(FORTUNE Magazine) – If Edgar Capen's enthusiasm is catching, the Macintosh should make it big in offices. Though he would not call himself this, he is Arco's resident curly- haired creative genius, one of the guys top executives of the energy giant call to help them think through important ideas. ''I've got the world's most interesting job,'' he says. ''I'm paid just to think, to go anywhere and do anything to make the company run better.'' He couldn't do it nearly as well, he insists, without his Mac. Though Capen, who has a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Texas, found the IBM PC good at generating rows and columns of numbers, he did not consider that helpful for his mission. By contrast, he says, ''The Mac is pictorial. It's communicative. If you're a pictorial thinker, it lets you turn ideas into pictures.'' Capen realized geologists and geophysicists, who study maps of underground formations to decide where to drill, were uncomfortable when their bosses made them predict the odds that their hunches were correct. ''These specialists don't like numbers,'' says Capen. ''They're intuitive. Touchy-feely.'' Alas, Arco's nuts-and-bolts managers need numerical estimates to determine whether a well makes economic sense. So Capen tinkered with Excel, a spreadsheet program for the Mac, to make a bar chart appear on the computer screen. Now the geologists and geophysicists can adjust the sizes of bars until they match their gut feeling about a site's likelihood of coming up dry. As the bars change size, so do numbers elsewhere on the screen. It is an interesting switch. Instead of using data to create a chart, he does the opposite. A group of managers charged with cutting costs at an Alaskan oil field came to Capen, who put them through his Rip van Winkle exercise. The managers were told to close their eyes, then wake up and imagine it was five years later. They found a dummy newspaper Capen had whipped up on his Macintosh telling them they had won the Nobel Prize because they had shown how to cut costs so greatly that they had opened the Arctic to worldwide development. They had to explain how that happened -- and in doing so came up with several new cost- cutting ideas. Reviewing Arco's exploration strategy, Capen analyzed the conventional wisdom that the average size of newly discovered fields is shrinking. He collected reams of production information and used the Macintosh to analyze it. What he saw astonished him: On average, new fields hadn't shrunk in years. He says, ''There isn't an oilman in a thousand who realized that.'' Capen cautions that he does not want to sound like a walking advertisement and cannot speak for the rest of Arco. But he concludes that ''without the Mac these things don't happen.'' For example, the information on new finds had been around for ages. ''It doesn't mean someone couldn't have fought his way through it using an IBM,'' he says. ''It would just be a whole lot tougher.''