With MS Office 2010 coming will Mac Office 2008 be updated?

[NovemberWhiskey]

MS Office 2010 is coming up in 2010. Will Office 2008 for Macs be updated as well?

 

[r.j.s]

They've usually released the Mac version a year later.

 

[tallguy]

The only update I really want for our office 2008 is the ability to use spaces properly with the formatting palette turned on. I would be happy with that.

 

[Frosties]

Microsoft May Ship Next Mac Office By 2010

Support for Visual Basic for Applications also will be restored in the next version of Office for Mac, Microsoft says.

By Paul McDougall
InformationWeek
juli 9, 2008 09:35 AM

Mac users won't have to wait another four years for the next version of Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Office. A company official said Tuesday that the software maker plans on delivering the successor to Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac by January, 2011, at the latest, and possibly as early as January, 2010.

Microsoft also plans to restore support for Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) in the next version, which will likely be called Office 2010 for Mac, or Office 2011 for Mac -- depending on the exact ship date.

"We're on a two to three year lifecycle," said Amanda Lefebvre, senior marketing manager at Microsoft's Mac Business Unit, in an interview. "We were a little beyond that for our last round," she conceded.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/enterpriseapps/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=208803359

 

[str1f3]

MS Office 2010 is coming up in 2010. Will Office 2008 for Macs be updated as well?

You should have a few years of updates considering the MacBU just dropped 2004 support a couple of months ago. After Office 2011 is released you should only see minor updates though.

Microsoft May Ship Next Mac Office By 2010

Support for Visual Basic for Applications also will be restored in the next version of Office for Mac, Microsoft says.

By Paul McDougall
InformationWeek
juli 9, 2008 09:35 AM

Mac users won't have to wait another four years for the next version of Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Office. A company official said Tuesday that the software maker plans on delivering the successor to Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac by January, 2011, at the latest, and possibly as early as January, 2010.

Microsoft also plans to restore support for Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) in the next version, which will likely be called Office 2010 for Mac, or Office 2011 for Mac -- depending on the exact ship date.

"We're on a two to three year lifecycle," said Amanda Lefebvre, senior marketing manager at Microsoft's Mac Business Unit, in an interview. "We were a little beyond that for our last round," she conceded.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/enterpriseapps/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=208803359

That's really good news. I hope they manage to improve upon the interface as well (more Cocoa and less Carbon) because Office 2010 is a UI disaster. Another interesting point is that M$ is still considering developing an iPhone app. This would be good since all the Office type apps have so far been disappointing. There would be a lot of money to be made there.

 

[NovemberWhiskey]

The big question is: why won't they include MS OneNote with Office for Mac???

If they just included it, I wouldn't have to run VMware and virtualize windows all the time.

I guess I can always dream...

 

[maflynn]

MS has a horrible track record with updating their Mac office applications. To that end, I'd not hold your breath on when they'll update it.

 

[nadyne]

MS Office 2010 is coming up in 2010. Will Office 2008 for Macs be updated as well?

We're actively working on it right now. We've generally been on a 2-3 year release cycle, and plan to keep that for the next release. It hasn't been named yet.

The big question is: why won't they include MS OneNote with Office for Mac???

When considering our application portfolio, there are a few major questions that we need to answer:
* How expensive is it to develop this application? That is, how many people will we need to work on it, and for how long?
* What is the user need for this application? How many people want it? What are they doing because they don't have it?
* What impact does it have on our sales?

You can help with the second question. Submit a suggestion telling us why you want OneNote. Be verbose, include lots of details. Tell us what you're doing with it that you can't do otherwise (say, with the Notebook Layout View in Word:Mac). Don't just say "I want OneNote" because that's not nearly as compelling as detailing your use cases.

Same goes for anyone who wants us to do an iPhone app. Tell us what you would want in an iPhone app: do you just want to view documents, do you want to edit them, how much editing do you want to do? Do you want your PowerPoint presentations rendered in full fidelity, including transitions and animations? Do you want to be able to edit Excel formulas? What do you think you'd never want to do to an Office document on your iPhone?

The only update I really want for our office 2008 is the ability to use spaces properly with the formatting palette turned on. I would be happy with that.

Make sure that you're up-to-date with your Leopard updates. 10.5.7 brought about a bunch of improvements for Spaces support for all Carbon apps, including Office.

If you'd like more details about the gory technical details behind the Spaces issue, check out this blog post from one of our senior developers: risks and rewards. It's a long post, and the stuff specific to Spaces starts with the paragraph that begins "Bear with me while I shift gears now".

Regards,
Nadyne.