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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.


..
 
It's not so much you as many other comments from people that are saying they're excited to buy Outlook because they don't like Mail.

I'm just trying to figure out what their situation is. I use Outlook at work and Mail and home and honestly can not think of a single thing I need that I can do on one that I can't do on the other.

So for me it's like, whatever. I'll use which one comes with the computer. I'm trying to figure out why some people really seem to care so much.

I can't speak for others, but for me there are two aspects here.

First, at work, yes Office is/is not bought by the company. At the end of the day, though, my department has a budget for software upgrades, and I'd much rather spend that $300 on something productive instead of another buggy version of Office, if I can help it. So, there, I am constantly questioning our continued suckling at the teat of Microsoft Office.

Second, at home I have my home/work computer (which is nicer than the serviceable laptop they give me to work from home and on the road but there's no way I'd be able to convince them to pay for three machines and software for three machines even though I do use the third one a few hours each week), but that's not so much a concern as it's a pain to have to switch to radically different communications tools at home versus the office. It's nice to be able to use the same scripts and so forth for managing home spam and conversations etc as I do at work.

In the end, though, I end up just using iWork on the home/work and fully-home computers, primarily because I don't do a lot of work in the Office suite anyway other than email. The office computers are running old copies of Office because it's still too much of a pain communicating with the Windows-using populace using iWork apps (Pages and Numbers and to a lesser extent Keynote) and I'd rather upgrade IntelliJ this year than fork over more money to Office, because the one affects 90% of my day and the other 5%.

Still, I do worry over the feature set of Office, and its price, because these things do affect me for a measurable portion of my day, every day. And I'd like to regain the brain cells currently devoted to remembering how to work around obscure Microsoft bugs and put them to better use.
 
Times New Roman not kerned

IMPORTANT

In Word 2011 (beta 5) the ubiquitous Times New Roman font (used almost universally by universities and students and high schools) DOES NOT KERN.

When using the latest version of Snow Leopard, all-capital words like AVARICE and kerning pairs like "Yo" (in "You" for instance) and "We" also do not kern, whether kerning is turned on or off.

This seems inexcusable in a software program of this renown.
 
^ when did you get that Beta ? I have not noticed this problem in the one rolled out to us less than a fortnight ago :confused:

Will check this out and report it back to Microsoft Connect. If this is introduced lately, I think we can safely assume it will be corrected before launch regardless.

Out of interest can you share with me few details such as language selection in Mac OS, and what version of Mac OS you are running. Just so I can reproduce as much as possible as it could be a number of factors required to get the bug. It will help me report it.

Thanks.
 
Some quick comments from the beta 5, after having used it for just a few minutes:

zoom with trackpad doesnt work
it still has document specific preferences inside the general application preferences panel

Microsoft CANT make logical, good working applications. That's a fact. This time won't be different. I promise you.
 
Sir,

I seriously doubt that there's anyone here who is a "MS apologist" (whatever the hell that is) nor do I feel "superior" because I use "MS Products".. I am simply pointing out (as are many others here) that 99% of the business world is using MS Office as part of their basic image package.

I have 4 employees who are highly skilled professionals. And millions of people work in offices today all over the world. I seriously doubt any of them consider themselves "pathetic cubicle-drones" or any other sarcastic and degrading characterization you wish you place on them.

You can disagree, go off on a fanboy tirade, and whine and scream all you want but it won't change the fact that to do business in this world (and be compatible with others) it is important that you use the industry de facto standard. I'm surely not going to tell a client that the reason the spreadsheet I just sent them won't open is because I'm using a FREE shareware program downloaded off the internet while he and everyone else he does business with is using office.

I'm a Project Scheduler. I use Microsoft Project and Oracle Primavera P6 v7. I don't use "Open Schedule", "Uncle Joe's Cool CPM Shareware", or "NeoPlan". Yeah, it costs a few bucks to use what the rest of the world is using but that's how the "real world" works.

If I had a recording studio, I'd use Pro Tools, not "Jim's FREE Recording Software". If I were a draftsman, I'd use AutoCad or Rivit - not some generic junk downloaded from the net...

The "world is not waking up"... You need some semblance of standardization to interactivity communicate with the world. This isn't 1975 anymore where people work alone. Business is a collaborative effort whether you think so or not.

It's is you Sir who is the arrogant, degrading, and uninformed one in this discussion. Because a person has taken the time to become productive in this world, it's nobodies like you who label them "pathetic cubicle-drones" and "MS Apologists" .. And why are you doing this exactly?? Oh yes, because they won't exclusively use Apple Products...''

You Sir, are the pathetic one...' And judging from the condescending tone of your post, I doubt you're really anyone whose opinion really matters much.

oh come on don't get your panties in a twist, I was simply musing on why some folks feel so passionately about the least-innovative company in tech, who as you say is only the "standard" by default. 99%? Where did you pull that stat, thin air? I'm no fanboy, I'm a pragmatist and will use the best tool for the job - period. It amused me that people feel the need to denigrate iWork (or other alternatives to the MS suite) as "toys"...even when for most people they are more than sufficient. So please save your huffing over "condescension", as it was precisely that from the likes of yourself that prompted my post it originally. Even your characterization of software other than that produced by corporations like MS or Apple as "generic junk" only reinforces my opinion! lol

As it happens I DO have Office 2008 on my i7 15" MBPro...so I'm not against having the correct tools....my point was, I very rarely NEED it! The very standardization you sermonize about is why - improving web and email standards and platform-agnostic file formats like pdf's have released a great many of us from having to rely on Office for either content creation or viewing.

My own employer, in spite of being practically a slave to MS, has been forced to move to more standards compliance with their horrid IIS webservers. Why? Because all of the company administration is delivered via web, and the explosion of Mac users among their employees has demanded it. With our 2500 pilots of which I am one, and our 10,000 flight attendants, a recent poll revealed Apple usage of approximately 25%! So now the company is forced to move from proprietary to WW3 standards. Change IS possible as people realize that innovation is better than blind adherence to status quo.

As you said it is no longer 1975. Throw-away lines such "what the rest of the world is using" are nonsense.

Back to the thread topic. I will no doubt fire up my Bittorrent client when October rolls around, but the day that nothing from Redmond resides on my hard drive can't come soon enough...
 
Word: Right-to-Left Text? Unicode?

Does anyone know if MS Word for Mac now supports right-to-left typing in non-English fonts or if it now supports unicode?
 
I don't think you understand what Outlook and Exchange means to a medium-to-large enterprise. $80 for an "email program" is nothing when a deployment of the infrastructure and client is in the $2 million range. I have 400 Mac users. $80 * 400 = $32000. And for it to actually work (where Entourage does not) and to end even half the user complaints? Even if the infrastructure is 1/4 of ours ($500,000), it's loose change and the bargain of the year. Particularly when we're spending easily the same amount in man-hours fixing mailbox and permissions corruptions, and struggling against Entourage's limitations.

If anyone is sitting there thinking it's an overpriced "email program", you obviously don't know Exchange.

Microsoft is obviously recognizing its strengths and where it's less strong. Entourage sucked because its roots go back to Outlook Express, which was only POP/IMAP. Exchange support was bolted on later. If you're a POP/IMAP user, what on earth do you need from Outlook that Mail or Thunderbird does not offer?

BTW, Outlook 2011 does support IMAP and POP accounts.



Microsoft Word > View > Notebook Layout



No. 10.5.8 or above.

If that is MS answer of OneNote for Mac, then sorry, it Sux. Doing that in Word does not even come close to the OneNote I used before switching to a Mac. And, No I'm not going to boot into Boot Camp, or run Parallels, to run OneNote.
 
There is only one retail version '08 Office Home/Student Ed., which comes w/ 3 license keys. There is, however, two version for '10, one w/ a single lic. and one w/ 3 lic. Does anyone know for sure which version M$ will upgrade to consumers who buy the '08 during the "tech guarantee upgrade" period? I would assume the 3-license version, but we all know what happens to people who assume. M$'s upgrade page is not clear on this at all.
 
Edited for brevity

I never claimed Keynote can magically make Powerpoint presentations that won't explode. It can't make Powerpoint not suck. You can get away with no bug check run for Keynote presentations, you can't for powerpoint.

Well, given problems people have had with embedded videos, I'd suggest a bug check is worthwhile even in Keynote. Personally, I never not do a check, no matter what program I use, because I don't want to stand in front of a group that's paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to see my presentation.

I'm mostly comparing the Mac versions of programs. Mail is much better than anything Microsoft has put out for the Mac. The Windows version of office is better than the Mac version. No doubt about that.

Again, it depends on what you need to do - Entourage, while not as good as Outlook, provides a better Exchange integration experience for me. YMMV


Good for you. I'd leave out terminology such as "real world" though because it implies that people who aren't you are not in the real world. You should just drop that phrase. I am in the real world too and I routinely redid papers in Pages to fix up layout and such. I was paid for that.

I can understand migration issues like this. Just don't frame them as "real world" vs delusional. (I'm not saying you were the only one doing this, this is the macrumors forums afterall.)

I use real world because it encapsulates an environment I am describing. It doesn't imply others don't have different experiences or can't use other products to do work; it has nothing to do with delusional. However, for the majority of users, the "real world" is one where MS compatibility is a must have.

Certainly there are other tools that can be used, and may even be better at the task; but they often require extra steps to ensure compatibility that many people are unwilling to do. I use various tools to get the job done. In some cases, better tools lose out to others because the hassle of ensuring compatibility is simply not worth it (Visio vs Mac diagraming tools).

OTOH, there are delusional Mac fanboys (not aimed at you) who seem to think that the rest of the world is wrong and can't understand why others still use MS products. Using a Mac in a PC world is hard enough without dealing with fanboys who seem to have failed Econ101.

In the end, it comes down to what I learned years ago from a master auto mechanic - match the tool to the job, quality tools are cheaper than cheap ones, and in the end the customer just wants something that works.

OTOH, it's nice to have a Mac and be able to print at a remote site via Bonjour when your PC counterparts can't; even if you paid for the Mac yourself and dumped the corporate machine. HAND
 
oh come on don't get your panties in a twist, I was simply musing on why some folks feel so passionately about the least-innovative company in tech, who as you say is only the "standard" by default. 99%? Where did you pull that stat, thin air? I'm no fanboy, I'm a pragmatist and will use the best tool for the job - period. It amused me that people feel the need to denigrate iWork (or other alternatives to the MS suite) as "toys"...even when for most people they are more than sufficient. So please save your huffing over "condescension", as it was precisely that from the likes of yourself that prompted my post it originally. Even your characterization of software other than that produced by corporations like MS or Apple as "generic junk" only reinforces my opinion! lol

Why shouldn't a person be annoyed by condescension? Esp when it is over something that you are wrong about? I see precisely zero people in this thread who "feel so passionately" about Microsoft's software or the company in general. Instead, I see people who must use Office, in a thread about Office, dealing with trolls coming here to say iWork is superior. And it's not, because people ARE forced to use certain software in certain situations, so iWork is not even an option. No amount of Apple passion will change that. Might as well tell us to use Photoshop to make a spreadsheet. Stupid and pointless.
 
Why shouldn't a person be annoyed by condescension? Esp when it is over something that you are wrong about? I see precisely zero people in this thread who "feel so passionately" about Microsoft's software or the company in general. Instead, I see people who must use Office, in a thread about Office, dealing with trolls coming here to say iWork is superior. And it's not, because people ARE forced to use certain software in certain situations, so iWork is not even an option. No amount of Apple passion will change that. Might as well tell us to use Photoshop to make a spreadsheet. Stupid and pointless.

Very well said
 
RE: Kerning problem in Word 2011 beta 5

Using Snow Leopard (10.6.4 latest version and standard English language) Times New Roman (TNR), the ubiquitous text font for papers, etc., DOES NOT KERN.

This problem also occurred with Word 2008 for Mac, but there was a work-around by deactivating all recent versions of TNR (supplied BY Microsoft) and only using the old (circa 1990-1992) version of TNR supplied by Microsoft for Word 2004 for Mac.

Apparently the old (1990-1992) version of TNR was a resource-fork tt font, and the newer "data-fork" tt fonts do not kern.

BUT, when this technique is applied to the present Word 2011 beta 5, only kerning of all-capitals is corrected (like AVARICE for instance). Kerning pairs like "Yo" and "We" and "r," and "r." are NOT corrected.
 
Why shouldn't a person be annoyed by condescension? Esp when it is over something that you are wrong about? I see precisely zero people in this thread who "feel so passionately" about Microsoft's software or the company in general. Instead, I see people who must use Office, in a thread about Office, dealing with trolls coming here to say iWork is superior. And it's not, because people ARE forced to use certain software in certain situations, so iWork is not even an option. No amount of Apple passion will change that. Might as well tell us to use Photoshop to make a spreadsheet. Stupid and pointless.

Props
 
Right on the money. iWork is toy, and Open Office is a bloated and semi-compatible pile of garbage. I'll be damned if I (and I doubt anyone who works for a living) would dare send off a spreadsheet to a client only to find that it doesn't open correctly.

Sorry Fanboys, in the real world it's MS Office or nothing.

Well said. MS Office is an industry standard. It comes down to two choices for us non-fanboy Mac owners: Either get MS Office for OS X or use Bootcamp/Parallels/Fusion and get MS Office for Windows. I prefer the former.
 
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.
..

Thanks MacRumorUser....keep up the good work.

Do you happen to know if Outlook intergrates well with calendar?
 
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.


..

Looking forward to getting it in October :D
 
This does not interest me at all. After having both Office and iWork on my mac, I found iWork to be much better than Office. I can't wait to see what Apple has in store for iWork 2011 if they release one!
 
IMPORTANT

In Word 2011 (beta 5) the ubiquitous Times New Roman font (used almost universally by universities and students and high schools) DOES NOT KERN.

Wow. That sounds like a show-stopper.

Times New Roman sucks ass, anyway. People only use it because they're lazy and don't know how to setup Styles.


Jellybean.

No OneNote no buy. Buffoons...

Microsoft Word.app > View > Notebook Layout.

Does it support 64bit? I feel no urgency whatsoever to upgrade.

Being buzzword-compliant won't make you word process any faster. You seriously have 4GB Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents?
 
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