Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 review

Outlook makes it onto Mac OS X, VBA scripts return to Mac Excel, and Mac users can integrate with Office Web Apps

Uveiled in February and available from the end of October, Office for Mac 2011 could be a must-have for businesses whose staff primarily work on Mac systems, but also have to deal with Microsoft's Office applications.

New developments in this latest version include Outlook displacing the Mac Entourage email client, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) scripts returning to Excel, and users now getting access to Microsoft's hosted Office Web applications.

There are two versions of Office for Mac 2011, each with two licensing options.

Home & Student costs £89.99 ex. VAT for one user, and £109.99 ex. VAT for three users, while for Home & Business pricing for one user is £189.99 ex. VAT and for two users £239.99 ex. VAT.

The difference in price is reflected in the fact that the Home & Student package doesn't have Outlook included, but corporate Mac users might prefer a version dedicated to business.

Install
We installed Office for Mac 2011 Home & Business version on one of Apple's latest MacBook Air laptops, the 13.3in model with an Intel 1.86GHz Core 2 Duo processors, 2GB of system memory, and a 256GB solid-state storage (SSD) device.

The install took under five minutes, took up 1.65GB of disk space, and dropped seven icons onto the MacBook's application dock: Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, Microsoft Messenger, Microsoft Document Connection and Remote Desktop Connection.

New Features
The last Mac for Office version was Office 2008, with the core applications in that release being Entourage, Excel, PowerPoint and Word.

Perhaps the most welcome change for business Mac users is the re-introduction of VBA scripting for Excel and Outlook, replacing the Mac email client Entourage.

VBA scripting's omission from Excel in the 2008 version of Office for Mac wasn't greeted with any enthusiasm by Mac users when it was pulled from that release.

Anyone wondering if the Access database makes an appearance in Office for Mac 2011 will be disappointed again - it's not included, and neither are other applications Windows Office users get as standard, such as OneNote and Publisher.

Office for Mac 2011 user interface
Outlook replaces Entourage in 2011, but although the new version of Outlook may appeal to Mac users, the fact that it only works with Exchange 2007 - which itself requires 64-bit hardware - might be a stopper if firms are still using Exchange 2003.

The Office user interface was radically changed by Microsoft on Office 2007, introducing a tabbed toolbar extending the width of the application - called the 'ribbon', which drew criticism from established users due to its difference from Office 2003's menus and toolbars user interface.

Mac users buying Office for Mac 2011 get a chance to experience the ribbon interface, although there are some differences between Windows Office 2010 and the Mac Office version.

However, the Mac Office version still has the old menus and toolbars interface parked on top of the ribbon UI.

Mac v. Windows differences
The platform differences between Office versions are probably due to Microsoft not doing a straight port of Office 2010 across to the Mac platform, but rewriting the application using a separate software development team.

All the Mac Office applications allow users to save documents either to a nominated SkyDrive account or a SharePoint portal. Interestingly, the Mac version of PowerPoint allows users to save presentations as a movie with the option of adding a soundtrack, but the transition effects between slides defaults to fade.

Mac PowerPoint users can also choose to broadcast the movie to other Windows Live ID users, although we couldn't see any similar functionality to broadcast through SharePoint portals.

While Mac Word users will see a feature set similar to the Windows version, it's again audio and movie media that show the difference. Mac users can insert audio and movie clips into Word documents, which only show up as images for Windows Word users.

During our tests with Excel VBA scripts we encountered several stability problems, however, manually checking for program updates showed a large 110MB update (Offcie 2011 14.0.1) for the package, which made the whole program a lot more stable.

Also new in Mac Excel are sparklines, a way of visualising data trends by showing bar charts or graphs using specifically defined data in an Excel worksheet (see below).

Outlook's inclusion in Office for Mac 2011 should please business users, especially the ability to import .PST files, and add other email accounts easily. We could easily add a Googlemail account to our Outlook application, for example.

Mac Office Web applications
With Office 2011, users can now take advantage of SkyDrive storage, accessible through a Windows Live account using the Microsoft Document Connection icon on the Mac's dock, but users are limited to accessing just one SkyDrive account.

To improve how Office web apps work, we also installed the Microsoft Silverlight plug-in for Safari.

We could share SkyDrive archived documents with people and co-edit Excel and PowerPoint files in the browser, although for some reason we had problems co-editing Word files.

Users also won't be able to co-edit SkyDrive documents with the local Office client application when other users are editing them through the browser.

Large corporates not wishing to drop business-critical documents onto consumer-focused SkyDrive accounts, can opt to connect to their own SharePoint portal and save documents there.