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Includes: Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook
Format: DVD
Developer: Microsoft
Requirements: Mac OS X v10.5.8 or greater, 2.5GB hard disk space, 1GB RAM or greater, 1280 x 800 pixel resolution minimum monitor
Processor Compatibility: Intel only
Retail Price: Student version: $149.99; Office version: $279.95 [Note: the Student version does not provide Outlook.]
Availability: Out now
TThe word for the day is "ribbons." Moving from the floating Formatting Palette, Microsoft has now joined the Mac version of Office to the PC version, and we have ribbons! Also part of this transition is bringing the email client Outlook to the Mac and eliminating Entourage. Sometimes ribbons work and sometimes they do not; it depends on the application and how they are implemented. They are not the best thing in software applications and are certainly not the worst. Meanwhile I'm finding Outlook to be a major step backwards. Like any big release, there are some excellent new features and some improvements on older features. Similarly, there are some new features that one has to be wondering what they thought they were doing. Nonetheless, the new Office for Mac 2011 has been released and it's time to explore what we have.
Microsoft Office is one of those programs that everyone complains about but invariably many people end up getting anyway. Either they are stuck using it due to office and/or association demands, or they secretly appreciate all that it has to give and offer. I can't deny that last comment. As bloated as it is, MS Office has a lot to offer.
I sort of find people's complaints about Office not unlike many people's complaints about government and taxes. We don't want to pay for taxes but we also want government to fix the potholes in our roads, keep our schools the best they can be, prevent poisons from getting into our foods, etc. Similarly, we complain about product bloat but we also want our word processing program to fix our images, we want out spreadsheets to create web pages and we want our presentation program to edit video. Bloat, like terrorism, is in the eye of the beholder.
I suppose in an attempt to be a bit less, Microsoft made a mistake with Office 2008 by dropping Visual Basic with Excel 2008. Before the ink was dry after releasing Office 2008,the complaints were loud enough that MS vowed that the next release of Excel would return Visual Basic to Excel. This, thankfully enough was done and VB can be found in this release of Excel.
On the other hand, one thing you will not find in this release is Expression Media. I was one of a number of reviewers who was not enamoured with what Microsoft had done to iView Media (see my review here) and apparently Microsoft chose to cut their losses and just dump the program. I find this a double loss because I used to like iView (what the program was called before Microsoft purchased the company) and now the program and the company that created it are gone. [Is this electronic murder?]
Every iteration of Office has a new rendering of their icons for each application. I've found the icons in the past OK and not offensive. But I have to say I liked the new icons for Office 2011 from the very beginning. I find them simple, clean and neat.
Before I delve into each product in this release of Office 2011, one of the new features in Office is not in the package, but rather out of the box or rather in the clouds (as it where).
Microsoft has joined a number of other companies who are providing space in the either for cloud computing. More specifically, you can take your Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, send them up to your companies server or Microsoft's server and have other people admire, comment, or even edit those documents.
Knowing that some might be very uncomfortable about placing their sensitive documents on someone else's server, Microsoft provides two different ways to achieve the same goal of cloud computing. If you have a MS server within your company, you can set up a "SharePoint" site and place your documents on your company's server. If you do not have such abilities, and you are willing to place your documents on Microsoft's servers, you can use what is called the "SkyDrive." I should add that Microsoft's servers can be considered safe. Remember: the only people who will have access to your documents are those that you invite.
Regardless of where you send your documents, the people invited (by you) to view the documents can get permission to either read, comment, and/or edit the documents. If they have full permission to edit, they can either do that from within a browser such as FireFox or Safari, or if they have MS Office 2011, they can download the document, make any edits they chose and upload the new version. Each time a document is edited, a new version is placed on the server so that each iteration can be examined as needed. Nothing is ever tossed out inadvertently.
To access the documents on the web, one needs to have a Microsoft account (free) which requires a name (an email address) and a Password.
Editing within SkyDrive was mostly fine, there is a minor time lag as the actions need to travel along the internet. My connection is mostly good but your mileage may vary. The one area where editing in SkyDrive was a pathetic complete loss was the spell check. As shown below, when it stops on a word, correction options are provided but there are NO provisions to ignore or learn the word. If you download the document and correct, learn, and/or ignore words within Word 2011, all options are saved within the document so that when you view that same document online, all ignored and/or learned words will appear correct (not red-underlined) on SkyDrive. [This is one of the many benefits to the new XML format that Microsoft has adopted (which is why it's now .docx, not .doc for the file name). While the uniform adoption process might be painful in the short run, the benefits of the XML format will be a big boon in the long run.]
There are provisions within the online editing to prevent multi-users from editing the same paragraph and each time an online document is saved, it's saved as a new document retaining the previous version. So, if there's a concern about loosing something that was in an earlier version that might get lost, that is not an issue -- although finding which version has the content that you are looking for might be, but that's your issue.
The other big change in all of the applications is the use of "Ribbons" to access all of the tools. Gone is the Formatting Palette, long live the Formatting Palette. Each application's Ribbon has tabs that let you select the particulars of that dynamic. In a fashion, it's no different than selecting items from within menus with all the contents of that menu item displayed. In some aspects the ribbon works very well, others not-so-much. I'll be discussing particulars of the Ribbon in each application.
One aspect that has not changed is that you still need to go into too many different preferences to set the Auto-format the way that one might want. For example, let's say you are in Word and do not want any URLs you type into a document to automatically be click-able links to take you to your browser. This needs to be done in Format -> Autoformat -> Options, Preferences -> Format -> Autoformat as you type (or access the same preferences from Tools -> Autocorrect -> Autoformat as you type). These latter two items are different routes to the same tool, but that still leaves two different directions to alter one series of auto-correction. It's a real pity they didn't distill this down to one location that fixed all you wanted it to fix.
So, on to the applications that now appear in Microsoft Office 2011.
Word
When first opening Word the thing you will notice very quickly is how populated the top of the window has become. Below is a screenshot of Word 08 including the Formatting Palette lying over the document. (This image was decreased in size 65% to fit Applelinks' width constraints.) Word 08 did have the elements of a ribbon where you could examine "Document Elements," "Quick Tables," etc., but they were more picture thumbnails that you selected to model your document "like the one in the picture." It was sort of like working in a fast food place where you clicked on the picture of the hamburger as opposed to entering the price of the hamburger.
Now compare that to the top region of a Word 11 document. Due to the full width dynamics of the Ribbon, I've had to cut the view into two pieces. (Note: I maintained the same 65% reduction in size so that it could be better compared to the Word 08 view.) Now you also have tabs across the top of the ribbon but (mostly) gone are the simplistic images of how your document will look. In a fashion, this is a more grown-up approach to document creation/editing/alteration.
The view of Word 11's Ribbon above is a bit wider than what you first see with the default. I've set the preference to also display the Paragraph Indents and Space as well as the Typography sections. As one who does not place an empty paragraph between paragraphs (I set the space after a paragraph 1/2 the font size), I found it very strange and wrong for me to have to go into Format -> Paragraph to set the space between paragraphs. If you look at the bottom half of the image above, on the right side, just above the word "Themes," you see an up-facing chevron (this opens and closes the ribbon) and a gear. The gear provides access to the Ribbon's Preferences. From here you can turn on and off whatever you want to see (or not see) within the Ribbon and I was able to turn on the otherwise defaulted "Off" Typography and Paragraph Indents and Spacing. You can also reorganize the order of the tabs.
By turning off these two items, the minimum width of a Word document is 950 pixels wide, well below the minimum size of a Powerbook. By adding both features to the Ribbon, the document width is 1250 pixels and that might be an issue for those on smaller Powerbooks. As you manually decrease the width of a document (with the resize corner), various tools start either collapsing or disappearing. First to go is "Picture" (bottom right), then "Shapes," etc. As you expand the width of the document, you start to see more of the "Styles" (middle of bottom image). Even if they are not seen, you have complete access to all created styles form the dropdown menu see in the right-facing-arrow on the right side of the Styles box.
One aspect that some may have problems with is adapting to different ways of doing things you've been doing for years. For example, I often do a lot of Finding and Replacing, such as Finding all double Paragraphs and turning them into Single Paragraphs or double Spaces and turning them into single Spaces. So for years I've always tapped "Command-f" then tapped the Replace tab on the Find box. I could also have pressed Shift-Command-h and gone directly to the Replace window but I found my approach just as easy. Now, in Word '11, if you tap Command-f, you are automatically placed in the Search field on the top right corner of the document (see the right side of the top half of the image above where it says "Search in Document." However, there's no way to get to the Replace option from the Search location. Fortunately, the Shift-Command-h key-command from the past is still viable and now brings up a side panel to your document. And it's worth the extra learned habit.
As shown below, when you do a Find in this fashion, Word will highlight all of the text items that it sees in the document that you intend to Replace. Also, it doesn't make a difference if you have non-printing characters showing (e.g., spaces and paragraph symbols) for those to be displayed or not, if you've placed spaces, paragraph symbols (^p), tabs (^t), or the like in the Find, they will be displayed/highlighted as "found." Additionally note the gear icon below the Find field. There you will find controls for "Whole Words," "Ignore Case," "Sounds Like," "All Word Forms," and "Advanced Find and Replace." Ironically, when you select this last option, it brings you to the exact same dialog window as you previously had with Word 08. What's ironically disappointing is that whatever is placed in the Find field in this separated window is not highlighted as it is in the new Find and Replace interface.
Word is both a standard word processor and continues to try to be a page layout program, along with a note taking application for students, Outline application, and a Web Layout application. On the latter, it does a reasonable job of creating CSS pages but they are not lean, mean pages and are full of extra code. Suffice it to say, the folks at Adobe behind Dreamweaver are not interrupting their coffee and looking over their shoulders. However, if you have a page of content that you need to get on the web and you do not care what the code looks like, it will work. Keep in mind that there is no site management, ftp capabilities, or any ability to work with the code within the page.
The Page Layout application is the preferred tool when you wish to create newsletters and other content that requires blocks of text linking across the page or multiple pages. If you are trying to create a document that has a lot of images, tables, and other mixed content, the Page Layout is strongly recommended as opposed to using the standard Print Layout mode. When people use the Page Layout, items end up flipping all over the page and bouncing into the document's edges. Word's "Page View" was not meant to do this type of operation. If you do not have Adobe's InDesign or Quark, please use the Page Layout option in Word.
New in the Publishing Layout are layers. Actually, not really new, but much better dealt with. Any time you add a new object onto a page, it has it's own layer and whichever layer is on top has priority. As shown below I've created two layers with text. Layers "kick in" once you have more than one item on a page. On the top I show the "Arrange" options and in the middle and bottom image I show the results of shifting the top text box on top to the bottom. In these you can see how word-wrap shifts from the top to the bottom text box. Any kind of object you place on a page: graphic, image, whatever, will have layers capability.
[One other thing to note in the image above is at the drop-down menu letting you control what order of the items are. The top two options, Reorder Objects, and Reorder Overlapping Objects are discussed in the next section on PowerPoint.]
Back to the Page View mode, any inserted items live in a box that you can click to drag around the page and place where you want/need the item to be. In this regard the Page view and Layout view are similar. When working with a standard word processing document (Page View) and are usually accompanied with an icon of a ship's anchor meaning you can drag the item to a new location and it will stick. Unfortunately, this is just as cumbersome and ornery as it has been in past versions of Word. Using Word 2011, I tried to format a document with a table extending over three pages and had one blazingly rough time trying to get the various items centered and displaying them the way I wanted. While I was eventually successful, it was not a fun time. Simply, by letting items float, Word was making things far more difficult for me than if Word was simply letting the items sit on the page as they had in the long-ago past. So sadly, no improvement here.
One big improvement for a specific market is those who work with the application "ChemDraw." Back with Office '04 (but removed with Office '08) was the ability to copy and paste chemical structures into the Office applications. Now once again one can Copy from ChemDraw, Paste into an Office application (and now here's the big news) copy from (say) Word and Paste into ChemDraw and continue to edit the ChemDraw object. Strangely, this doesn't work if you drag the items into or out of Word, but nonetheless, this is a great feature. [Note: you need to be using ChemDraw Ultra 12.0.2.]
In short, there are some very nice enhanced and/or new features with Word '11. The Find/Replace window displaying what's going to be found and replaced is wonderful but limited if you need the advanced Find/Replace which is absolutely the same as Word '08. The Ribbon is fine but after working with it for a long time I can't say it's that big of a deal over the Formatting Palette from Office '08. One might say that the ribbon uses less horizontal space and thereby is an advantage to those with narrow screens, but if you have a narrow screen you probably have a screen that's not too tall and the ribbon takes up a lot of vertical space. I do like how one access Styles from the Ribbon over the Formatting Palette and I also like the new Layers Palette. The Reorder Objects is an amazing wonderful tool as you'll soon read.
If you are using Word '08, there are some nice and good new features, but it's up to your needs if they are enough to make you want to spend your money. If you are using Word '04 or Word X, this might well be worth your update, especially if you have to deal with people creating .docx documents on a regular basis.
PowerPoint
It's very hard to simply compare PowerPoint '11 to Powerpoint '08 without also adding in a bit of Apple's Keynote as well. A lot of that is because it's easy to state that Word is better/more powerful than Apple's Pages and Excel is better/more powerful than Apple's Numbers. But Keynote has in the past been better/more powerful than PowerPoint, so to best look at the value of PowerPoint '11, one should compare it to it's closest competition.
Probably the biggest thing that will stand out for those who've used PP in the past is that now most of the transitions are better rendered. Past versions of PP had a very amateur appearance for its transitions: they were clunky and did not have the grace that was always there with Keynote. The cube roll, for example, is still somewhat choppy and not as smooth as it is in Keynote, but it is soooo much better than it used to be. On the other hand, if you need to go back a step during a presentation, the transition between slides is maintained. In Keynote, if you have a transition from slide A -> B, if you go from B -> A, the transition is simply ignored. With PowerPoint '11 you get the transition in both directions. Why is this important and/or of any value? Simple: when you are in a presentation, you are trying to create a mood and structure to your talk. It's not uncommon during a presentation for a question from the audience to cause you to have to back up a slide or two. When your beautiful transition is ignored when going backwards, it's sort of like a lifting of a veil making your presentation seem more pedestrian (so to speak).
Be advised though that working with Transitions can be buggy. Not "crash and lose data" buggy but once you start working with Transitions, you will find that accessing them from the ribbon starts getting very funky. Suddenly you can't scroll back and forth to access them and the dropdown options stops working. All I could do was to click away at it over and over until I was able to access what I needed.
But while transitions are what the audience will see, what you will be working with is the presentation's construction and, unfortunately, that will still be awash with too many clicks to do what is still significantly easier to do within Keynote. I'll elaborate on working with the ribbon creating extra unnecessary work as I write.
PowerPoint does make it incredibly easy to customize every aspect of your document's look. You can select a template and with a few clicks, make that template so different that its own mother couldn't recognize it. While all this customization has great potential, I do find two problems with this: first off, if you do not notate exactly how you did things and where you made the changes, it can be almost impossible to duplicate (if necessary) unless you really really know PP. Secondly, you can spend so much time on just the look of your presentation that you may not have much time left to create the presentation. Nonetheless, the options are at least there. Let me also add that Microsoft has done a nice job in mixing fonts, colors, shapes, etc. My recommendation is to select one and leave it be. Sadly, some people have more taste in their mouths than they do in their head and some pretty ugly looking presentations can be created without too much effort. Be forewarned.
To start out as early as possible with some of the nifty new features in PP, one only has to look at how PP deals with multiple objects on a slide. In just about every application where you can place such multiple objects, there are menu selections to move an to the top or the bottom of their visual position. This option is here as well. But if you do not know what items are above or below the specific object you want to move, this can be confusing or frustrating. MS has established a new standard for arranging items that are stacked on top of each other, the "Reorder Objects" option. As shown below, from the Home or Format ribbon tab, you can either do the standard reordering ("send forward, backward, etc.), or, if you select the "Reorder Objects" selection, your whole computer screen blacks out and the objects on the slide shift to a 3-D view where you can grab an item and move it left or right to change it's orientation. If an object is selected before you begin, it will be highlighted in this view and if only several items are overlapping (and there's no reason to see all of the items on the slide), you can select to only look at the "...Overlapping Objects." This is a dynamic that I wish all object-oriented applications could move to.
Laying out objects on a slide is frustrating if you are used to working with Keynote because there are no smart-guide lines indicating when you are in the middle, half, third, or quarter of a slide or allignment with another object. Similarly, Like Keynote, there are fields letting you know the size of an object's height and width on the ribbon. However, if you wish to access the location of the object on the slide, you need to right-click the object and select "Format Picture." From there, the last tab displays the position fields. You have to OK this window before you can re-access any other content on a slide or a different slide. If you are trying to coordinate the position of two objects on two different slides, that means you need to access slide 1, note the position, close the window, change to slide 2, click on the 2nd object, right-click to select the Position option, make any necessary changes, close the widow, and check your work. This need of requiring many steps to do something basic is prevalent in PP.
When you start to create a presentation, you have the option to view a collection of themes. Ironically, as opposed to Office '08 where you could view the theme selection in PowerPoint's ribbon, in PP '11, you open up a floating Palette and view the various themes in a fashion very similar to Keynote. The one big difference (and advantage with PP) is that on the right hand side you can view the various page construction variations (one image, no image, title space, etc.), you can accept or choose other color themes, you can accept or change the default fonts, and you can alter the slides aspect ratio. If you do not make these changes at this point, you can easily alter them later on in your presentation construction process.
PowerPoint '08 already had a strong ribbon presence and this ribbon incorporates that which wasn't a ribbon before. Or, as in the case above, removes items that were in the previous ribbon.
Once you've figured out your theme, you can either start to work on your presentation or customize your workspace in the same way you could with Office '08 by customizing your Toolbar. As shown below, when you select Customizing the Toolbar, a mini-version of PP's menus show up and you can drag down to any menu command and drag that item to the Toolbar. This seems like a very good idea with lots of potential, but there are interesting limitations: Not everything you want can be found in menu selections. For example: the creation of new slides. If you look at the image below, you can see an icon for a new slide on the left, below the "HOME" tab of the ribbon. I can find no option to generate a new slide from any of PP's menus. Which means that the only place to click for a new slide is where you see it below. The catch is that you have to be in the Home tab to have access to the New Slide icon. If you are in any other tab, you cannot click on an icon to generate a new slide. Yes, you can press Shift-Command-n and generate a new slide,which will be a duplicate (sans data) of the current selected slide. If you want to change the new slides layout (one image, two image, text only, etc.), you still have to go back to the Home tab to access those options.
From all this I find the workflow of PowerPoint occasionally tedious, especially if you try to limit yourself to only mousing and not use key commands. For example, lets say I want to fine-tune a transition and I want to see my changes in full-screen play mode. I tap on the Transitions ribbon tab, select my transition and/or make my orientation fine-tuning (left to right, etc., time for effect, etc.). If I click the "Play" icon on the Transitions, tab, I will only see my effect within the confines of the image that I'm looking at. If I want to see the effect in the whole of the full presentation, I then have to click into the Home tab and then click the Play icon in that view.
New to Animation in PP '11 are motion paths, a welcome addition and this now brings this dynamic of PP Animations up to Keynote. Unfortunately, both Keynote and PowerPoint for the Mac are behind the Animation capabilities of PowerPoint for the PC which can have a formal Animation timeline which makes coordinating multiple animations much easier to do.
Another great addition to PP '11 over Keynote is that when you are rehearsing your presentation, you see each transition. When you are in Presentation mode in Keynote, you see the current and next slide but as you press the mouse or right-arrow key to advance the slide, the slides change but you do not see the transition (your audience will). In PowerPoint '11 both of you will. I tip my hat completely in favor of PowerPoint on this as it's a big gapping hole for Keynote.
Creating a Quicktime movie (.mov) of a PP document is profoundly disappointing. All transitions are removed and replaced by a fade to next slide. There is no way to control the QT movie by slide-to-slide control by mouse-clicks (as you can with Keynote). If there's a movie file within the transition, the movie plays (which is good) but then you look at the movies show screen for an equal length of time as the movie plays before moving onto the next slide. That is, if the movie plays for 30 seconds, after the movie finishes playing, you stare at the show screen for 30 seconds before you move on to the next slide. And, while you can save a Keynote out to a PP presentation and Keynote can open (and use) a PowerPoint presentation, the reverse cannot be done by PP. Thus, if you have been using Keynote and wish to move the presentation over to PowerPoint, be sure to save it out as a PP presentation before you quit Keynote.
Microsoft does provide a variety of ways to share your presentation over the internet but all of them have limitations that are caused by either bandwidth limitations of the recipient, loss of most (or all) transitions, loss of audio, and movies will not play. On the other hand, it is possible to have multiple people work on a presentation via SkyDrive. However, like trying to edit a Word document in SkyDrive, you will have better results to download the file and work on it within PP '11 but if the recipient does not have PP '11, they can work on it from within their browser.
Probably my biggest complaint with PP is nothing new and is something that's been around for a long time: one of the dynamics that one can add to slide transitions is a sound file. Trust me, if you ever want to look like a profound amateur at PowerPoint, add some applause sounds in between slides. That is just about as bad as having wayyyy too much text and for each slide facing the screen and reading all the text along with your audience. In this humble reporters opinion, MS could substantially improve PP by removing the sound files from PP.
In short, if you are using any previous version of PP, this is a big step up. I would still chose Keynote over PP '11, but your work may not allow that and the need to share and work with other who use PP may pre-determine which application you need to work with. There is a lot going for this release of PP, unfortunately there are a number of aspects within the application that make creating presentations a lot more complicated and/or laborious than they need to be.
Excel
Of all the Office's applications, it's Excel that probably has the most going for it with this new release. That's not to diminish the value of the other applications, but if you are a hard-core Excel user, this is a "must get" update.
The Ribbons get put to very good use in Excel. I found that it was easier to navigate and access items that I wanted. Locating desired operations was easy to do and I also found less multiple steps to get where I wanted than in the other Office apps. But on to the review of the features:
First off, Microsoft made a major blunder with Excel '08 when they removed VBA, Visual Basic for Applications. What removing VBA meant is that MS removed macros from an application that used them richly. Before the ink was dry in Seattle, Microsoft vowed it would reinstate Macros back into Excel. Not only have they reinstated Macros, but they've made it more in line with the PC version of Excel and thereby improve and enhance cross platform compatibility. And yes, if you have Macros from Office 2004, they will be compatible with 2011. Because of the removal of VBA with Office 2008, there was no reason for those with Office 2004 to upgrade, now with Office 2011, there's no reason not to.
Excel 2008 had Pivot Tables but in 2011 they are much easier to access and use. If you use a database, like FileMaker, you are used to the ability to manipulate data in its order, placement, and presentation. But that's not so easy with a spreadsheet. Pivot Tables are about as close as you can get to a database and they are dirt simple now in Excel. As shown below, on the top is a collection of data in a spreadsheet. It was assembled in a first-come first-enter fashion and beyond the fact that it would be very easy to get a total sum of the profit, That's about the only thing that would be easy to generate from this list. Below that is what you can get from a Pivot Table in a few clicks. It was shockingly easy.
Another new feature in Excel '11 are Sparklines. Sparklines are little micro-line graphs that are only a cell big and can display the comings and goings of data along a row. Using this same Pivot Table above (since it was handy), I created the Sparkline to the right as shown below. All these are intended to do is to provide a quick visual look-see for how a given trend is developing across any given row. They are not intended to provide an accurate display of the data, only relative appearance and for that they do a great job. Sparklines work in rows, they do not work in columns.
As with the other applications in Office '11 there are many many (many) ways to customize and enhance your final product. Excel has too many ways as well. The fact is, a secretary where I work was complimented recently by providing some tables that were attractive. It wasn't the data, it wasn't how the data was arranged, it was that the table was attractive. To make sure you have an opportunity to get a complement from a superior, Excel has many ways to make your tables attractive. besides themes, Conditional Formatting, Font customization, there are also Themes. As shown below, once a theme is established on a table, it can be further customized by any row and sorting by your wish and desire. Ah, if only the data would place itself on the page...
Lastly,one more new feature for this review: Conditional Formatting. Not really new, but enhanced and improved. Below is our trusty set of data where I've selected the data and then selected Format -> Conditional Formatting. From there I selected which formatting I wanted and displayed below is the window to edit and fine-tune the appearance I want. If you want your pretty data to stand out and say something, this is one big way to do that.
Overall I've not a big Excel user. But I have to admit that with the new features, capabilities, I am more inclined to pull up Excel than I have in the past. Excel's ability to manipulate the data beyond straightforward ascending or descending sorting means that operations that in the past were not to be even considered are now very doable. Plus, it's so easy to make your tables pretty, well, let the colors begin.
In short, I find that this release of Excel provides a level of interaction and ease of use to be a big winner. I also found that the ribbon gave me the least issues or problems than I found in other applications from within Office. The ease of doing automatic Pivot Tables was remarkable, and I find Sparklines to be a great "snapshot" tool because sometimes that's all you need.
Outlook
One of the biggest items in this release of Office is that Outlook is finally available for the Mac. As much as the MBU (Mac Business Unit) at Microsoft tried to make Entourage as much like Outlook as they could, Entourage was never Outlook. If you work in offices, the Mac was always at a disadvantage due to the interactively features that Outlook provided (and Entourage couldn't keep up). Since I work in a university, I was looking forward to the advantages that my PC friends always had. If you do not purchase the "Office" version of Microsoft Office, you will not get Outlook (or Entourage for that matter.) For the extra $130, you get Outlook, and at this point in time, I sadly say, save your money.
Outlook for the Mac has some very specific and minimum system requirements. The following is copied from the MS specs, please note the one item in blue:
More specifically, if you do not have the minimum server requirements, your email will not show up at all. Zip, nada. Your only alternative is to access your email via a standard IMAP format and all the benefits of Outlook are out the window. [No pun intended.] Ironically, I can link my 2008 Entourage to the same servers with the broken connectivity that Entourage provides and it works in its limited fashion just fine. In other words, I can do a connection (albeit not perfect) with Entourage set in the Exchange mode but not with Outlook because our servers are not the newest that Microsoft provides.
I don't know whether this is strange or sad because Entourage has been a pain in the neck: I find that Entourage crashes often (never with data loss). Furthermore, I am tired of telling Entourage over and over that a specific message is not Spam (and that messages from myself to groups are not Spam), and other nuances that I was ready to move on from. But the nuances with Outlook were insurmountable.
If your email is set with the newer emails above older emails in Entourage, and you open the earliest email, when you delete that email, the next (newer) email in sequence is selected is the one above the deleted email. This email is newer and is now ready for viewing. In Outlook, rather than moving to the newer email, it moves to the older email below the one you just deleted. Thus, you delete an email, take your mouse and click on the one above, read, delete, take your mouse and click on the one above, etc. Big pain #1.
Another feature loss has to do with quickly making active a series of email with commonality. Specifically, I often keep emails in a thread until the thread is complete and then delete the full thread. This can be seen in the top image below where I'm selecting all three messages by simply clicking on the "DC" thread header. From here I can easily delete all three by clicking on the Trash can using Entourage.
In Outlook 2011 (the bottom image above), this doesn't work at all. By clicking on the thread's header, nothing happens. The only way to make all three active is to click on the first and Shift-click on the last emails or simply delete them one-at-a-time. With three messages, this is not that big of a deal, but threads that go on to 40-50+ messages it becomes a big hassle. Especially since I'm used to doing it by the easy Entourage way. Big pain #2.
One more complaint on how the transition from Entourage to Outlook just disappointed: In Entourage, on the bottom left of the window, while looking at email, you had the option to have a month's view of a calendar as shown below on the left. On the right is the same region in Outlook, no calendar. This has nothing to do with the Calendar function within either Entourage or Outlook, it was only a month's view at a time. You could go forward or back by month (after month) and that's about it. But it was very very convenient when someone asked you about any given day and you could look at the little calendar and see that the third Saturday was on the 18th or whatever. It's always the little things. Little pain #3.
All I can say is that it is fortunate that I did not delete my copy of Office 2008. I've given up trying to use Outlook and have gone back to using Entourage 2008. While I can accept that new versions of software require the latest in release of assisting software, in other words, that's why this Outlook requires the latest servers. But what I cannot accept is the loss of so many tools that I've grown accustom to and depend up to get me through my day at work or my activities at home. I'd like to think that none of the issues that have stopped me from using Outlook are difficult to overcome. But until they are dealt with, I'm still quite satisfied with Entourage from 2008. Now, if only they would fix that spam issue...
In short, I'd like to be able to report on how Outlook worked in my work environment, but I can't. Overall, Outlook was not too different than Entourage but in my day by day usage, it was much more painful to use. It was more desirable for me to constantly take the same messages out of spam over and over than to deal with the dreadful interactions of Outlook.
Overall view
In short, if one overlooks the dreadfully bad Outlook, this is a good release of Microsoft Office 2011. I'm giving this 4 out of 5 "A". Where I found Office to be frustrating was how many operations required more than an acceptable amount of mouse clicks and/or interactions to get something done. The new ribbon on all of the applications sometimes helped and other times simply got in the way.
Unfortunately, Outlook was the weakest link in this whole set. If your company uses Exchange servers but does not have the most recent release, Outlook can't connect to anything except typical IMAP connections. Not the end of the world but not what you are paying Microsoft to provide. [And I repeat that this is so ironic since Entourage can connect to just about any Exchange server albeit not in the same robust capability that Outlook can.]
But if you focus on the other applications in Office: Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, there's a lot to like. Excel is exceptional, Word is powerful, and PowerPoint is very good. While one still has too many places to look for to fine-tune the auto-correction features, the new Microsoft Office is a good buy.
Applelinks Rating
___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.
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