Third Office for Mac 2011 Beta Reveals New Icons, Splash Screens, and More

[shervieux]

what is microsoft communicator?

Having watched the videos on the Windows Demo, here is a rundown on the communicator....

It is an Instant messaging client taken a bit further. This new communicator will integrate with all office products allowing you to IM and collaborate on documents right in office and supposingly offer real time editing of documents in a chat sessions. Also, with it being integrated - you can now IM, email, and use your computer to call a contact that is listed within a document itself (or also in your contacts in outlook), just by clicking on the information in the document (phone number, email address, instant message screen name).

I have not played with communicator myself, but for a while I had the 2010 windows beta downloaded, and it seemed pretty nice and rock solid in performance. Since I work for a company where all employees are based out of their homes, I am really looking forward to this. From the videos I watched, this version is supposed to do a lot for people on the go or in remote offices (away from corporate).

Still dreaming they would bring OneNote to the mac. It was a push, but after several conference calls; management discovered many employees were using their own purchased OneNote. So now it may look like it will be a standard tool (thank God - took them long enough).

Also another dream of mine - Office for the ipad. iwork is ok, but just to be able to work on a document in it's native application is so much better, no compatibility issues. My biggest things I need to come to the ipad are:

Word
Excel
OneNote - Although MobileNoter seemed to cover that.
Outlook - Apple Mail is ok except when using exchange. I need access to my companies public folders, not just my own folders.

KeyNote on the ipad is so much better than PPT anyday.

Looking forward to upgrading to office 2011 when it is available.

 

[GoodWatch]

Thank goodness they released another beta so they could get everybody's feedback ON THE FRIGGIN' ICONS!

Good grief.

In the next beta the icons will be absolutely gorgeous but the functionality will stink

 

[mrchinchilla]

I haven't used Office (on a Mac) since Office 2001 in the OS 9 days, I switched to AppleWorks when OS X was released, haven't looked back. Of course, I check up on their 'progress' — or lack thereof — now and again. They seem to be improving in some respects, but the icons are... well, they need some work.

 

[swarmster]

I'm not seeing anything overly terrible about the icons, but I'm very surprised no one has brought up the splash screen. I mean really, a splash screen? Is this 1990? It's just an office suite, there's no excuse for still needing a splash screen on today's computers.

Not that I'd be leaving iWork for this anyway.

 

[Westside guy]

I'm not seeing anything overly terrible about the icons, but I'm very surprised no one has brought up the splash screen. I mean really, a splash screen? Is this 1990? It's just an office suite, there's no excuse for still needing a splash screen on today's computers.

I'm guessing you've never used the current incarnation of Word? Cuz you really do need to splash screen to show you that something's happening when you first launch the app...

FWIW Adobe does the same thing.

 

[pubwvj]

Blah.

The biggest things they can offer is new icons and screen splash screens? Booooring. I'll stick with wordprocessors from the 1990's. The technology peaked.

 

[WildCowboy]

For anyone interested in how the new icons look in the Dock:

 

[AliClifton]

looking forward to this, always preferred office over its alternatives, even if it wasnt quite up to standard on OSX

Still, those icons are ugly (at least compared to the last release) and despite what some of might think the visual look of program icons is important, especially on an OS as pretty as OSX

What is 2010 year of the ugly icons? Even Adobe's product icons look uglier this year (not what i was expecting from CS5)

then again i'l take super performance over looks any day, but its always nice to have both ;D

 

[lunarworks]

For those complaining about the Office 2011 icons, count your blessings. You could have Office 2010's "wonderful" icons:

 

[batchtaster]

This is widely known (and publicly stated by Microsoft) to be the case.

It's not in this beta though. They ran out of time, and Beta 2 expired before they could get VBA done. Another build is expected soon.

Is it publicly available for download yet?

No, they don't do that. This is a closed beta. Whoever you get it from has broken NDA.

So it just replaces the "Corporate" tab of Microsoft Messenger then it sounds like. Right?

More-or-less. Both Messenger and Communicator will support video via their respective networks, as well as integrating presence from Communicator into Outlook (ala iChat availability in Mail.app).

- Outlook stores files outside of that horrible database. It is now very similar to that of Mac Mail. It converted my identity pretty quick without errors.

That's no different than Beta 2.

- I do not see project center.

I assume you've got a pirate copy then, as you would otherwise know from the beta site that Project Center is history. As is Encarta, although that's across the board not just Office 2011.

if I have the 2008 version (bought it) do they give a discount for the new version or will I have to buy it full price?

Of course you'll have to buy it. It's an upgrade, not an update. Just like Mac OS X.

Let me see if I understood this: will 2011 Outlook for Mac still use MBox (database), and not PST files?

Outlook for Mac imports PSTs, it doesn't use them. And since it can import them, there's no reason for it to use them directly. The new storage allows Time Machine and Spotlight to work with them correctly, which would not be possible with PSTs.

Has this been officially released as a beta, or is it only available through torrents? If official where do you find it?

Where can I download it?

There is no legal public beta.

Thank goodness they released another beta so they could get everybody's feedback ON THE FRIGGIN' ICONS!

Good grief.

The biggest things they can offer is new icons and screen splash screens? Booooring. I'll stick with wordprocessors from the 1990's. The technology peaked.

Demonstrates you don't know anything about the beta program. Beta 2 was feature-incomplete, with large numbers of unimplemented features and non-functional buttons. Beta 3 is intended to be feature-complete (VBA notwithstanding). But yes, the icons, sure.

Awesome, now I can have the most backward and idiotic UI trend ever concieved on my mac too. Can't wait to put all my commands in a jumbled pile of icons which waste 4x the screen real estate and require 3x as many clicks to perform.

The ribbon: Hate it because it eats away at vertical real estate. Put it on the side and I wouldn't mind.

The Ribbon is on by default but optional. You can collapse it so it's no more intrusive than the collapsed Elements Gallery in 2008, or turn it off altogether. It does not replace the menubar. That was well publicized, so people shouldn't still be wailing about this.

 

[swarmster]

I'm guessing you've never used the current incarnation of Word? Cuz you really do need to splash screen to show you that something's happening when you first launch the app...

FWIW Adobe does the same thing.

Isn't that the point? I click my Pages document and I get my Pages document. I click a Word document and I get to wait so it can show me an image saying I'll someday get my Word document while it takes the time to do who-knows-what in the background. It's just a word processor. We have multiple cores at multiple GHz with multiple GB of RAM and Microsoft needs a splash screen to show me a page of text? Give me a break.

Don't even get me started with Outlook. *shivers*

 

[csalm87]

I think I'm most interested in seeing how Outlook for Mac turns out. As a power email user, Entourage is still lightyears ahead of Mac's horrible and overly simplistic/lacking Mail, but Entourage itself is a distant shadow to Outlook for Windows. I understand that Outlook for Mac won't be a feature-for-feature copy of its Windows counterpart, but hopefully it's better than what it is now.

I really hope Outlook works with my email. Entourage does and I downloaded the beta and I can't get it to work.

 

[csalm87]

I'm guessing you've never used the current incarnation of Word? Cuz you really do need to splash screen to show you that something's happening when you first launch the app...

FWIW Adobe does the same thing.

Umm... the bouncing icon in the dock will tell you that something is happening. of course, no program should take that long to open anyway.

 

[ThunderSkunk]

Awesome, now I can have the most backward and idiotic UI trend ever concieved on my mac too. Can't wait to put all my commands in a jumbled pile of icons which waste 4x the screen real estate and require 3x as many clicks to perform.

 

[Cougarcat]

I'm guessing you've never used the current incarnation of Word? Cuz you really do need to splash screen to show you that something's happening when you first launch the app...

FWIW Adobe does the same thing.

Well that's just it. There is no reason a word processor should take more than a few seconds to launch. Adobe's software might be slow too, but at least they are big, complicated apps. One of the reasons I switched to Pages is that I loved being able to click on its icon and then then have a blank document appear, right away. No waiting.

The icons: I don't mind them, I think they are better than 2008 but not quite as good as 2004.

The ribbon: Hate it because it eats away at vertical real estate. Put it on the side and I wouldn't mind.

I'll be sticking to Pages.

 

[Eddyisgreat]

Umm... the bouncing icon in the dock will tell you that something is happening. of course, no program should take that long to open anyway.

Exactly. Anything that has a larger footprint than a single instance of calculator is bloated garbage.

 

[50548]

So now I can say:

MS IS ALIVE!

 

[DrumApple]

Yeah we really need a corporate IM program on macs-since SO many huge corporations use macs-NOT.

On the other hand, it doesn't take a genius to see that SO many universities endorse macs-and thus they should have developed OneNote for macs. Brilliant. Guarantee you they would have sold a whole lot more copies of office is it came with OneNote instead of this useless MS Communicator.

 

[heisetax]

I hope one of the improvements is to bring back vba macro capability. The excel interface could use key shortcuts like in the Windows version too.

Here's hoping!

The keyboard shortcuts for the Mac version went away several versions ago. I miss them just like you & many others do. Because of how poorly Excel 2008 runs on my Intel MacPro I still use Excel 2004 to run my income tax prep program. No other spreadsheet does as well as Excel 2004 does. This includes all versions of MS Excel & other competing spreadsheets or office suite programs.

I'm hoping for some speed increase when running my income tax program. Having enough time for a nap between each time a page down or such command is given before it is executed. With those increases then with the keyboard menu items back I could have a usable modern version of Excel that most others are using.

 

[batchtaster]

Yeah we really need a corporate IM program on macs-since SO many huge corporations use macs-NOT.

On the other hand, it doesn't take a genius to see that SO many universities endorse macs-and thus they should have developed OneNote for macs. Brilliant. Guarantee you they would have sold a whole lot more copies of office is it came with OneNote instead of this useless MS Communicator.

Poor assumptions.

Communicator is effectively part of Exchange and Outlook. Without it, Mac users are once again poor cousins, and chunks of the telephony and collaboration services in Exchange 2010 won't be available. There are plenty of notebook apps out there, to substitute for OneNote, but there is no substitute for a Microsoft-sanctioned Communicator.

 

[batchtaster]

Is this an open beta like the office 2010 for Windows?

No, it's really really not. There is no legal public download.

 

[Xavier]

Cool! Its nice to see Microsoft Office getting some love for the mac.

Will upgrade once this comes out

 

[nsayer]

Christ, some of the comments on this thread are embarrassingly childish.

Pot. Kettle. Black.

 

[heisetax]

MS Office icons

I liked the Office 2008 icons more.

I'm sure that the MS Office icons have changed many times in the past & will keep on changing. With my using of the list view & screen resolutions being what they are I can't really tell you what any of the icons really look like. Maybe part of that is my 65 year old eyes, but I would say the lack of use of the icon view, using the dock for most tasks are probably more to do with it. I'm still using Drag Strip to start my programs so I have to know what the icon in general looks like, or do I just remember where the different programs are located?

A color change would affect me more than what the actual icon looks like. Icons are just becoming like programs, they keep getting changed, sometimes for the good, sometimes not.

 

[mikes70mustang]

Hopefully this isnt a buggy piece of crap like 08