Microsoft Office:Mac 2011
Saturday, 16 October 2010
Interestingly, Microsoft readily admits (at least in its information for dealers) that around 50% of Mac buyers are switchers. You’ve got to hand it to Microsoft, then, that it competes with Apple on so many fronts yet still works hard to make a good Mac product.
Of course, Mac users also want some ‘special’ Mac only features. (I definitely do.) And there are some, as you'll see.
A potential glitch on the horizon is the fact that Apple may be about to launch iWork 2011, in the October 20 announcement (21st, NZ time). Microsoft needs to convert as many people over as possible, since the iWork suite's Pages, Numbers and Keynote all open and save the Microsoft equivalents (Word, Excel and PowerPoint), but this new Ofice goes on sale on the 26th. Apple's 20th October 'event' may only be an announcement and not a launch – we'll see.
But Seattle’s Mac Business Unit is one of the biggest and most experienced Apple developers around; they know what they’re doing.
To address the first point of similarity across platforms, this new version of Office gets the ‘Ribbon’, which PC Office users seem to get really excited about. As it’s just that bar thing along the top with icons in it, I am perplexed PC users seem to find this so exciting. But the whole suite does, apparently, look and work more like Office 2008 for PC (which I have not seen or used, so I can’t really say, sorry).
But this version has a much more interactive tool bar I mean ribbon – it contextualises to offer the tools for what you are doing – if you click on a picture, for example, the options in the ribbon change – more on that below.
Installing Office:Mac 2011 Home and Business puts Messenger in your Applications folder, plus a Microsoft Office 2011 folder containing Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, Additional Tools, Microsoft Document Connection and an Office folder, plus an HTML ReadMe file.
The Additional Tools folder contains Microsoft Language Register, Microsoft Silverlight (a Flash alternative) and Windows Media® Components for QuickTime, making QuickTime able to deal with certain proprietary Windows' AV formats. The Office folder has 14 language localisations (all European except for Japanese), various app frameworks and apps (Chart Converter, Clip Gallery etc and other work files. The full installation came to 1.5GBs.
Speed
For Office:Mac 2011m the program code got a complete rewrite.
Thank goodness! And it’s paid off. On a mid-2007 MacBook Pro 15-inch (Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM), Word 2008 launches in 24 seconds. Word 2011 takes just 4 – that’s a helluva speedup.
On a mid-2010 i7 MacBook Pro (2.66GHz, 8GB RAM), Word ’08 takes 5 seconds, Word ’11 takes 1 second… In the graph below (made in the new Excel), shorter bars are better (less seconds). The blue bars are the launch times on a mid-2007 MacBook Pro (2.2GHz Core 2 Duo) and the red bars are on the mid-2010 MacBook Pro i7 I am currently reviewing.
On an i7 Quad-Core iMac, I couldn't time Word's boot – it was too fast!
The lookThe new version looks different immediately from the previous (2008) Mac version. Apart from the sassier, curvier icons, the interface has really benefited from Apple’s Cocoa graphics, making ’08 look boring by comparison (not that the new look is over the top).
The Mac BU coders also used more of Apple’s Core image code to offer more iLife-like effects.
Speaking of Apple’s iLife, Office ’11 has a Media Browser like iWeb and Mail etc that, likewise, taps your Mac’s iPhoto and iTunes libraries directly, along with the usual symbols and shapes.
This is good.
Mac users always get utterly bamboozled by the bizarre and nonsensical versions that proliferate for PC software packages. Honestly, these things seem to breed themselves. It’s worse than trying to choose a home barbecue.
Luckily that’s changed too – now there’s only the Home & Student version whichcontains Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Messenger 8, and the Home & Business edition, although to obfuscate this a little, each package comes in a one- or three-user Student pack, or a one- and two-user pack in the case of Business.
Outlook
The H&B version adds the email client Outlook to the mix. The basic version does not include a mail client any more. (Every Mac has Apple’s Mail anyway, which I use for multiple accounts, scheduling synchronisation and business management – I have done for years without having to use anything else. But apparently it’s not powerful enough for big biz usage. So people say.)
But thank goodness Entourage has gone! One of the oddest things for switchers was looking for Outlook on their new Macs, and having to find and cope with something called ‘Entourage’ instead.
Anyway, Outlook replaces Entourage in the Pro version.
The database of Outlook is not built the same way as it was with Entourage, it is now a set of folders and files, to make it lighter, more responsive and easier to backup.
It also now has Preview so you can check out attachments before downloading and opening them … which Apple Mail has had for years already. Still, that’s good. You can sort and order email by ‘conversations’ (Apple Mail calls this Threads – View>Organize by Threads).
Improvements
Thankfully, and at last, Command-Shift-S activates Save As, like it does in most Mac applications. This worked in Excel 2008, but not Word. Minor, sure, but it always drove me crazy.
Pivot tables have been improved in Excel. Conditional Formatting has also been improved, changing the format of cells based on criteria you set.
Charts and Smart Diagrams are now available in the SmartArt graphics’ selection.
In Word, Page Layout View has guides that appear and disappear as you need them (as Pages and Keynote have had for a while), plus automatic text wraps and even more templates to get your started (à la iWeb).
Static Guides can be turned on and just dragged from the ruler, as in Photoshop and InDesign – very handy for layouts.
Styles are more visual – you get a colour-coded strip down the left side of your document to help you keep track.
The Presenter view in PowerPoint makes it easier to present with – see the next screen coming up on your laptop, elapsed time etc. Again, this is a lot more like Apple iWork’s Keynote.
Keynote's advantage over PowerPoint was always the more ‘cinematic’ effects – well, the Mac BU has also leveraged this core tech to add similar capabilities into PP, plus Keynote-like animations with path control.
New features
There are some more significant new features, too. Apart from that Ribbon (which is pretty similar to the last Office:Mac’s top-doc tool dispenser, if you ask me) and Outlook, there’s also a Full Screen View in Word (below) to help you concentrate on your writing with less distractions. This has been quite a popular feature of Mac word processors like Writeroom, for example.
Visual Basic support is back for those code-swappers who yearn to operate across platforms. This makes the scripts on PC setups both accessible and deployable on Mac implementations, which should really please some of the Office mavens out there who have so detested those workers preferring Macs. This was dropped from Office 2008 largely, I suspect, as it was one of the only ways to actually get malware into and out of an Apple computer. But people missed it and there was something of an outcry.
You can access Microsoft Web Apps to help access and collaborate on documents, plus you can coauthor between Macs and PCs.
These Web Apps, which are supported in Safari including the mobile iOS versions, require a Windows Live account, and there are some differences between the PC 2008 and Mac 2011 apps referred to in the literature, although it's not clear what these are yet.
A new application called Microsoft Document Connection gives you access to a Windows Live account, with the advantage of being able to save files online and access them, to ‘SkyDrive’, which could be very useful if you’re flitting between places. Actually, more than just a few – you get a generous 25GBs of space (sign up free). You can also use the service to host and share photos and videos, much like MobileMe. It also works with Microsoft's SharePoint service).
There’s an expanded Template Gallery – apart from what loads onto your hard drive as part of the suite’s resources, you have access to many more templates hosted online.
Presentation Broadcast means you can show PowerPoint presentations even to those who don’t have PowerPoint. Office 2011 gives you a unique URL to use for this, and you also need a Windows Live account to make it work. I guess this represents a foray into the cloud …
But PowerPoint also lets you embed and even format movies right inside the application, including adding effects much like the photo editing tools in the new Word.
With the new photo editing built into Word (above), you can now retouch photos to some extent, remove backgrounds and add colours and even a few effects, right on images placed in your document. Just click on the image and the tools appear in that erm Ribbon thang. It’s easy to use and at least it’s right there in your document.
In Excel, a new thing called Sparklines (right) means you can create small charts from single cells in Excel. Just select a cell and choose Sparklines from the Insert menu for access to that. I don’t actually understand the point, but I am not a heavy spreadsheet user. I can use a spreadsheet to do my GST – for the rest, I’m a soul lost to mathematics, so not really a good judge.An end to Endnote?
Additionally, the Mac BU’s Danica Aitken claimed you won’t need Endnotes any more, which would be great, hey, academics? There is, I noticed, Footnote (of course), in the Insert menu but also Cross Reference, and Index & Tables.
I apologise that I am not a heavy enough user of Endnote and bibliographies etc to say whether this is a truly useful feature or not.
Mac-only features
As with even the 2004 version of Office, the crew at the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft in Seattle leveraged some tech in the OS not available to Windows installs. Usually, Mac-only features focus on the graphics and audio engines inside OS X – for example, audio note recording, which is only in the Notebook layout of Word, but which has been there since 2004. This is, thankfully, still in this new version.
This is sensationally good for recording meetings, interviews and lectures while you type the odd thing in. Office can’t transcribe the spoken words into written text for you; you'll have to do that yourself – but you can listen back later and edit it down to what you need, saving lots of frantic typing on location. I have recorded a meeting with 30 people attending, for example, through a MacBook Pro's built-in mic, which picked up everyones' voices no problem.
But a totally new feature to this new version really looks awesome, plus it's really easy to use – this is called Dynamic Reordering. DR lets you reorder layers visually by dragging in a really cool 3D-style interface (above). This works for layers with text, photos and graphics in Word and PowerPoint, and it’s something I’d like to see in many other programs.
To use it in Word, you need to be in Publishing Layout view (the views are now instantly swappable by pressing new buttons at the bottom right of your document). Select all (Command-A) then choose Reorder Overlapping Objects from the Format menu.
My only complaint would be it took me a little while to find, as I was looking for something called ‘Dynamic Reordering’, naturally enough.
But … several annoyances remain
It’s always been very difficult – for me, anyway – to keep Word (since at least 2004) on the dictionary of choice. It ignores UK spelling no matter what you set in the Custom Dictionary (UK English, for example) and continues to flag ‘colour’ as a misspelling. This is just another reason I moved to Nisus years ago – Australian spelling won’t do, as it’s largely US anyway, and even the English English dictionaries these days spell ‘recognise’ as ‘recognize’ these days. Apparently, only New Zealand and South Africa have stayed with –ise’ OK, ‘-ize’ may be much more phonetically correct, but it’s still wrong for us.
(Nisus Writer Pro and Express both have New Zealand English dictionaries, among many, many others).
There’s that bloody selection thing! Select a letter, start to drag and the election pops about, selecting things left and right I really don’t want selected! This is really frustrating.
Word Count … you can choose Word count, but it doesn’t let you keep typing as you write. As a professional writer, I need to be able to glance at something with a word count as I work. Students will also appreciate this.
Finally, when you paste, a little icon shows up that lets you ‘Match destination formatting’. Fine, and this was all dandy when it debuted back in Office 2004 …but you have to click it and choose it every time! These days, in most other word processors, including even Mail message windows and Apple’s Text Edit, simply changing the Command-V combination to Command-Option-V’ or whatever simply pastes the text in the destination formatting, without having to much about with mousing over to press little buttons.
Two versions
But just in case you were breathing easier with only having two versions of Office:Mac to choose from, there are actually four versions – the one-pack one-user Home and Student is NZ$219, and there’s a Family Pack (three users/three Macs) for $259, which is really good value. You get 90 days free support.
The Home and Business version is $379 for one user, and $499 for a two-user version. You get one year of free support; this version takes up 1.5GBs of hard drive space.
Conclusion
In-Word-doc audio, and the Dynamic Layers are the features salespeople should be plugging to potential Office:Mac users, apart from the ‘more seamless between a Mac and a PC’ thing.
And if you bought Office:Mac 2008 very recently, check, as you might be eligible for a free upgrade to 2011.
Is it worth it? Yep. It’s way faster, it looks good, the Mac-only features are cool, and the integration is better with your PC versions. If you're an Office user already, it makes sense for the speed, familiarity and integration advantages – the new features are the icing.
Plus it’s not wildly expensive. It’s on sale in New Zealand from 26th October.
What's great — much faster, better integration, looks better and the new features are compelling. Dynamic Reordering is great.
What's not — Some old niggles still in the latest version, ie with the dictionary
Needs — Office users who crave more speed, power – and more seamless integration
4.5/5
What — Office:Mac one-pack one-user Home and Student with 90 days free support (NZ$219, Family Pack three users/three Macs $259).Office:Mac Home and Business with one year free support ($379 one user, $499 two-user version).
System — A Mac computer with an Intel processor; Mac OS X version 10.5.8 or later
1 GB of RAM or more; 2.5 GB of available hard disk space HFS+ hard disk format (also known as Mac OS Extended or HFS Plus); 1280 x 800 or higher resolution monitor; DVD drive or connection to a local area network (if installing over a network); Safari 5 or later recommended
Additional items or services are required to use some features:
Certain online functionality requires a Windows Live™ ID.
Certain features in the Home and Business version require Internet access (fees may apply).
Exchange support in Outlook for Mac 2011 requires connectivity to Update Rollup 4 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 or later.
Access to files stored on a SharePoint server requires connectivity to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 or later.
Co-authoring requires Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 or a Windows Live ID.
Contact — Microsoft NZ Ltd.
Available from — Apple resellers
