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Office for Mac 2011 Previewed Ahead of Launch Scheduled for Later This Year
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If anyone from MS is reading this: Please don't remove the formatting palette completely!
The ribbon is cool for some things, but the Mac's formatting palette is a far more intuitive UI element for most changes. Also, it is a far better use of screen real estate since every mac has a landscape display.
Oh and sort out Excel! It lacks all the advanced mathematical stuff you can do on the PC version (which still isn't as good as old versions of prism!)
The ribbon is cool for some things, but the Mac's formatting palette is a far more intuitive UI element for most changes. Also, it is a far better use of screen real estate since every mac has a landscape display.
Oh and sort out Excel! It lacks all the advanced mathematical stuff you can do on the PC version (which still isn't as good as old versions of prism!)
Corollary: don't put anything in the ribbon/toolbox unless I can also get to it by keyboard-combination/VBA script. There is currently no way (that I can find), for example, to tell a header to not be the same as previous without taking my hands off the keyboard, launching the damned toolbox, expanding the right tab, and clicking the box. That's ridiculous.
No, I will fully admit I was complaining about the Windows version of Office and its ribbon interface. I'm happy to hear that the Mac version will be better.
And that's the trouble with proprietary formats. You get locked into a piece of software, even if it's output is terrible. That's why I'd promote ODF.
I think web-based office apps are the future. They need a little more maturity, but they'll get there. Being able to access your documents almost anywhere, anytime, because it's not tied to your desktop in your office is nice. You can also share it, work on it concurrently, as well as have a secure place to store it.
Meh. Still no native MAPI support in Outlook for Mac? Why not - they used to do it before with Outlook for Mac 2001 and it worked really well under OS 9 and later in OS X Classic mode. It's 9 YEARS on Microsoft.... (I feel old now 
)
)Project
This is for me (obviously) a biggie.
Couple of things I absolutely need a PC for, Project and Primavera. I'm quite surprised that Primavera hasn't announced a port into OS X since Ellison and Jobs are great friends.
With MS Office (with Outlook), MS Project, and P6 - I could absolutely dump the PC...
This is for me (obviously) a biggie.
Couple of things I absolutely need a PC for, Project and Primavera. I'm quite surprised that Primavera hasn't announced a port into OS X since Ellison and Jobs are great friends.
With MS Office (with Outlook), MS Project, and P6 - I could absolutely dump the PC...
I'm just about ready to give up on my mac for my work. I went "rogue" and got one when our corp std is Win. But the headaches in Entourage, and the unresponsiveness of Excel (and I don't like missing the ribbons). I'm now running my old Dell next to my Mac, just to get some critical features. A new office could help me shake off my PC for good. I was seriously wondering about getting Win 7 in Bootcamp, just to have the nice hardware, lol.
Office 2008 was shameful. What a waste of my money. I hope 2004 keeps working until someone with actual design sense takes over at MS. In the meantime I will use iWork whenever possible. It is so much easier to use software that follow OS X conventions, such as Apple software and the many other outstanding third party publishers out there. Having to use MS or Adobe and their proprietary interfaces just irritates me.
When Office 2008+ gets rid of all horizontal clutter, reinstates VBA macros in Excel, and embraces Cocoa things like the dictionary which all my other apps use, etc, I may be intersested again.
When Office 2008+ gets rid of all horizontal clutter, reinstates VBA macros in Excel, and embraces Cocoa things like the dictionary which all my other apps use, etc, I may be intersested again.
What type of an Exchange environment are you running though?
From what we've heard, Outlook for Mac 2011 will work decently with Exchange 2007, and very well with Exchange 2010, but if you're still on Exchange 2003 then don't expect much per-say. One of the biggest advantages that Outlook has had over Entourage is its robust MAPI support, but apparently Outlook for Mac 2011 won't have MAPI support present (afaik, MAPI support from a MS Mac client hasn't been present since the old Outlook for Mac from the 90s).
+1 for HATING the ribbon bar
The context sensitive formatting palette is much better. Plus, on a widescreen display it makes sense to have the palette at the side of the document window rather than on top of it. I only wiah you could open multiple formatting palettes.
I have to use the PC version of office with its ribbon bar at work. Despite spending lots of time with it, I hate it hate it HATE it. It is so frustrating to use. Please MS, lets us switch it off and keep the formatting palette!!!!
Looks like my current version of office is going to hang around for a long time.
The context sensitive formatting palette is much better. Plus, on a widescreen display it makes sense to have the palette at the side of the document window rather than on top of it. I only wiah you could open multiple formatting palettes.
I have to use the PC version of office with its ribbon bar at work. Despite spending lots of time with it, I hate it hate it HATE it. It is so frustrating to use. Please MS, lets us switch it off and keep the formatting palette!!!!
Looks like my current version of office is going to hang around for a long time.
Well, they've re-built Outlook for Mac using Cocoa, so at the moment we can't fully say what changes in total they have made.
However, I think a better comparison would be comparing Outlook for Mac 2011 to Entourage 2008 EWS currently. For environments running Exchange 2007 (or 2010), EWS is actually decent. Hopefully Outlook for Mac 2011 builds upon that to incorporate even greater support.
rebuilt? My understanding is that Outlook for Mac is brand new from the ground up, since it is pure Cocoa. It wasn't suppose to be a rename of Entourage.
There's a lot of debate about this right now, partly due to this quote in their PR:
Did they develop Outlook for Mac from the ground-up in Cocoa, and simply implemented the feature set also seen in EWS? Or is it EWS re-built using Cocoa, having added features, and being rebranded as Outlook for Mac.
I've also heard rumors of limited PST importing capability, but I hope that isn't true.
glad to see this. i hope the launch of this will be better than 2008. i hate to see the price also
Your questions don't make sense at all. EWS is the latest MS APIs to access Exchange servers with, it has nothing to do with the actual application itself (just a method for the application to get data from). Apple's Mail.app uses EWS as well for Exchange access. You can't "rebuild" EWS in Cocoa because it is not an application, neither can you add features since APIs are hardcoded in by MS Exchange servers not client side.
Basically what they are saying is that they are only going to use EWS for Outlook for Mac, which restrict the mail client to Exchange 2007+ for full information syncing including mail/contacts/notes/tasks/etc. Users with access to Exchange 2000/2003 can't use the EWS protocol to sync that information. They'll have to use IMAP instead to sync their mail only.
Wow. That is TRULY amazing. That's quite possibly the worst interface I've ever seen! Why would anybody remove so much vertical space from your screen?
Most Word documents are vertical, leaving plenty of space on the sides for nav. Most PPT docs are 4:3, leaving plenty of room on the sides. This is hysterically bad.
Most Word documents are vertical, leaving plenty of space on the sides for nav. Most PPT docs are 4:3, leaving plenty of room on the sides. This is hysterically bad.
Office 14 for Mac is slow on my mac mini, think it runs on Rosetta hence the slowness. opening a document takes time. Hopefully this is better.
Well, "better" depends on your own habits. I hate the formatting palette, so the modified ribbon appeals to me more.
It pretty clearly says it's using Exchange Web Services...
I'm sure the MS reps are reassuring everyone that this time, finally they've simulated Exchange support reasonably well.
I have a simple test in situations like this-- if EWS was really good, MS would use it for Outlook on Windows. If they aren't using it on their bread and butter apps they don't trust it, or they've hobbled it. Why? There's no reason they can't make the Windows and Mac protocol supports identical.