Office:Mac 2011 Home & Student: Head of the Class
By: Ric Getter
When a new version of Microsoft Office is announced, the news is almost always greeted with a mixture of both hope and dread. The new features always sound so great, absolutely brilliant in some cases; but along with them comes the fear of bugs and, as has often been the case, dreadful performance of the initial (and sometimes subsequent) releases of a given version. So the two biggest surprises in Office:Mac 2011 are the facts that it runs extraordinarily well and it’s quite possibly the fastest version of Office that Mac users have seen in years. What’s even more amazing is that this is combined with innumerable feature enhancements and one of the most significant facelifts the program has seen on the Mac platform.
At $149 for a three-license package and $119 for a single user, Microsoft’s Office:Mac 2011 Home and Student edition is muscling into territory held by Apple’s iWork ($99). It should be noted that Microsoft has dropped the honor system for Mac users and the products now require online activation. Lacking Outlook, the mail/calendar/contact management member of the suite, the target market is the user content with Apple’s Address Book, iCal and Mail. However, it provides full compatibility and (nearly) all the features of the latest versions of Office for Windows. It also gives you some of the benefits of MobileMe without the $99/year subscription fee and it includes “cloud” versions of the applications that are available through a Windows Live account.
Office:Mac 2011 has evolved into one of the best integrated and most consistent suites from virtually any vendor (even acknowledging Adobe’s traditional dominance in this realm). Word, Excel and PowerPoint share many of the new and enhanced features in the Office suite and, as always, output from one application can be inserted dynamically into another; updating an Excel sheet or chart will be reflected immediately in Word or PowerPoint, for example. For that reason, we’re going to look some of these improvements first, before examining the changes to the individual applications.
Meet the Ribbon
Introduced in Office 2007 for Windows, the ribbon interface was the bane of experienced Office users though, in time, it proved to be a boon for most folks learning the program for the first time. The idea is that a bar of tabs will change the selection of icon-based options below it. For example, the Layout tab will reveal a variety of document-wide formatting options; Tables, Charts and SmartArt will reveal their options. The ribbon got a bad rap in Office 2007 because it completely and quite abruptly replaced the menu bar. The result was like coming home one night and finding that all of your possessions had been carefully moved to a different and not necessarily logical location. Mac users get to keep the menu bar. Though the menu stays with traditional command groupings, the ribbon’s arrangement does seem to make more sense. It can be customized in a variety of ways but, alas, there’s no way to reorder the useful Quick-Styles gallery. Another welcome addition that resides on the ribbon is the Spotlight-like Find System. Through a drop-down menu, its functionality is nicely customized for each Office application and it’s quite helpful to have a search tool in easy reach.
Though each tab’s contents may vary from application to application, the ribbon’s layout is consistent throughout the suite. If the ribbon still doesn’t find its way into your heart, it can easily be hidden with a click or two and the interface becomes very much like the earlier versions.
The new media browser is a great, new built-for-the-Mac feature. It’s a panel that brings all your iPhoto, iTunes and movies (at least the content of your Movies folder) into one place. The panel also provides access to the Office symbol and shape libraries as well as an expanded clip art collection. One potential annoyance is that this panel will always ride on top of any other windows or panels.
In the Sky
Happily, Office:Mac 2011’s approach to cloud computing follows Google’s rather than Apple’s lead: It’s free. A Windows Live account will give you access to 2GB of disk space as well as limited but functional online versions of the Office suite applications. A “Share…” menu item lets you save directly to your SkyDrive (Windows Live storage space) in the same way that enterprise users can save to a SharePoint or Exchange server. The SkyDrive also allows for online collaboration and real-time conferencing via Microsoft Communicator (or any chat system of your choice).
Another nice touch is that the SkyDrive is smart enough to let multiple authors work on the same document simultaneously. Sections, rather than entire documents, are locked for editing. This level of sharing also lets you see and chat with your co-authors during a session.
Stylin’
Microsoft has been providing its Office users with an abundant selection of templates for years. What’s been missing is a useful gallery for browsing all the options. The new Office has a thumbnail gallery that shows off all the available templates and even looks past the cover of multi-page designs.
Other welcome additions are additional editing options, styles and tools for images. Though it’s no Photoshop, if you want make some eleventh-hour exposure or color corrections to a photo or add some artsy effects, you no longer have to bounce back into an image editor. The Office applications will even compress images to email- and web-friendly sizes.
Finally, one of the most noticeable, across-the-board improvements is speed. All the Office:Mac 2011 applications launch in seconds and (nearly) all the commands and controls are responsive in a way that Mac users haven’t seen for years. Regardless of all the great features that have been added, this is the one improvement that will make the upgrade worthwhile for virtually anyone who has grown tired of watching the bouncing “W” icon in his or her Dock.
Word 2011
For better or worse, Microsoft never released a Mac version of Publisher, and try as it may, Word was never a stellar publishing tool. Word 2011 is destined to give iWork a run for its money thanks to several new and unique features. The new Word sports master pages, areas text graphics or layout elements that will repeat on each page. These will work nicely with the next new feature: text boxes. The boxes can be linked to allow text to flow without the inherent limitations of multi-column documents.
One of the major stumbling blocks when using styles is the difficulty of remembering what style is applied to which part of the document. Now, the Styles panel in the Print Layout view can show you a color-coded cross-reference to all the styles as they appear in a document. It makes updating styles a breeze and helps separate out styled text from content that has been formatted directly. The latter is a priceless benefit for documents that have been though the hands of multiple collaborators. One real jaw-dropper is the 3-D view provided by dynamic reordering (a feature shared with PowerPoint). This will show you your document in a 3D, layered view that will help pull forward or push back page elements and assist in finding chunks of a page that may have been accidentally hidden by a graphic or text box.
The program lacks some of the niceties of the Windows version (particularly the little formatting box that appears when you hover your cursor over a selection). However, it takes full advantage of Apple’s Quartz graphics and Apple Advanced Typography (AAT) for some Mac-only benefits.
Excel 2011
Though it doesn’t break as much new ground as the other members of the suite, Excel 2011 offers some outstanding information processing power that is now easier than ever to manage. Even beyond the welcome return of VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), Excel now offers nearly complete functional parity with the Windows versions, including important but previously hobbled tools like conditional formatting and PivotTables (the extremely valuable though dubiously named method of summarizing and correlating data). The new PivotTable Builder makes it a bit easier to wrap your mind around the concept and basic PivotTables can be built with just a couple of clicks. You’ll also find numerous small improvements in graphics, styling and interface tweaks that image-conscious Mac users will appreciate.
PowerPoint 2011
Though Apple’s Keynote is still a bit player in the presentation sector, it’s hard to surpass when it comes to both creating and giving sparkling presentations. With PowerPoint 2011, Microsoft has made some key improvements that make it considerably more competitive.
As many embarrassed presenters know, PowerPoint has never really excelled in terms of handling large media files. The program now makes it much easier to embed video in presentations has the ability to handle a wider range of video formats, including most flavors of QuickTime. Video elements can be styled (angled, drop-shadowed, etc.) to help them follow the specific look of a look of a slide. You can also now set a poster frame and get full control of playback while giving a presentation.
Taking another cue from Keynote, PowerPoint 2011 is the most presenter-friendly version of the program yet released for the Mac. The presenter’s screen not only previews upcoming slides, but adds time information and a block that lets the presenter add notes on the fly, a great tool for noting feedback or corrections needed for the next go-around.
Another part of the effort to keep up with Keynote is the addition of scads of transitions, animation tools and themes. Though many of the animation and transition capabilities are ripe for abuse, many of the new themes are truly elegant and offer a wide enough variety and are easy enough to customize to help you avoid the dreaded “boilerplate” look.
Without question, Office:Mac 2011 is a landmark release of the suite. In terms of both features and performance, it’s a quantum leap beyond the last two versions. Though it has enough depth and power to satisfy an enterprise user, it’s packaged in a way that’s tame enough to rate the “Home and Student” label. There are a few rough edges to be burnished in subsequent updates and releases, but they’re understandable considering the overall improvement the suite has shown. And that was enough to push it over the edge to rate MacDirectory’s fifth star.
Price > $149 (3-user, home use license). System requirements > Intel processor; OS X 10.5.8 or later; Free Windows Live account for cloud features.
Pros > Excellent performance; useful and often ingenious new features; greatly improved compatibility and feature parity with Windows versions.
Cons > A couple of rough patches in the new interface; product activation method makes the suite less portable.
MacDirectory Rating: Five Stars
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Office:Mac 2011
