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Microsoft Highlights Compatibility, Graphing and Photo Editing in Office for Mac 2011

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Apr 12, 2001
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Microsoft has posted a new video clip highlighting some of the features of its Office for Mac 2011 suite due for release in late October. Among the features touched upon by Microsoft's Senior Evangelist for the Macintosh Business Unit Kurt Schmucker:

- Compatibility: Microsoft has focused on making Office for Mac 2011 more compatible with the Windows version than ever before, ensuring that users and documents can move seamlessly between platforms.
We'll take a document and print it out with Word for Windows and with Word for Macintosh. Take the two sheets of paper, overlay them...hold them up to the light. If we see any difference, we consider that a bug that we have to fix.
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-Graphing: Office for Mac 2011 brings a number of new tools to help users display data in graphical formats, including the Sparklines feature that debuted in Office for Windows 2010. Sparklines allows users to display simple data in small graphs that fit right into the cells of Excel spreadsheets to provide a significant amount of information at just a quick glance.

- Photo Editing: Available throughout the suite, photo editing tools will allow users to perform a number of tasks such as filter application, background removal, and color correction without having to leave the document on which they are working.

The video is part of a continuing series of behind-the-scenes previews of Office for Mac 2011. The first video posted in late July discussed template galleries, Outlook features such as Conversation View, and the ribbon toolbar.

Article Link: Microsoft Highlights Compatibility, Graphing and Photo Editing in Office for Mac 2011
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2010/08/18/microsoft-highlights-compatibility-graphing-and-photo-editing-in-office-for-mac-2011/
he looked like he was tied up to a chair while he was giving this presentation. no emotion, no tone, just monotone.

ZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.........

:apple: FTW
 
Great to see how hard they're working on Mac OS/Windows Compatibility :)

Interesting that after all of the negative criticism regarding the age of the employees in the previous video, this new one now uses someone who looks more experienced. Coincidence?
 
Am I supposed to be impressed with the "holding the paper up to the light" comment ? I would hope that would be the case.
 
lewis82 said:
What about equations?

I want the newfangled Office 2007 equation editor. The old one that shipped with 2008 has existed since 1997.:mad:
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They've added this in the new version. I've seen in (and used it) in the beta version.

Now if they could lower the price that would be great. Compared to iWork, MS Office is way too expensive.
 
I can't believe that here we are coming to the end of 2010 and in today's world there are still some incompatibilities between a PC version of Word and Mac's version before Office 2011 comes out...

What is soooo hard Microsoft???? It is a file format.

If someone creates a PSD in Photoshop on a PC (for what reason, I have no idea) and sends it to me, I can open it with no issues what so ever, barring any system font issues. If Adobe can do it with things a lot more complex than words in a document, Microsoft should be able to handle it too.

I will say though that file compatibility issues have continued to decrease over the years since Mac Office 98, but still....
 
It's going to stink like all the other versions have. They always say it will be perfect and even better than on Windows. And it never is.
 
If only they had the same standards for IE

I think the world would be a much better place if the had taken this same approach of comparing an overlay when they set about designing, and redesigning, and redesigning again, Internet Explorer.
 
mattwolfmatt said:
Am I supposed to be impressed with the "holding the paper up to the light" comment ? I would hope that would be the case.
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Actually.... yes. Like I said in my previous post, why are they JUST getting to dealing with this issue?????
 
More incredibly stilted and staged marketing videos from Microsoft. Can this company ever produce something that feels authentic and real??
 
Schmucker?

NXTMIKE said:
he looked like he was tied up to a chair while he was giving this presentation. no emotion, no tone, just monotone.

ZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.........

:apple: FTW
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What do you expect from someone who is named Schmucker? :D
 
Now we know: some people in the Mac BU at Microsoft are, in fact, old enough to vote in the US. :D

(Even if they are not made of iCandy like Eric. :))
 
How about making it open quickly? I really do not care about making gimmicky charts. Also, interoperability between Windows and Mac versions should be flawless. For crying out loud, it's the same company.

Maybe I'm just a whiny brat or asking too much. But seriously, I just timed it. 55.8 seconds until I could type without the beach ball. To be fair, Pages took about 45 seconds. This is one reason why I write papers in textedit first. Takes 1 second to open, if that.
 
Who is looking forward to buying this?

I will probably buy Office 2011.
But, not with any enthusiasm. I will buy it because I feel I have to.

Is there anyone out there that is excited about Office 2011?
 
WOW! thats impressive, now if only they could work that hard on their pathetic excuse for an OS :D
 
I feel like this is copying some features of iWork like instant alpha. iWork ftw!
 
What about blue backgrounds and white letters? Its an awesome feature, especially on todays bright and massive screens.
 

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strabes said:
How about making it open in less than 60 seconds? I really do not care about making gimmicky charts.

Also, interoperability between Windows and Mac versions should be flawless. For crying out loud, it's the same company.
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+1.

Forget about bells and whistles. Make it open quickly and cut the price dramatically and this will sell extremely well. It's very hard to justify spending all of that money on a program that takes 30 seconds to open on a Mac that is only a few years old.

I've never seen any announcements about speed improvements so I suspect they will be ignoring this entirely.

It kids of reminds me of a quote I heard about Photoshop, paraphrasing: "You know your program has problems when it' so slow to open that you have time to read all the dozens of names on the opening splash screen."
 
KindredMAC said:
If someone creates a PSD in Photoshop on a PC (for what reason, I have no idea) and sends it to me, I can open it with no issues what so ever, barring any system font issues. If Adobe can do it with things a lot more complex than words in a document, Microsoft should be able to handle it too.
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Word documents aren't meant to look pixel-by-pixel identical on every machine the document is viewed on. It is, for the most part, intended to be a WYSIWYG editor, but this is necessarily dependent on the system it is viewed on: printer settings, fonts, etc. (Even on the same computer with a different printer, it can look different.)

Recent versions have added some semantic capabilities (or at least the ability to define custom formats), which give you the ability to address many of these issues. For example, by using the provided Heading style (or making your own), you can do things like avoid making it an orphan, which will help when your pages break at different points.

But if you're doing serious typesetting, the real answer is LaTeX. Word wasn't really meant to handle some of these situations, and, having its roots as WYSIWYG, as you note, it doesn't always handle them well.
 
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