Office For Mac 2011

[Motoko.]

I'm really liking the ribbon!

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

Looks pretty good, apart from the custom controls that look like they're out of Jaguar (The document view in the bottom left, is that drawing over the scrollbar?)

Being built on Cocoa is a nice change from Carbon, although that should have ideally happened a while back (Firefox for example became a Cocoa app a few years ago)

[PyX]

IMO the ribbon in this version looks cleaner than the Windows version, but it could use some leaning still...

Office 2008 was a pure mistake IMO not just because of its major slowness and sluggishness, but also because the Ribbon was just adding a new level of complication to the existing interface and would basically not do much. Like, you could hide it all the time. The Ribbon interface in Windows can be hidden, but on the opposite, the "hide ribbon" button is totally useless because you always need those edition tools.

It's not that ugly too... I almost like it (but I'm always comparing it to the Windows version, maybe that's why). I don't understand why there's still all those menus up there. We should just see an Apple menu, File menu and Help menu, nothing more IMO.

Now, if they're adding Outlook, a version of MSN supporting video/audio conferences and handwriting, the Ribbon interface, and they put everything in Cocoa and optimize it for Snow Leopard (a.k.a. have a native 64-bit support), they're gonna have a winning product for sure on the Mac platform. Even if they make it a little inferior to the Windows version, I won't feel like I'm totally left out in the dark with a product worth hundreds of dollars.

My next requirements would be : more Office apps on the Mac. We're missing Project, Visio, Publisher, ... and the box still costs hundreds. What's wrong with them?

[Septimus]

Looks okay. But as long as it runs better. Dog slow on my 2.53 MBP. It is quicker to run Office 2010 on Windows 7 in VMWare Fusion.

[Medking]

I like it to be honest.

Is OneNote really necessary on Mac? Because Office for Mac already comes with some good note-taking templates. In my opinion they should just add on to the templates already in use, to make it so that you could have an entire binder, but within Office itself.

It always seemed unnecessary to have a separate application... but I dunno...

(another thing i always noticed, and hated, with OneNote was that it never actually wrote on the lines of the notebook. As in, the lines were there, but it didn't follow them... So, it's basically just like having a blank document, with some faint lines behind. Annoying as hell.. )

[what]

The lines in OneNote are really for tablet PCs users who handwrite. For normal typed-up notes you turn off the gridlines. Printed text on gridlines doesn't work that well anyway.

[PL_ Veteran]

I think I'll be sticking with iWork.

I would but the whole export/save a copy thing annoys me. My college supports DOCX everywhere now and with it being an open standard I don't know why they couldn't put it in. I just want to set DOCX as the default file type and not have to think about it.

[Brian M. Veteran]

From a usability perspective it looks pretty well laid out, however, I wish they'd just stick with that the OS/native apps do... natively. Having "inspector" boxes works well with iWork, works well with Photoshop etc, so why can't they stick with it? :(

[Quillz]

One thing I like about iWork, though, and it's really more because of the design of Mac OS X, is just the way I can drag in media, whether it be images, music, etc. I can drag an image into a cell in Numbers, for example, and it will be sized to fit, match all the styling and formatting, etc. I can't recall if Office 2008 worked like that.

It's just the little things about iWork that keep me using it. But if Office 2011 is a big improvement over 2008 (which I really didn't find bad at all), then I can see myself making the switch.

[MulletRobZ]

If there is a public beta of this, I'm so giving this a shot. I liked the Ribbon concept from Office 2007, but it didn't materialize in Office 2008 for Mac. But then again, I'm also concerned as to whether this version will be Intel only (a lot of Mac apps are moving in that direction), or will it support PPC as well.

[.Neo]

I would but the whole export/save a copy thing annoys me. My college supports DOCX everywhere now and with it being an open standard I don't know why they couldn't put it in. I just want to set DOCX as the default file type and not have to think about it.

I think its pretty logical that Apple prefers to use its own document type, you don't see Microsoft Word saving to .pages either. Especially because advanced lay-outs will **** up either way when opening them in another application. The only thing that I find annoying is that Pages won't export to .docx. Maybe iWork '10 will fix this.

[Scorcho]

All I ask for is a functioning Outlook that has Exchange performance (if not feature) parity of Office 2003. That would make my life at work much simpler.

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

It seems more and more likely that we'll be buying Office (for PC and Mac), so I really hope 2011 is still a universal binary, it'd be annoying if it was Intel only but still supported 10.5 (My mother has a 4-5 year old iBook which I installed 10.5 on)

[PyX]

Since Apple themselves dropped the support for PPC, I don't see why companies would continue to support it. The last PPC released is what, 3-4 years old? And the others even older... I'd say it's time for an upgrade...

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

Well, if you're still supporting 10.5 then you should still be supporting PPC, but if the app is 10.6 only then obviously you wouldn't build a PPC version.

As for my Mother having a PPC mac, she bought it only a few months ago, she doesn't really like the current designs but really likes the old designs, she went out of her way to find and buy a 12" G4 iBook (at the same time I got a 450Mhz G4 tower for $5 :cool: ), it can run Leopard fine.

[.Neo]

Wow... For her sake I'm hoping she also likes the design of old software, you know, to accompany that taste for old school hardware...