I just wanted to thank all the Office:Mac beta testers and others who have input into developing Office 2011. I'm really looking forward to this release as I've put off getting Office for Mac until this year because of all the issues with Office 2004 and 2008 ( I realize many of the problems have been fixed in those editions).
Still, I appreciate everyone's efforts at making Office: Mac 2011 what I think/hope will be a much better office suite than it's previous versions. Beta testers don't always get the recognition they deserve.
Until October....keep catching any bugs you see.
I was lucky enough to be one of the chosen 40 social beta testers.
I had moved to iWork over Office and have done a consirable amount of work in iWork including help write three 400 page historical factual books.
I genuinely have great affection for Pages and whilst it has a number of limitations, there are so many great features to it - it alone is worth the asking price of iWork alone.
I had also moved back to Mail from Entourage etc..
So it was always going to take a lot of work to bring me back to Office for Mac, but as I was given this opportunity to get my hands on Office 2011' see how it was developing and learn it's new features, I can honestly say it's a great product once more.
You can make Word work in an almost identical manner to Pages by simply selecting 'publishing' layout and hey presto images and other stuff now has the same effect on text wrapping as Pages. You can drop cut out images from Photoshop directly and they will wrap perfectly. You have a larger variety of frames for images akin to Pages and there are some great photo effects you can apply as well as adjusting the media.
Basically it's taken the best elements for which people like myself love/loved in pages and brought them back to the better word processor.
There are also many other improvements that genuinely make office 2011 a proper generational improvement over it's previous outings.
The new user interface and especially Ribbon make navigation and tool selection far more intuitive. The application itself feels less cluttered and more over far more 'mac' like in it's aesthetics than again any of it's forbares. In fact going back to 2008 / 2004 after using 2011 for a while really is quite striking.
Outlook has become for me a permanent fixture. Again it's strange and is hard to explain but it feels like in a way they have stripped it back to the essentials, and yet it is still jam packed full of features too, and there are a number of great features like the conversational mode that once you have used it's hard to imagine why they had not been introduced sooner.
PowerPoint has likewise been improved to feature many of the great stuff from Keynote, and then taken that step beyond, and excel was always the better spreadsheet than Numberx (which is still in it's infancy).
Yes there are still a few wrinkles for Microsoft to iron out before October, but Office 2011 is faster to load, faster when open, more stable and infinitely much I proved both in UI and content handling. Will it appease everyone, well no as you can never please everyone all the time - but that's nor the point, the point is they are at least trying and for once the mac development squad has really stepped up a gear and are genuinely delivering I'm my oppinion there best Mac offering to date, and I much prefer it to either Office x, 2004, 2008 on Mac and Office 2003' 2007 on PC.
There has been a lot of negative comments in this thread, and I hope those people once they have at least tried Office 2011 (im sure they will release a trial version around it's launch) with an open mind they will see for them elves that Microsofts mac team have really stepped up their game and produced a quality product for Mac users.
Of course with Apple supposedly gearing up to release iWork 11 themselves, it's good that Microsft have really upped the ante, because Apple will have to do the same. Either way it's win win for the consumer.
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