Microsoft Offers Behind-the-Scenes Look at Office for Mac 2011 Features

[Ethnmad]

thanks for the sharing, its awesome!

 

[jacg]

It's our goal to be a good Mac citizen and to provide the best productivity experience on the platform. For the most part, that meshes up easily; other times, we have to make trade-offs. Spelling/grammar is a great example of that. While the OS does provide an acceptable dictionary built into the system, ours is significantly deeper. Imagine if you ran a spellcheck on a document in Word:Mac 2011 and everything came out fine, but then you ran the same document through a spellcheck in Word 2010 for Windows and it came up with errors. To maximise productivity and avoid cross-platform issues like that, we use our own.

This is a reasonable point and I guess the quest for compatibility will always mean compromises, but for many compatibility will be the most important thing.

Anyway, have you considered having the option for Office2011 at start-up check that the custom dictionary is up to date by adding words from the OS custom dictionary? And the option to simultaneously add new custom dictionary words to both system and Office dictionaries?

Another poster suggested the ribbon was customisable. This combined with the ability to totally hide it when required make it sound better.

One thing that is on my mind regarding compatibility is all those neat Pages-like in-app graphics features you are adding like Instant Alpha and image adjustments; are files where these features get used openable/editable on a Windows computer?

Thanks for the answers. I'll definitely try it out.

 

[talmy]

No mention anywhere about the Equation Editor. Word for Windows 2007 introduced a new equation editor which is incompatible with Word for Mac 2008. Is the new equation editor in Office 2011? I'm tired of this incapability game in Microsoft Office.

 

[nadyne]

Anyway, have you considered having the option for Office2011 at start-up check that the custom dictionary is up to date by adding words from the OS custom dictionary? And the option to simultaneously add new custom dictionary words to both system and Office dictionaries?

Sure, it's been considered, but there's plenty of difficulties in it. Comparing the two at start-up would slow down start-up. Now, go look at the Office 2008 threads here and see what people think about how fast that suite starts up. If we could do so without slowing down the start-up process, comparing at start-up isn't sufficient. You can add words to the OS custom dictionary at any time. Many people never fully quit out of the Office apps, so that means that they wouldn't get updates. We could check for update to the OS custom dictionary at set intervals, but that has the potential for a performance impact.

One thing that is on my mind regarding compatibility is all those neat Pages-like in-app graphics features you are adding like Instant Alpha and image adjustments; are files where these features get used openable/editable on a Windows computer?

If they're using Office 2010 for Windows, yes. If they're using an older version, they won't be editable.

Regards,
Nadyne.