Office 2001 for Apple's Macintosh operating system would goon sale in the second half of this year and will include new features aimed at the multimedia-savvy crowd that favours those computers, said Mary Rose Becker, group product manager for Microsoft's Macintosh business unit.

"Mac users are unique and they are looking for features and functions that are not only compatible with the Windows platform but that are unique to them," Becker said.

Office, a bulwark of many business computer networks, includes software like the Word word processing programme, Excel spreadsheet maker, and PowerPoint for creating and showing presentations.

The Macintosh additions include improved file sharing between Macintosh and Windows-based computers and a brand-new e-mail programme that, unlike Microsoft's Outlook and Outlook Express software, can be used onApple's colourful and popular line of iMac computers, Becker said.

Office 2001 will also include a more "Mac-like" interface and more tools to use graphics, images and video, which Apple machines excel at handling.For example, Microsoft included support for Apple's QuickTimevideo format in PowerPoint so that presentations can now be saved in QuickTime and viewed with the QuickTime player instead of PowerPoint.

Eyeing the increasing popularity of Apple computers among home consumers and small businesses, Microsoft is also more than doubling, to 400, the number of templates that can be used to jumpstart projects like newsletters or stationery.

"Now what we're finding is that our customer base is becoming a little more diverse. As Apple broadens with their iMac strategy, we're trying to map to that," Becker said.

"We're looking at expanding our focus to small businesses,consumers and educators while while continuing to serve our customers in the large organisation space," Becker said.

In addition to the Office upgrade, Becker said her unit was writing software to run on Apple's upcoming Mac OS X, its new operating system due out in January.