Monthly Archives: October 2010

Office:Mac 2011

Macworld’s top ten features of Office:Mac 2011

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In Macworld’s continuing coverage of Office:Mac 2011, they posted their list of top ten features.  Here they are:

  1. Collaboration: In Word and PowerPoint, you can work on your document with other people at the same time.
  2. Compatibility: Aside from our usual goal of file fidelity between Office:Mac and Office for Windows, we’ve also added many features from Office for Windows.
  3. Outlook: Need I say more?
  4. Cloud: You can save to SharePoint or SkyDrive directly from Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.
  5. Ribbon: A better way to access features in all of the apps (and you can completely hide it if you like).
  6. Visual Basic: We brought Visual Basic for Applications 6.5 to Office 2011, and it rocks.  (In fact, that’s a whole ‘nother blog post of my favourite test case for VBA).
  7. Template Gallery: Aside from adding some awesome new templates to Office 2011, we’ve also made it easier for you to browse the templates, modify the templates, and view your most recently-opened documents.
  8. Dynamic reordering: This was a hard feature to name, and its codename came from the demo that we first used to show it off.  Remember Waldo?  We hid Waldo on a layer, and then used dynamic reordering to show that he was in there.
  9. Excel sparklines and pivot tables: Hello power Excel users, we have some awesome new features just for you!
  10. Protection: You’ve got much more control over what other people can do with your documents and emails.  For you Outlook users who are in an Exchange environment, for example, you can disallow recipients of your mail from printing or forwarding a mail.

I’m pretty happy with this top-ten list, and not only because I worked on many of the features listed herein.

Office:Mac 2011, Outlook, Q&A

Q&A: Can I sync my Outlook:Mac calendar with Sync Services?

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Chris asked:

Does Outlook 2011 support calendar sync to sync services like Entourage did?

You’re correct: Entourage supported contacts and calendar sync via OS X Sync Services.  Some heavy-duty users experienced recurring issues with self-duplicating items, which made for a pretty painful experience.

To avoid these issues, we rebuilt our Sync Services support from the ground up for Outlook.  We set a very high quality bar, with the goal of avoiding those issues that our Entourage users faced.  For our initial v14.0.0 release, we got there with contacts.  But we didn’t get there with calendar.  Close, but no cigar.  Close wasn’t good enough, so we held off.  We wanted Outlook to be the most awesome Outlook ever.  We decided that we’d rather not support it on the initial release rather than have a version that didn’t meet our standards.

We will add calendar sync in a future update.  I don’t have a date to share yet for that.  The team is working hard on it, and I’ll post when it’s ready.

Exchange, Office:Mac 2011, Outlook

Macworld’s review of Outlook:Mac 2011

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On Friday, Macworld published John Welch‘s review of Outlook:Mac 2011.  It’s a big review, but then there’s quite a lot to say about an all-new application, and John’s never been anything short of verbose anyway.  John’s a hard guy to please, so I feel like our four mice in his review would’ve been at least 4.5 mice in anyone else’s review!  His final advice is that “[i]f you need an Exchange client on the Mac, Outlook 2011 is the king … or just want something more than Mail, iCal, and Address Book give you, Outlook is a no-brainer”

Since it’s such a big review, there’s discussion of some of the subtle work that we’ve done to improve your experience when you’re using Outlook.  For example, he noticed one of my favourite features in the calendar.  If you select a specific category in the list on the left side, the events that are in the other categories fade out a little bit.  It’s subtle, but it’s a great visual indicator to help you focus on the category that you’ve selected.

John also talks about our Ribbon.  Here’s part of what he has to say:

The Ribbon is a bit of a controversy. It’s a user interface element in all of the Office programs that sits at the top of the document window and provides quick access to the most commonly used tools. At first, because of my experience with Entourage, I hated it. I like to have a minimal UI. After using it for a while, I’ve changed my opinion. The Ribbon is a bit garish, but it does keep the options I use frequently right where I need them. It doesn’t get in the way and it takes up a minimal amount of space.

If I had any complaints about the review, I have to admit that I find it perplexing that Outlook’s use of Exchange Web Services (and thus the requirement that it requires Exchange 2007 or later) gets three separate lines in the “cons” section at the top of the review.

Office:Mac 2011, Q&A, Word

Q&A: Will the math add-in for Word 2010 come to Word:Mac 2011?

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Joe asked:

Are there plans to bring the Math Add-in for Word/Onenote 2010 to Word 2011?

I’m not quite sure what you’re referring to, so I’ll try to cover all of the bases here.

If you’re referring to the Equation Editor in Word 2010, then yes: Word:Mac 2011 allows you to both edit equations created in Word 2010 for Windows, and you can create new equations in Word 2011 too.  Here’s what the Equation Tools tab in the Word:Mac Ribbon looks like (click on it for a full-size version):

Equation Tools
Equation Tools Ribbon in Word:Mac 2011

The Word 2011 help has lots of information about using equations, including plenty of details of how to create equations that will be able to be opened by older versions of Word.

Now, if you’re not talking about our built-in equation editor, then I think that you might be talking about the third-party MathType plug-in from Design Science.  I don’t know what their plans are.  I have my hands full in keeping up with what my team is up to, let alone other software vendors!

Office:Mac 2011

screenshots of Office:Mac 2011

I noticed that ZDnet has posted a bunch of screenshots of Office:Mac 2011, as well as a review.  Their conclusion?

Does Office 2011 for Mac offer enough to make it worth the upgrade from earlier versions? Absolutely. With all the new features that will save you time from quick image edits within the suite to easy sharing of your work, and much more, Office 2011 is a huge improvement over Office 2008.

I don’t have enough space in this hotel room to turn cartwheels, so I’ll have to make do with simply grinning from ear to ear. 😀