InfoWorld review: Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 gains ground

Microsoft’s newly released Office for Mac 2011 takes huge steps toward bringing the same experience to Office users on both Windows and Mac — but they’re the steps that begin a journey, not bring it to an end. The Mac suite remains well behind its latest Windows counterpart, Office 2010, but it’s now on a par with Office 2007, and that by itself is a significant step forward from Office for Mac 2008.

Office for Mac 2011 ($279.95 direct from Microsoft) is still not nearly as full-featured as Office 2010 for Windows. There’s no database application, no dedicated page-layout application (though Word 2011 is quite good at page layout for shorter documents), and no OneNote — the most serious shortcoming, in my opinion. Despite this, Office 2011 goes a long way toward integrating the Mac and Windows Office worlds into a seamless whole.

[ Also on InfoWorld: A bevy of iPhone-inspired features will find their way into Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. See “The new Mac OS X: What Apple has in store for 2011.” | Stay abreast of key Apple technologies in our Technology: Apple newsletter. ]

The new Mac suite — comprising Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook 2011 — does inherit a number of Office 2010’s top features, including simultaneous document editing or co-authoring, built-in graphics tools, PowerPoint slideshow broadcasting, Outlook’s conversation view, and interoperability with Office Web Apps. Word 2011 has improved document layout tools, while Excel 2011 has been brought up to date with pivot tables, conditional formatting, sparklines, and support for Visual Basic macros. Still, some business-grade features in Office 2010 — such as Business Contact Manager and PowerPivot for Excel — have yet to make it to the Mac.

The changes getting the most attention are the addition of the ribbon interface, which brings the Office for Mac GUI in line with the interface that Windows users have been working with since Office 2007, and the replacement of Entourage with Outlook. Each of these is significant, but the most significant change in the long run may be the addition of the Microsoft Document Connection — a window to SharePoint and Windows Live SkyDrive shares — to the Mac OS X Dock.

Test Center Scorecard
	20%	20%	20%	15%	15%	10%
Microsoft Office for Mac 2011	8	8	7	8	6	8	7.5 Good

Office ribbon comes to the Mac When you open any of the applications in Office for Mac 2011, the very first thing you notice is the gallery that greets you. You can turn it off with a simple check-box click, but otherwise, it presents you with a variety of templates in which to create a new document and locations from which you can open an existing document. Once you make your selection, you’re treated to the new ribbon view of the Office productivity world.

Windows-based Office users went through the Great Ribbon Migration a couple of years ago with the arrival of Office 2007. Office 2011 doesn’t look exactly like the Office 2007/2010 interface (there’s no “marble” in the upper-left corner of the window), but it’s very similar. Depending on exactly what you do with the various Office apps, you may love or hate the ribbon — or both, depending on exactly which task you’re wrestling with.

If you tend to use Office for very basic tasks (authoring raw text, building straightforward spreadsheets, or creating rudimentary text-based presentations), then you’ll probably find that the ribbon is a lot of unnecessary visual overhead. If, on the other hand, you are producing highly structured documents, collaborating with others, or building extensive visual documents of any sort, you’ll probably fall in love with pieces of the ribbon interface.

The upshot is that the GUIs for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for the Mac are now much more completely in line with those on the Windows side. Now, it’s important to note that this is the first released version of the apps with the new interface, and as we’ve seen on other significant occasions involving Microsoft releases, implementation can be a little rougher than we’d hope. I’ve looked at these apps in an earlier beta release, so I can tell you that progress has been made, and I expect that progress will continue to be made.

Outlook 2011: Up from Entourage There may be Mac users of Office who actually like Entourage, but they’re a rare breed. For the rest of us, Entourage is the ultimate proof that Microsoft treats Mac users as second-class citizens. Entourage left me longing for the full set of features — from very easy integration of tasks with calendars to the plethora of add-in functionality available from third parties — that defined Outlook in its Office 2007 release for Windows.

Outlook 2011 brings a lot of the functionality and most of the user interface of the “real” Outlook to the table. The mail, calendar, tasks, notes, contacts, and ribbon interface, as well as integration with other Office applications that Windows users are accustomed to, are now present on the Mac, and they allow for uncomplicated moves back and forth between Outlook features and other apps. It’s not always as smooth as it should be. For instance, launching an email message from within one of the other Office applications fails to include email signatures. But in terms of the interface and integration capabilities, Outlook 2011 is a major step forward for Macintosh users.

That said, I’m not switching yet. The first reason is that all of the tools to integrate with outside apps and systems (notably Google Calendar and Google Tasks) don’t work yet. I’ve no doubt that they will work at some point, but until that time, Outlook is a scheduling castaway on Exchange Island. That’s a temporary problem common to first-release products.

The second issue may be tougher for Microsoft to fix. Outlook 2011 is slow — really slow — to accomplish basic tasks such as downloading and displaying mail, moving messages from inbox to folder, or from one folder to another. There are a number of possible reasons, ranging from storing email messages as individual files to simply not having programmers who are as accomplished on the Macintosh as they are for Windows. Regardless, if having a snappy email client is important to you, then Outlook 2011 will be an exercise in frustration.

Document Connection: On-ramp to cloud collaboration The most important new feature in Office 2011 could turn out to be the Microsoft Document Connection. In the same way that Microsoft’s vision of how programming would be done (on teams, rather than the “lone warrior” approach) turned out to be absolutely correct when the company rolled it out in the 1980s, the dual focus on cloud infrastructure and collaboration as keys to office productivity may well be the way business is conducted in the future. Companies are certainly moving in that direction, and the Document Connection hurries along the process in interesting ways.

SharePoint is becoming to the new millennium what Exchange was to the 1990s: the center of the Microsoft Office productivity universe. The Document Connection, accessible through an icon on the Mac OS X dock, provides a window into SharePoint folders in an easy-to-use, easy-to-understand way that doesn’t require programming on the client side. It offers the same interface to Microsoft’s Windows Live SkyDrive cloud storage service, simplifying the process of group collaboration when no one on the team has put together a SharePoint server.

Document Connection seems like a first step into the cloud-based collaborative future toward which Microsoft is moving users. Ultimately, it appears likely that Document Connection functions will be built into the individual applications, but for now, the window into the cloud is a useful view of the future. Hook up to SkyDrive, or find yourself a SharePoint server, and step into the next generation of office productivity. Resistance is futile.

Office 2011: Upgrade sooner or later? There are two additional apps that come with Office 2011 that I haven’t discussed. The first is Remote Desktop Connection, which will be important for those who need to manage Windows servers or support Windows desktop machines in an office setting. It works well once the underlying network properties are set up correctly, and it offers the same interface and experience as the Windows version. There’s also a new Messenger app, which will be nice if you use Microsoft Messenger a lot and haven’t already fallen in love with one of the many other instant messenger apps for the Mac. It’s there, but I don’t consider it a major selling point.

If you use Office in a business or academic setting or you just want more from Office on the Macintosh, then Office 2011 is a solid step forward. It’s important to note that it, like most Microsoft software, is likely to become more stable, more fully featured, and more, well, workable in fits and starts over the next year or so.

If stability and predictable user response are important to you, you might wait a few Patch Tuesday cycles before diving in — or a couple of months of limited trial before rolling out the new suite to an entire company. If you’re an individual user who’s at home with beta and early release software, there’s no reason to hesitate. Even with a few rough edges, Word 2011, Excel 2011, and PowerPoint 2011 are significant upgrades to their Office 2008 for Mac counterparts.

Outlook 2011 is better than Entourage too, though it perhaps has the longest way to go before becoming a fully realized product. If Microsoft can solve the performance issues, and the company’s partners can link it to the rest of the world (by porting over all the extensions that work on Outlook for Windows), then Outlook for Mac will be a “must” application. Until then, it’s a definite maybe.

Office for Mac 2011 brings Macintosh users most of the Windows Office 2007 experience with an important bit of cloud computing thrown in. That means Mac users are still left behind, but they’re now within the same generation of technology, even if there are many features that still separate the two software worlds.

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This article, “InfoWorld review: Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 gains ground,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in Mac, Windows, Microsoft Office, and applications at InfoWorld.com.