to group similar commands. Each tab brings up a new version of the Ribbon. Common file-handling functions like Open, Save and Print aren’t on the Ribbon. They are accessed by clicking on a big round icon at the upper left called the Office Button, which is roughly the equivalent of the old File menu. Clicking the Office Button also displays a much larger and longer list of recently opened files than the old File menu did, and you can even permanently “pin” files to this list.

There’s no doubt that some functions are quicker and easier in the new interface. Narrowing the margins in a Word document now takes as few as three clicks, compared with up to 14 clicks and keystrokes in old versions.

Applying styles to a Word document is also easier. The Ribbon has a bunch of them in the Home tab, illustrated with big square icons that show what they look like, and you just can just click and apply the one you want.

But some less-common tasks are harder without the old menus and tool bars, such as adding a new word to the Auto Correct system.

Like a lot of things in Office over the years, the new file formats have been instituted mainly to aid big corporations and organizations. For consumers and small businesses, the main benefit of the new formats is to shrink file sizes, but that benefit is likely to be far outweighed by the hassles and incompatibilities they introduce.

Luckily, you can set up Office 2007 to ignore the new formats and save your files in the old formats to be read without conversion software. But some new formatting features may not be usable in the old formats.

Free conversion software is available now at office.microsoft.com. Click on the Downloads tab and select Microsoft Office File Formats Compatibility Pack.

Mac Office users will have to wait until later in the year for Microsoft to release converters that will allow their version of Office to read the new file formats. But a third-party conversion program, for Word files only, has already been released. It’s called docXConverter, and can be downloaded at www.panergy-software.com for $20.

In another move that will likely annoy many consumers, Microsoft has stripped Outlook from the low-price home version of Office. This version, which costs $150 and can be used on up to three computers, was formerly called Student and Teacher edition, and now has been renamed Home and Student. Formerly, you were supposed to have either a student or a teacher in your household to buy it, though stores never checked this. Now, that pretense has been dropped.

But this edition of Office has been made less valuable for many folks. It still includes Word, Excel and PowerPoint, but now, instead of Outlook, it has OneNote, a very nice program for creating and organizing notes and other research materials. Many home users would prefer Outlook. But to get Outlook in Office 2007, you either have to buy Office Standard for $399, or buy a standalone version of Outlook for $109.

If you’d like to get more out of Office, especially in the area of how your documents look, Office 2007 is a big step forward, and worth the steep learning curve it imposes. If you’re happy with Office now, or you mostly create plain documents where formatting and design aren’t high priorities, it may not be worth the effort to buy and learn the new version.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com.