Office for Mac 2011 Previewed Ahead of Launch Scheduled for Later This Year

[ronniebellie]

Visual basic?

I'm still using Office 2004 because of Visual Basic. I have more than one hundred complicated macros that I use for my business. Until Visual Basic is back, I can't switch.

 

[MikhailT]

BTW, I think Microsoft is at a crossroads. They can either embrace the Mac, and put more resources and engineering on making all their software give Mac users the same experience they have using Microsoft software on a PC... +1 Or... They can continue to let their Mac counterparts stagnate, which in the end will just mean LOST revenue for Microsoft because Mac users will find alternatives rather then use a crippled Microsoft product, so if they want to make a lot of money they better get coding!!!

Office is their cash cow, even bigger than Server/Windows combined. They make profit on Office for Mac suites, so they should be putting in all they can to make Office the best productive office app on the Mac. Unfortunately, they aren't doing that which is sad because I do believe they have the power to do it.

What's even worse is that Apple isn't even trying with iWork either, they have all the things they need to make a killer office app and yet, nothing. iWork.com beta is just sad as well. They could've made iWork the awesome alternative to Google Docs/Office Web and what have they done in over a year? Nothing. Look at MobileMe, they have done nothing to improve it (speed improvements) and it still suck. Apple is just dragging lately and I don't know what is going at Apple lately, they need to get their stuff together or face MS coming back stronger than ever.

 

[lhotka]

The ribbon bar is a screen hogging abomination - it's bad enough on a 4x3, but on a 16x9 or 16x10 screen, you lose a ton of real-estate. I don't mind the re-arrangement of features (though many are counter-intuitive, and placed outside of a workflow context) so much as it's just the ugly look and feel.

And to do it on a Mac is just stupid. It's not like it'll make folks interested in switching to Windows. We only use Office because no other suite does a remotely good job of preserving formatting during round trip collaboration. For stuff that doesn't go to customers - it's iWork all the way.

 

[cmaier]

The ribbon bar is a screen hogging abomination - it's bad enough on a 4x3, but on a 16x9 or 16x10 screen, you lose a ton of real-estate. I don't mind the re-arrangement of features (though many are counter-intuitive, and placed outside of a workflow context) so much as it's just the ugly look and feel.

And to do it on a Mac is just stupid. It's not like it'll make folks interested in switching to Windows. We only use Office because no other suite does a remotely good job of preserving formatting during round trip collaboration. For stuff that doesn't go to customers - it's iWork all the way.

They need to do it. At least they made it so you can make it go away, and they kept the menu bars, unlike for Windows.

 

[quixotic]

Remember, we like a clean and simplistic UI.

...and the ability to make the final document look nice
...and for the document to work the same on windows as it does mac
...and for future releases to be able to open my old document

 

[jettredmont]

Dear MacBU:

I know there are Office for Mac haters out there (even on this very thread); however I'm not one of them. Office for Mac means I don't have to run Windows at home (like I do at work). So you know where I stand, I'm a fan. A big fan.

That said, I do NOT love the ribbon on Office 2007 at work. I think it's a huge impediment vs. the menu interface. I'm asking that you NOT REPLACE THE MENU! If some people (new users, for example) want the ribbon, fine, but make it possible to run Office -- specifically Word and Excel -- the old way via the standard menu in addition to the ribbon. That is important to me and probably to most Office for Mac users (again, ignoring the haters who don't count anyway as they aren't actually customers).

Who knows, maybe the Office for Windows team could learn a thing or two from you guys?

The only other thing I need is for macro support to be added back in Excel.

Thanks for your consideration.

John.B

John -

Lok in those Gizmodo screen shots. That black and white bar at the top of the screen with all the (growing ever-more-incomprehensible) menus in it? Still there.

IMHO, Apple already has the superior "find how to do the feature fast" option with the Help/Search menu item. Presumably Word et al will continue to support this (because it not only comes for 'free' I also believe it would take some work to turn off).

My wife loves Office 2007's ribbon. I don't know why. I find it kludgy, always offering me tools I don't want at the moment and taking up a good 10% of the vertical space on the screen to do so. I will be one to collapse the stinking ribbon and continue with my keyboard shortcuts and menu items when/if I need them. I'd rather not lose a 100x100 square in my screen for the "WordArt" mega-button since I'd never dream of using that clunky feature to begin with.

In any case, though, Apple's got our back here. It would take some pretty devious and certainly purposeful programming on MacBU's part to deprive us of the "standard" (discoverable without being constantly on the screen) Mac interface elements.

My main question for MacBU, though, is: will this be a first-class Mac citizen app, or just another warmed-over Carbon contraption? Will services work in Word/Excel/etc? For instance, can I instantly reveal the current document in Finder, or shoot highlighted text over to OmniFocus? And, importantly, will it perform will on my Mac? Without this, you won't have a sale from me, no matter how "pretty" the ribbon is that I end up hiding.

 

[chaynes]

Future

There are 2 companies I'm trying to get totally away from: Adobe and Microsoft. It looks like Adobe may be easier than Excel makes leaving MS. There's better stuff than Office for everything else but Excel.

The computer age is still in the fledgling stage even though there are times it seems so sophisticated. When computing gets really serious, when enough people are educated to the point they can see when they're being conned, there will be no Microsoft.

 

[FullGaz]

If this version brings support for right-to-left languages such as Hebrew I'll consider buying it, for sure.
But again, maybe iWork will get that also, so the choice is going to be a little bit hard to make...

 

[brandscill]

I am always first to bash Microsoft for their poor excuse of an operating system yet I love office. I don't know if it's because I've used it for nearly 12 years or just the extensive functionality in both Word and Excel but I couldn't live without either.

Office 2011 for mac sounds promising, I hope it's a large improvement on Office 2008

 

[bilbo--baggins]

Who cares about VB! ;-)

Everyone that needs Macros in their spreadsheets for starters.

 

[Richardmath]

Vba

No VBA on the Mac version of Office is the major thing holding it back. Writing macros is what makes Excel so powerful on the PC, and without it the Mac version can never compare

 

[brandscill]

No VBA on the Mac version of Office is the major thing holding it back. Writing macros is what makes Excel so powerful on the PC, and without it the Mac version can never compare

I will second this, luckily haven't needed it in the past year but will do in the new year

 

[Doctor Q]

I've liked the improvements made to Excel over the years. It's my workhorse.

But Word continues to be the most annoying program I own (nonintuitive design, awkward features, poor performances) so I use it only as a last resort. With Word it's as if Microsoft keeps trying and failing to give you an antidote for the previous version.

 

[John.B]

John -

Lok in those Gizmodo screen shots. That black and white bar at the top of the screen with all the (growing ever-more-incomprehensible) menus in it? Still there.

Thanks! Giz is blocked at work. <blush>

FWIW, I got a great reply from Schwieb of the MacBU team (actually the Dev Team Lead) over at AI.

To recap:

• The menu stays, the ribbon is optional.
• VBA is definitely making a comeback in Office 2011.
• Ctrl-U for "Edit the current cell". (How come I didn't know that?)

As I said, everyone can have their own opinions but I'm a big fan of Mac for Office as it means I no longer have to have a Windows PC at home.

 

[gfiz]

It just dawned on me and makes me kinda sad....but at this year's MacWorld, Microsoft had a bigger presence than Apple

 

[jettredmont]

There are 2 companies I'm trying to get totally away from: Adobe and Microsoft. It looks like Adobe may be easier than Excel makes leaving MS. There's better stuff than Office for everything else but Excel.

Funny, because Excel was the application that brought me into the MS Office fold some 19 years ago as well. Word? Word 2.0 was crap compared to WordPerfect 5.1 (on DOS). But Excel? Man, that just mopped the floor with every other spreadsheet out there (Quattro Pro innovated the multiple tabs thing, but then Excel plagiarized that for their next release as worksheets).

On the other hand, today I use Numbers whenever I can, which is pretty much any time I have something I don't need to send out to Excel users. It's just much more flexible for what I want to do.

For instance, I needed to perform an average on 500 cells in a column; in Excel I started at the top and dragged down for about 10 seconds, until it hit the end of the filled in rows, and 1.5 seconds later I had selected well over 20,000 "rows". In Numbers, that would just be a matter of clicking the column header, and I never hit the "scroll thousands of rows before I can stop the scrolling" because, well, there aren't ever thousands of "empty" cells extending forever in every direction waiting for me to put noncontiguous data in them (unless I tell the table to be that big). Likewise, in Excel that formula reference ends up as "=Average(E7:E539)", while in Numbers, it's "=Average(Duration)". Moving from "your page is one big grid which you can divide up into multiple tables" to "your page can house as many grids as you want, but each grid is one table" is a very powerful spreadsheet paradigm shift.

That having been said, Numbers today is lacking a LOT of the depth of Excel. I get that. But, since I don't need to use that depth often, I find that Numbers suits my purposes much better.

For me, today, Excel/2008 is equivalent to Lotus123/1991. Numbers will be playing the role of the game-changing paradigm shift. Given what I've seen of Excel 2010 and what I've heard of Excel 2011, MS just doesn't "get it", and will be playing the part of the "slash-commands are far superior to toolbar buttons" luddites for the foreseeable future.

 

[TheBen]

What are the odds of seeing Right-to-Left (RTL) support in this version? I've been waiting for it for years now.

 

[MartiNZ]

Late last year I started transferring all my business documents to iWork and haven't looked back. I've used more versions of Office than I care to count, but never again.

Good on you and good luck to you. I tried adopting iWork exclusively when Snow Leopard came out, but I had to admit defeat and reinstall Office:Mac 2008 last month.

There are just far too many incompatibilities - most of which would seem to me to be pretty simple fixes in the export process - to permit its use in a Windows-heavy environment.

The focus on it for iPad has me wondering if they might release windows iWork, but even then it would be impossible to get everyone to shift.

 

[notjustjay]

Apple should create iWork for Windows 7.

A neat idea, but one that probably wouldn't work as well as you might think or hope.

It seems that when Apple produces software for the PC they largely take their existing Mac code and wrap it around some kind of "translation layer" that retrofits the app to compile and run in Windows. They probably have to do this because OS X contains all the core services (Core Animation, Core Audio, access to your iPhoto library, etc.) that apps like iWork would leverage. Windows doesn't have this, so this is all baggage that has to come with the app.

Witness iTunes for Windows, Safari for Windows, and QuickTime for Windows. They are slow, bloated, and have quirky UI's. They just don't "fit in". I suspect if iWork apps were written like that, people would play with them and just get frustrated, or say "well, this is nice, but..." and go back to Office.

 

[German]

Apple should create iWork for Windows 7.

WHY? --To make a bigger dent at lessening the world's perceived dependability on Office (and to wow customers with the superiority of Keynote. --and to make a few more people consider Mac experience for their next computer: If an Apple office suite can be this easy and fun to use, imagine what you can experience with and Apple computer...)

Apple should support ODF:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument

 

[Deanster]

Pages and Numbers don't work well for me.

Nearly everything I do ends up being shared with others, and having a native format that's not widely readable does nothing for me.

I used Pages exclusively for more than a month, and found that nearly 100% of my documents ended up having to be exported into .doc format. Then I instantly had two versions, and the one that had been sent to others wasn't the .pages file. Then, inevitably, someone would add something that Pages didn't handle correctly, so I'd be back in Word. It'd be different if Pages could work directly on a .doc file - but since it can't, it's not a good tool for me.

Didn't take long to figure out that if I'm constantly importing and exporting into Word format, and going back to Word for formatting, that I should just be using Word.

My only other comment is that Word is so freakin' slow to boot that TextEdit has found a place on my doc, and it's what I use to make a quick note - and since Word can work directly on a .txt or .rtf file, I'm not trying to import/export all the time, as I was with Pages.

Same story with Numbers, but I only made it a couple days - Excel compatibility isn't very high, and since everyone sends me stuff as Excel, and wants Excel back, working in Excel is the only way to fly.

Keynote is wildly superior to Powerpoint, and I sure try to work in Keynote when I can. But again, I have to keep a .ppt copy of everything, in case I end up presenting on a different computer...

Long story short, MS office file formats, especially the original .doc, .xls, and .ppt formats, are the expected formats for sending and receiving. Pages isn't a bad alternative for small desktop publishing projects, and it's I suppose an OK choice as a word processor if you NEVER need to exchange documents with others, but IMHO, it's simply untenable as a primary choice for general use. Numbers doubly so, though it sure does look purty. Keynote rocks, but when I'm doing a project for anyone but me, it's back to Powerpoint.

Put Office on the iPad, and I'm THERE!

and web-based office apps just seem like a terrible idea...

 

[Maserati7200]

Why is only the email program going to be cocoa based? The whole suite should be cocoa based for 2011. Even Adobe is going to have converted their apps to cocoa by then.

 

[Dillenger]

Another vote for - Mac OneNote!

 

[butterfly0fdoom]

The "Ribbon" for Office 2011 looks to be a lot better than the Ribbon in Office 2007; it looks like they just made the toolbox into a collapsible ribbon instead of a separate window. Have you complainers actually LOOKED at the screenshots?

 

[Val-kyrie]

BTW, I think Microsoft is at a crossroads. They can either embrace the Mac, and put more resources and engineering on making all their software give Mac users the same experience they have using Microsoft software on a PC... +1 Or... They can continue to let their Mac counterparts stagnate, which in the end will just mean LOST revenue for Microsoft because Mac users will find alternatives rather then use a crippled Microsoft product, so if they want to make a lot of money they better get coding!!!

I agree.

If this version brings support for right-to-left languages such as Hebrew I'll consider buying it, for sure.
But again, maybe iWork will get that also, so the choice is going to be a little bit hard to make...

What are the odds of seeing Right-to-Left (RTL) support in this version? I've been waiting for it for years now.

I would also like to see MS add FULL support for Unicode and Right-to-Left fonts. Without these, I won't even consider Office '11. Mellel is doing just fine for me.