Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

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

I welcome any progress made with Office. Hooray!

But I couldn't watch that video. Lighting temperatures all mixed together, terrible audio. Just because you shoot something on a DSLR doesn't make it good.
 
notjustjay said:
Actually, I have a lot of criticisms about iWork. For one, I've always found the apps to be dog slow. They were slow on my PowerBook G4, they're still slow on my MacBook Pro. Less slow, sure, but I've always felt that Pages, especially, was a pig on my machine. It looks visually rich, but it's frustrating to work with on any document longer than 3 pages.

I also happen to really, really hate the standard OS X font selection dialog.
Click to expand...

I'm exactly with you:

I've been able to bog down Pages and Numbers pretty good, especially when you start working with many tables, embedding images into charts (using an images as a background for a chart, pie piece, etc.) or linking between documents. All of the cool visuals you can do just really slow it down - which is often the whole reason for choosing iWork programs in the first place.

OS X font dialogue is really annoying. I'm not saying I want the windows version, but it's one of the most non-intiutive parts of OS X I've come across.
 
iWork is slow, especially on a G4 :eek:. On my Intel quad core it's good though. I much prefer it to Office personally. It will be super fast with a Macbook Pro with SSD :cool:

Office 2008 for Mac was pretty horrible. Very slow and crashy, although the service packs have helped. I preferred 2004! And I preferred X before that actually. From iWork '09 I switched to iWork pretty much exclusively except when I have to edit office docs of course.

2011 does look like an improvement though, I'm glad to hear about the focus on compatibility and new features. It should be quite fast too ... on an SSD :p
 
I'm a huge iWork fan, but some of those new tools in Excel—Microsoft's best product in my opinion—look great and make me wonder about switching back to using Excel. Plus, with Outlook, it may be tempting assuming it seamlessly integrates to Exchange server and there are none of Microsoft's dirty "compatibility" tricks.

As for the balance of the suite, the ribbon bar aside, this looks like an impressive upgrade by Microsoft, so I hope they sell a ton of Office for the Mac.

For me, I'm hoping iWork 11 is a serious upgrade on both the Mac and iOS. I love iWork, but it's getting pretty long in the tooth and there are tons of bugs and performance issues which need to be hammered out. (To say nothing of a cloud strategy which makes sense in the multi-device world.)

Make no mistake about it: Microsoft has raised the bar with Office 2011 and Apple needs to respond with serious innovation.
 
No More MS Bloatware On My Mac!!!

Numbers and Pages do everything I need.

By By MS...you had a nice run but you are no longer required.:p
 
Sounds good! Office for Mac isn't that bad but Pages worked well for me, however you cannot compare the two as Pages doesn't have nearly as many features as Word for Mac. Pages is good for basic simple text editing, but when it comes to inserting photos it becomes horrid.
 
I like Open Office but it still does not open all MS files flawlessly. Until it does, MS Office is a necessity when receiving files from others.
 
great... now that office is finally up to par with the windows version.
work on that darn Messenger For Mac... because it's still total crap after all these years, while the windows version is improving and improving, getting updates frequently. :mad:
 
Kurt Schmuckers

"Profesional Looking Documents"

like

"Orange Tasting Drink"
or
"Leather Feeling Plastic"

Is this okay now to call people Evangelist at work? Can Muslims be called a Senior Mullah?

But seriously, word on the street is Kurt is ex-SAS. He's trained to kill, which is why he can barely function under normal circumstances (talking, walking naturally across a room etc.). Last guy to mess with Kurt's gestalt was in all sorts of bother.
 
They are claiming compatibility with Office for Windows. But wasn't that their claim with previous versions too?

I had to laugh at this part:
Kurt Schmucker said:
Mac users will find this new photos editing capability really important because of their emphasis on high quality graphics, visual fidelity, great layout, and good art in their documents.
Click to expand...
It's interesting to learn that Windows users don't care about high quality graphics, visual fidelity, great layout, and good art in their documents. They must emphasize other things.

The Sparklines feature looks cool. The first temping feature I've seen so far.
 
There really is a world of difference between 2008 and 2011.

I spend most of my life writing some pretty big tech docs - I'd always have to switch into office for Windows. I'm doing that a hell of a lot less with even the BETA 2011.

Start up times for apps are massively improved too. Quick tests with 2008 & 2011 on the same machine show that 2011 is about 3 times faster.

Personally, I think it's a great leap forward. Loving Outlook too! It's still not feature equivalent to Outlook for Windows but is ages better than Entourage.

In terms of document compatibility though I'm not sure what real improvements are there to be made? I mean I always switch between Office Mac & Windows and I can't remember the last time I saw any compatibility issues?

People are work with are 99% + Windows too, and I've never had any come back on document compatibility?
 
strabes said:
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.
Click to expand...
55.8 seconds?
How many other programs do you have open and running?
On my ancient Powerbook G4 with 1.67 GHz PPC and 2 gig ram, with Firefox and Mail open I opened Word alone within 5 seconds. Close Word and open a 45 page document by double-clicking on the file with Word closed and even with the entering the password for the password authentication I have for this file it opened within 15 seconds. Now I know if I go to open that same file just after the machine is booted up for the first time on any day it'll take a little longer, but only another 5 seconds or so.

Oh yeah - forgot - this is from the 2004 Office package.
 
uber_nerd said:
If you are creating documents with equations you should look at a proper document preparation system such as LaTeX (the TeXShop mac application does a good job). The typesetting is beautiful and it handles equations much better than any WYSIWYG could ever hope.

Flat files only please for important research documents, manuscripts and anything you might want to use again.

Also you can create scripts to output LaTeX reports ready to be complied, handy if someone asks for a slight change in the 100+ figures in the 400 page report.

Anything over 10 pages should never be created in word.
Click to expand...

It's only for chemistry lab reports.

I'm not in Uni yet, so I don't have to deal with a lot of equations, but it's frustrating not to be able to print the document I made with the school computer at home...

I'll have a look at LaTex, though.
 
KindredMAC said:
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.
Click to expand...

Crippled by design.
 
I like the moleskine-esque packaging for the design obsessed.
 

Attachments

  • Screen shot 2010-08-18 at 4.07.57 PM.png
    Screen shot 2010-08-18 at 4.07.57 PM.png
    155 KB · Views: 96
RMo said:
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.)
Click to expand...
I'll have to disagree. If I make a document that uses a certain font, spacing, etc., it should look the same on two different machines (assuming they have the font installed, not accounting for printer differences here, just on-screen).

It's Word, and they claim it's a what-you-see-is-what-everyone-sees-and-gets. Otherwise, why bother? Just send .txt files back and forth.
 
I'm looking forward to Office 2011 but fearful at the same time.

I'm eagerly looking forward to the return of Outlook. I love Apple to death but why can't they make an integrated email, contact and calendar application is beyond me and drives me nuts. For 2 years I've run my business using the 3 aforesaid applications but I'm dreading how difficult it's going to be to switch to Outlook. I love the fact that via MobileMe my calendars, contacts and emails sync perfectly with my iPhone and between my MBP and MP. If I switch to Outlook I may loose this ability :mad:

On another note, I still see iWork's built-in templates and ease of use miles ahead of what Microsoft is doing. I'm eagerly awaiting iWork 2011 but in the past I've had serious compatibility issues with developing documents in programs like Keynote and trying to export them to a PowerPoint format. I'd like to see more interoperability between the two office suites.
 
PurdueGuy said:
I'll have to disagree. If I make a document that uses a certain font, spacing, etc., it should look the same on two different machines (assuming they have the font installed, not accounting for printer differences here, just on-screen).

It's Word, and they claim it's a what-you-see-is-what-everyone-sees-and-gets. Otherwise, why bother? Just send .txt files back and forth.
Click to expand...

I don't WANT Word for Windows and Word for Mac to be pixel perfect as that would mean that the Mac version would render text like Windows do, and that's really really not desirable. I want Word for Mac to render text as text on a Mac is supposed to render text which been superior to whatever Microsoft's been doing for the last 25 years.

I sure they have fixed the bugs where rendering text layout would depend on what zoom level you have. I've had Word documents that shift between something like 135 or 127 pages depending on if you are in 75% zoom or 135% zoom. And this translated into printing too!

This was actually present in Excel and Powerpoint too! It's very nice to see text fitting in a cell at one zoom level, but not in another, or headings suddenly wrapping to two lines while presenting a slideshow. Very nice Microsoft.. I sure you've fixed those bugs too.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back