New bits, old tricks in Office Mac 2011

Photo / Supplied

Microsoft is kinda caught with any Mac release in a couple of ways. Firstly, all those PC switchers and/or those who use a PC at work, say, and a Mac at home want the experience to be extremely similar, both for the sake of ease of use and for productivity. Which is a reasonable expectation.

But Mac users also want some 'special' Mac only features. (Well, I know I do.) One that goes way back to Word 2004, for example, is the ability to record audio notes directly into Notebook View Word docs via your Mac's built-in mic. (I'm pleased to say this feature is still in Word 11).

This is absolute gold when it comes to attending lectures (type a few notes while your MacBook picks up all the audio), doing interviews (type a few notes while the subject waxes large) or taking minutes at meetings (I have easily recorded 30 people talking around a table while I typed a few notes on a MacBook).

Then you can strip the audio out and archive it in iTunes. Priceless. You have to strip it out anyway to send it to a PC user ... they can't do the Word-audio thing because it leverages some Apple Mac OS-only features. Since Seattle's Mac Business Unit is one of the biggest and most experienced Apple developers around, they know what they're doing, despite any real or perceived strife between the two companies.

Remember, Word came out for Mac years before there was a Windows' version, and Excel the same. Bill Gates knew a good computer platform when he saw one.

Anyway, I digress. To address the first point, this new version of Office gets the 'Ribbon', which PC Office users seem to get really excited about. Aw. It's just a bar thing with icons in it, BTW.

Speed

The Office:Mac code got a complete rewrite, Microsoft tells us.

Thank goodness! And it's paid off. On a 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...

The look

The new version looks different immediately. Apart from the sassier, curvier icons, the interface has 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 used Apple's Core image to give some iLife-like effects. Good-oh.

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 with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Messenger 8, and the Home & Business edition.

H&B adds Outlook

Correct - 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 weirdest things for switchers was looking for Outlook on their new Macs, and having to find and cope with something called 'Entourage' instead. I don't think anyone ever understood this idea. 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.

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.

New features

There are quite a few new features. Apart from that Ribbon and Outlook, there's also a Full Screen View to help you concentrate on your work. Visual Basic support is back for those macro-swappers across platforms; you can access Microsoft web apps to help access and collaborate on documents, plus you can co-author between Macs and PCs.

There's an expanded Template Gallery; Presentation Broadcast means you can show PowerPoint presentations even to those who don't have PowerPoint; there's some photo editing built in; and a new thing called Sparklines means you can create small charts from single cells in Excel.

Additionally, the Mac BU's Danica Aitken claimed you won't need Endnotes any more, which would be great, hey, academics? But I'll have to check that out further (a proper review should appear on my mac.nz reviews page soon).

Mac only features

As with even the 2004 version of Office, the crew at Microsoft's Mac Business Unit 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, that audio note recording in the Notebook layout of Word since 2004, which is 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 - but you can listen back later and edit it down to what you need, saving lots of frantic typing on location.

But a totally new feature truly looks awesome and is really easy to use - it's called Dynamic Reordering. This lets you reorder layers visually by dragging in a really cool 3D-style interface. This works for layers with text, photos and graphics and it's something I'd like to see in many other programs.

These two features are the ones all those salespeople out there should be plugging to you 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.

Plus it's not wildly expensive. It's on sale from the 26th October.

- Mark Webster mac-nz.com