It?s not in the shops yet, but we got our hands on the latest version of Microsoft Office for Mac this week. We?ll be reviewing it in full in issue 228, on sale Wednesday 10 November, but here are a few of our first impressions.
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The first big change is the passing of Entourage ? it?s been replaced by Outlook for Mac. The new app certainly loads faster than its heavyweight predecessor and includes a feature to display entire email conversations together in one place.�
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Ribbon toolbar
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The other apps ? Word, Excel and PowerPoint ? remain the same in name but have all gained Microsoft?s Ribbon toolbar. This sits across the top of the program window and changes what it displays depending on what you?re doing. So when you?re typing in a Word document, you get the familiar font and formatting options. But insert a picture and the Ribbon changes to present you with image manipulation tools. It then swaps back again when you return to writing. We've got some screenshots of the Ribbon in the different apps for you below.
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It might take a little while to get used to where everything is on the Ribbon, and you can switch it off if you don?t like it. However, in some cases this means you lose access to certain features if you don?t know the keyboard shortcut. One example we came across was that when you?re writing an email in Outlook and hide the Ribbon, it?s bye-bye Send button. Having said that, you can customise the regular toolbar that sits above the Ribbon to include the commands you want.
Fullscreen writing
One new feature we liked from the outset was the fullscreen view in Word, where you can read or write without distraction ? it?s just you, your document and glorious blackness. If you move your mouse to the top of the screen, a toolbar appears with the essential text formatting options, so you need never leave this view while you?re writing.
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Web apps and Visual Basic
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The suite integrates with the Office Web Apps, which are free stripped-down versions of the desktop programs. This system enables you to save your documents in the cloud on a free 25GB SkyDrive, edit them from anywhere and also collaborate with others on the same document in real time. This feature isn?t limited to the Mac version either ? friends using Office 2010 for Windows can work with you too. Our first impressions of uploading and downloading documents into Word from SkyDrive were that it wasn?t particularly quick, though.
Accessing our documents on an iPad and iPhone worked fine, although the font rendering in the documents we tried was poor ? as though we were looking at an image rather than a text file. To edit on an iOS device, however, you have to download the file and copy it into a text editor. We couldn?t then find a way to upload it again on the SkyDrive site.
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Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) makes a return, having been absent from Office 2008. There?s also a Cover Flow-esque view you can switch to when you?re working with layers of images in PowerPoint. It enables you to reorder your layers by dragging them around ?- a nice touch.
Versions, pricing and release date
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There will be two versions of Office for Mac 2011. The Home & Student edition omits Outlook and weighs in at �89.99 for a single user licence or �109.99 for three users. The full Home & Business version costs �189.99 for a single user and �239.99 for a ?single user, two computers? licence. Office for Mac 2011 is due out on 26 October.
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