Filed under: Computing | Tags: 2011, academic, mac, Office, office for mac, office for mac 2011
On October 26th Microsoft released the latest edition of their Office for Mac suite, Office for Mac 2011, and what an update. As a staff member at a higher education institution I am thankfully able to purchase the suite at a much reduced price (AUS$99) for the entire suite of applications as opposed to the full cost (AUS$379), and I also elected to pay a small additional fee to have them send me a backup DVD copy of the suite so that I am able to install in the future should something ever go wrong.
As I was purchasing online I was immediately able to download from Micrsoft’s online distribution platform Digital River, I must say they do need to get this platform off of the old 56k modem technology, the downloads coming in at 14-26KB/sec is just pathetic for such a large company, the download took over 16 hours to come in on a fast ADSL connection.
The morning following my purchase, as it hadn’t finished downloading by the time I’d gone to sleep, I set about installing my new purchase. Installation was reasonably quick and painless. One thing that did surprise me was that it never offered to remove my older Office for Mac 2008 installation, I was actually forced to do this myself manually later on. When I went to uninstall Office for Mac 2008 via its remove Office tool, found in a sub-folder, I just about lost it when I heard the familiar trash can sound, just precious.
The first application I ran of course was the only application new to the suite, Outlook. This was the application I was most excited to have, like most I could not stand Microsoft’s foisting of Entourage upon me as it was truly an awful application, thus I had to get going with migrating my mail from Mail. I was quite surprised that it failed to migration my inbox emails, but it did migrate my other mail folders, so I ended up having to go back to Mail, create a folder “Inbox mails”, copy those emails from the inbox to there, and re-import once more. I am surprised their testing failed to check this prior to release, major oversight on their part and completely unacceptable. Prior to installation I also knew it didn’t import iCal calendars, I think that is rubbish, they’ve had enough time to hook into that, so I was forced to export an .ics file and drag it over the calendars area, quick and painless, but annoying. I wasn’t aware that I would have to export my contacts from Address Book and similarly drag the .vcf over the contacts area.
Word, Excel and Powerpoint have all received nice updates via their ribbon interface. One thing I have noticed with subsequent starts is that these applications are all loading significantly faster than before, almost instantaneously on a late 2008 unibody alu MacBook 4GB 7200rpm hard disk. Microsoft have done a brilliant job with the speed of loading of these applications, its’ amazing. I also very much like the gallery feature and its options that allow you to select colour schemes and fonts options for your projects, really nice.
So far, aside from the minor quirks there with imports for Outlook 2011, very much liking Office for Mac 2011, this is a very worthy and welcomed upgrade to Office on the Mac that finally gives us parity I feel with our Windows colleagues instead of leaving us their poor cousins.
Leave a Comment so far
Leave a comment
