AshKToday Microsoft NZ showed Office for Mac 2011 to local media at a launch event in Auckland city. Theoretically, only ten percent of our readers should care but I’m assuming that a higher percentage of Witchdoctor readers are Mac users. The three WD editors certainly are, although some of us have been known to use a PC occasionally.
There are loads of new features in this all singing, all dancing software release.
Microsoft is talking up the compatibility aspects plus the fact that Office Mac 2011 is very similar to Office 2010 for PCs. In addition it’s pushing the ability of the package to create uber professional output – so of course, “compatible, familiar, professional” is the tag line. However, most notable for me was the inclusion of Outlook in the business version of the software.
Some people regard Outlook as an evil piece of resource hogging bloatware but it is the standard corporate email platform (Lotus what?). It also works and it works well, especially compared to Entourage (ugh) and Mac Mail (what’s worse than ugh?).
Among other things, Office Mac 2011 also supports Microsoft’s Web Apps and has a great Mac specific feature called Dynamic Reordering, which pops up a sideways 3D view of a document or presentation and allows the user to move various objects around depending on the layers they’re on. Very cool indeed. There’s photo editing functionality, a huge template gallery with access to online templates and a funky presentation broadcast system in PowerPoint.
There’s lots more, so the only way to cover it all is for one of the team to do a full review. I’ll take a shot but if the installer says that I need to install Rosetta on my MacBook Pro, then the disk goes in the bin or off to a worthy Mac user. For those not in the loop, Rosetta is Apple’s application that allows the legacy applications that used to run on old Power PC Macs to run on the newer Intel Macs. I don’t have any legacy apps, so I don’t see the need to run a legacy emulator (yes I’m a stubborn anal retentive type, who uses the free NeoOffice rather than the ancient code in the earlier versions of Office Mac).
There are only two versions of Office for Mac 2011 available:
Home and Student – 1 user $219 or 3 users $259
Home and Business – 1 user $379 or 2 users $499
