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More Screenshots and a Hands-On of Microsoft Office for Mac 2011

elppa said:
You can use the inspector pallette in pages and the formatting palette in word 01/04/08. Then it's just one click as well.
Click to expand...

But to use these inspector pallettes, I first have to click on the inspector pallette, which I don't keep open because I don't like the desktop clutter. The ribbon is integrated and constant and not floating around on my desktop in a separate window.

And then with the inspector pallettes, I have to click an arrow to open the sub-menu, and then I have to click a tiny box saying don't insert extra space after paragraph.

With Office 2011 this command is right there in the ribbon in a giant Styles box. Much easier for me, and that's whole point. I like the ribbon, and I like the look and feel.
 
Well, today I used Office (2007, though) on a Windows machine since a year or more. I was impressed by all its features. Thus, I'm happy to see Microsoft is really trying to deliver good products, they even manage very well to blend into the Mac environment.
 
tom5304 said:
But to use these inspector pallettes, I first have to click on the inspector pallette, which I don't keep open because I don't like the desktop clutter.
Click to expand...
That's your choice, but the ribbon takes up a lot of horizontal real estate as well. Most documents are A4/US paper, most screens are wide, from some perspectives it doesn't make much sense.

I would also point out that in word you can't see multiple “tabs” at a time — whereas in Pages you can tear off as many inspector panels as you like! Much more flexible.

tom5304 said:
And then with the inspector pallettes, I have to click an arrow to open the sub-menu
Click to expand...
And on the ribbon you have to pick the right tab? What's the difference.
And I thought we were talking about line spacing? There's no “sub menu”.

You've lost me. I don't think you are being fair in your evaluation.
 
jragosta said:
I also can't stand the ribbons when I use Office on my PC. Maybe it's just a matter of getting used to them and I don't use the ribbons enough on the PC to know.

Fortunately, the article says they can be turned off.
Click to expand...
It can also be hidden in Office 2007, which is close. There's just little other way to access anything without 3rd party software if you hide it, the toolbar is smallish.

Does ANYBODY in this thread actually attempt to use customization features in any of their software? Many of these programs can be altered to suit your own usage and taste. I got fed up with the ribbon fast and added software to allow me to make my own ribbon tabs. The ribbon can be made quite useful, and if your commands are where you need them, it's just as good as menus or toolbars or that floating thing on the Mac. Most people I talk to never even tried with Office 2004 and earlier, where everything was VERY customizable.
 
elppa said:
You've lost me.
Click to expand...

Yes, I see. :p

Sometimes the simple solution to a problem can throw people off. It doesn't have to be as complicated as you make it out to be. I simply like the Office 2011 beta more than I like Pages '08. Don't over-think it. It's okay.
 
tom5304 said:
Sometimes the simple solution to a problem can throw people off. It doesn't have to be as complicated as you make it out to be.
Click to expand...

But it's the same number of clicks! I fail to see how it is easier!
 
elppa said:
But it's the same number of clicks! I fail to see how it is easier!
Click to expand...

Like I said (and most seemed to ignore), the menu bar system is a BAD feature of the Mac because it doesn't work well with large monitors and there is no menu bar on secondary monitors and thus you're stuck with a heck of a lot of mouse travel to activate menu features with the mouse. Ideally, the Mac should move away from fixed menu bars (which work great on smaller single monitors but are total crap with really large ones and dual monitor setups). The latter could be addressed if the OS would offer a duplicate menu bar on the secondary monitor, but currently it doesn't.

At least the "ribbon" gives functionality on the Mac that most other Apps don't have. Just try using something like the current Office on a dual monitor setup without shortcut keystrokes and see how much fun it is to use. Windows at least ties its menu bars to the window so you don't have to move the mouse to the top of the screen and any windows on secondary monitors have their menus right there with them (Windows could still use an option for secondary task bars and start menu buttons). So those that think the ribbon stinks clearly aren't looking at other people's setups with dual monitors, etc. I find my secondary laptop monitors going to waste most of the time on m MBP and Netbook (when docked) because it's too much of a PITA to use a menu bar on the other monitor for commonly used functions. This is something Apple REALLY needs to address and at least adding a secondary menu bar for another monitor would help, although it still becomes a pain on really large high resolution screens to be moving the mouse up to the top of the screen all the time when the top of the window makes so much more sense.
 
Personally I just hope that anything that can be done from the ribbon can be assigned a shortcut key. I'm tired of having to pull up the stupid toolbox to do simple things that I have to do all the time.
 
Incentive to improve awful Apple Mail?

Maybe a little competition will be finally be enough for Apple to improve the awful apple mail program.
 
TheNewDude said:
1. It's not "Crap". It's very good software, but then again ur entitiled to your opinion,.

2. I am not 100% sure on this, but isn't compatibility a bit of an issue?? I mean, do iWork documents work on Windows based computers?? That might be an issue for some. For example, my work computers are all PC based, so if i want to bring a file home, I need MS Office to open them...
Click to expand...

I'm going to just assume your clueless. iWork has a quick conversion system that can turn anything you write in it into a word format.
 
Westside guy said:
I'd purchased 2007, but the slow load times drove me so nuts that I decided to try going Office-free... and I haven't missed it at all (for 2 years? 3?).

I briefly loaded reinstalled it once because (I thought) Keynote was not always doing the best job translating one or two Powerpoint files - but when I loaded those "problem" presentations into the Mac version of Powerpoint, the slides displayed the same apparent problems. So, I uninstalled it and I've been happily chugging along with iWork.

None of the documents I see at work use macros, so that's not an issue for me. On Windows I tend to disable that feature anyway for security reasons.
Click to expand...

There's something wrong with your PC if you have slow load times with Office 2007. Maybe Outlook can be a bit slow if you have 10s of thousands of emails. Word,Excel,Access all open quickly on the dozens of PCs that I've installed it on.
 
Anuba said:
That's got nothing to do with Office on Windows being snappy, it's the result of SuperFetch on Windows 7. Your Win7 machine monitors which applications you start up often and builds up a cache that's loaded into RAM on startup. Since stuff like IE and Office apps are loaded very often, those are usually the first to be picked up by SuperFetch.

Do a fresh install of Win7 and a fresh install of Office and time the first launch, not very fast at all.

Since OS X has no technology resembling SuperFetch, apps load much slower, on the other hand OS X doesn't hog your hard drive for 3 minutes after bootup, like Vista and Win7 do when they're preloading the applications that you're likely, though not necessarily, going to launch.
Click to expand...

I hate to admit it, but, this is one thing Microsoft did almost right. Yes, it slows you down after bootup, but, if you happen to be forced by circumstances to run Word, Excel, and Powerpoint constantly, it is a nice feature to have. As an alternative, it would be nice if Word/Excel/Powerpoint had the ability to be started up as startup apps without trying to create new documents-- so that I could put them in my list of apps to start up on login. I hate the way they always try to create or open a document when started.

About the Beta -- is it/does it have a/64-bit version? That would be a plus.
 
Craiglorocks said:
I'm going to just assume your clueless. iWork has a quick conversion system that can turn anything you write in it into a word format.
Click to expand...

But not vice versa. Many office documents do not load properly into iWork. Worse, when saved back out, the formatting problems are permanently preserved, so many documents cannot make a safe round trip.
 
Importing MBox in Outlook?

Folks...not sure if this has been answered before. I am a recent Windows->Mac convert, and went through the (painful?) process of converting almost 3GB PST Outlook files to Entourage Mbox database.

My question is: will 2011 Outlook for Mac be able to import Mbox files directly? Or will I be required to re-convert back to PST? The latter would be kinda bummer....

Thoughts?
 
Hi everybody,

Here are some benchs of VBA in Excel 2011 vs Excel 2003, 2004 and 2007:

BenchsVBAExcel2001en.png


Cheers
 
Substance said:
WOW, just wow, MS brings all the UI garbage from the PC to the Mac.

I hate the ribbons, just hate them. Their toolbars on steroids, morphing into all sorts of different shapes and sizes. They make for nice screenshots but are a pain to use. They really thing that was better than menus?
Click to expand...

It's funny how for years Windows users said Office was better on Windows because there were keyboard shortcuts for everything, and now clicking on giant toolbar icons is better because menus were terrible.

I think they probably are better than menus on the PC. Menus on Windows apps are often a random collection of commands that would hide and show (yes, you could turn that feature off but it was on by default) and little thought was put into designing them properly. Not to mention it's slower to access menus in a window vs. the top of the screen. Ribbons probably are a welcome addition to Windows apps because they may just be an improvement.

Most Mac apps have well designed placement of commands that take advantage of muscle memory (i.e. menubar at the top of the screen, the commands are in the same place letting you access them without having to read them each time, you just) The Ribbon is most definitely not an improvement over this. It's been said you can turn them off, but I hope that means hiding every single control for them in the window so I can forget they even exist.
 
What happened to Office 2010? *scratches head* Probably Microsoft's sporadic naming conventions, right.... Although looking at Mactopia just now, they have no mention of that and only of Office for Mac 2011 - which will also include the full release of Messenger for Mac 8 I noticed!
 
ranguvar said:
Well, today I used Office (2007, though) on a Windows machine since a year or more. I was impressed by all its features. Thus, I'm happy to see Microsoft is really trying to deliver good products, they even manage very well to blend into the Mac environment.
Click to expand...

The MS Office 2010 is much nicer than 2007. I am really hoping that they put almost as much thought into developing our new Mac Office version.
 
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