Forum Moderators: travelin cat
Microsoft launches Office 2011 for Mac today, bringing Mac users the latest versions of the company’s productivity software. The release is the latest effort from the Office for Mac team, which has been delivering Microsoft software to the Mac for 13 years.
So the new release for Mac is focused on delivering anywhere access, better collaboration, and professional design tools to make it more attractive than previous versions, Wilfrid says. First and foremost, Outlook is now included in Office 2011 for Mac. The new Outlook was built from the ground up and works with both on-premises Exchange and the just-announced Office 365, the new cloud service from Office.
Office 2011 has new built-in integration with Windows Live SkyDrive as well as connections to SharePoint so users can manage files and work from any location, Wilfrid says. With Office Web Apps, Mac consumers can edit Office documents straight from their browser.
...My greatest disappointment, though, was Outlook. The other reviewers rave about its speed; my copy freezes whenever it’s “syncing” (sending or receiving e-mail). It won’t respond until the syncing is complete.
Worse, Microsoft gutted this program. So many of the great tools and commands I used in Entourage, its predecessor, have simply been removed.
The missing commands include Resend (lets you resend a sent message — to a new person, for example); Edit Message (great if there’s a hideous background or font that makes the message unreadable); Cleanup Text (fixes those multi-forwarded messages with a million indented >>> forwarding brackets, or gets rid of ugly line breaks); Redirect (lets you forward a message to the proper party, with the original sender still in the “From” box); and the option to use the same keyboard shortcuts for editing text that you’ve set up in Word.
There are bugs aplenty, too. If you use the Send as Attachment command from Word, for example, you wind up with an outgoing message in Outlook — but without your signature in place. You have to add that manually. To make matters more annoying, the cursor doesn’t plop itself in the To box, so you can address it. You have to click there.
[pogue.blogs.nytimes.com...]
That's pretty serious. And there is more here, I recommend the article. Pogue is a Mac guy and he uses it like I do. This makes Mac Mail look good.
Office 2011 for Mac hit retailers Tuesday with more crossover between the Apple and Windows editions than ever before — and that might not be a good thing for Microsoft.
Microsoft's productivity suite for Mac fans dumps Entourage for Outlook and includes integration with the Office Web apps — the browser-based edition of Office that lets you work with online versions of Microsoft's popular Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote applications.
Office 2011 for Mac also exposes Apple fans to Office's notorious ribbon interface that was introduced in Office 2007 and also adds support for Visual Basic for Applications.
