At long last, a new version of Office for Mac will be available. Is it worth the upgrade?
The mostly widely anticipated feature is the new Outlook for Mac. Although Outlook previously existed for Mac, it was clunky and slow. It was discontinued and replaced by Entourage, which was widely panned by the IT community for not communicating properly with Microsoft Exchange servers. With this new Outlook, Mac users finally have a version that looks like the PC one and knows how to talk to Exchange (versions 2007 and up). Even better, Mac Outlook can import data directly from PC Outlook. However, it can’t sync calendars with iCal.
Word, Excel and PowerPoint have all been finetuned, both in features and in speed. Mac Office 2011 is lightning-quick compared to its predecessors. It uses the Ribbon toolbar but also maintains familiar menus. Most PC functions are replicated, with only a few exceptions. It offers the ability for multiple users to edit the same document when used in conjunction with Sharepoint or Microsoft’s SkyDrive cloud-computing storage. And many users are heralding the return of Visual Basic after an outcry over its removal several versions back.
Kudos to Microsoft’s Mac group for coming up with a Mac version of Office that finally equals its PC counterpart. Office 2011 For Mac is slated to ship October 26, 2010.
Microsoft has announced that the next version of Office For Mac will include Outlook as a replacement for Entourage.
“It is an exciting time for the MacBU with updates to our current products and the first public announcement about the next version of Office for Mac. For several years we have focused on providing the best Microsoft Exchange client for the Mac, and the Web Services Edition delivers that today for Entourage users,” said Eric Wilfrid, general manager for the MacBU at Microsoft. “Outlook for Mac will bring features our customers have long requested — such as Information Rights Management — that make working across platforms even easier. I think people will see that this move to Outlook for Mac is more than just a name change.”
This could be really good, or really bad. Although Microsoft says this will not be a feature-to-feature match for Windows-based Outlook, anything that gives Mac users greater compatibility, especially with Exchange, is a positive step forward. That being said, we all know that Microsoft doesn’t always deliver as promised. A new Outlook for Mac is vaporware at this point, since the release of Office for Mac is at least eighteen months out. And I hope the migration process from Entourage to the new Outlook isn’t as problematic as the one we had to endure from Outlook Express for Mac to Entourage when the latter was first released.
I think this represents acknowledgment on Microsoft’s part that the Mac is in the enterprise to stay, and I look forward to testing the new Outlook for Mac when it becomes available.
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