Microsoft reveals Office for Mac 2011 will be 32-bit only - Page 2

Has any unreleased software product ever enjoyed so many posts? Not only is it unattractive, M$ knows how to drag out product releases to the point where it's actually aggravating.

I think some people have very large Excel spreadsheets, though maybe those projects should be reviewed to make sure XL is the best tool for the job. Most of us don't need 64 bit office for the short term. What's more worrying is 2011 software is still planned as a carbon app suite. Office for Mac is supposed to be Microsoft's most profitable pieces of software, I don't know what's up with that.

All of Apple's own laggards should be kicked up to Cocoa too.

From the screenshots it is looking better than the previous version.

The Apple version will still have the menus too, so you'll get a visual instruction of the keyboard shortcut, if there is one. The Windows Office ribbon doesn't tell you those keyboard shortcuts, not on hover, clicking, right clicking... This really slows you down if you haven't used it for a while. Never mind the switching between ribbons.

I will remain with Office 2004 until it quits working. At that point it's OpenOffice time.

For very small docs -- for anything of any size or complexity I would not want to work with the iPad (using Pages or MS Word). I am a huge iPad fan but I just don't see the use case for creating large documents. I do see a case for reading, reviewing and commenting -- maybe seven as a minor collaborator. I just do not think that the current multitouch interface (and especially virtual keyboard) cuts it. That is nt to say that it cannot be enhanced and refined to do so.

Give me 'Word Lite' that renders correctly and lets me see what will be produced and allow me to at least markup and embed comments like in Reader. I suspect that that would fulfill most users desires - but the key is the ability to render documents from both Mac and Windows accurately (as well as across versions).

This comment makes no sense to me at all.

First you make some arbitrary line between "big" and "small" documents when a more sensible line to draw is document complexity? Secondly, while there are fairly obviously some missing features in the initial offering of Pages on the iPad, those will almost certainly be filled in with the next release.

Finally, you end up with a plea for "Word lite" when in fact the current Pages offering on the iPad is basically that. It has flaws, it's not as full featured as the desktop version, etc.

It sounds to me like you just like or prefer Word. That's fine, but don't try to frame some silly argument that Pages is just for "lite" documents, and then turn around and ask for "Word lite."

It's nonsensical and just comes across as an insult.

I really like iWork and moreso on the iPad but lets be honest in saying that, as of right now, iWork for iPad is a stripped down version of the Mac. iWork on the Mac is a stripped down version of Office. There are even compatibility issues between the Mac and iPad versions of iWork.

It still has a long way to go on the iPad and hopefully Apple will continue to invest in it. Numbers doesn't even have Excel support and considering that iWork tends to have problems with extremely large documents on the Mac, I expect an even worse situation on the iPad. For 95% of the population iWork is enough but for the business crowd they will need something more powerful.

I welcome Office for the iPad because, not only can competition be a good thing, but it would also help push the legitimacy of the iPad as the next PC. For all the hatred of Office (which is somewhat well-deserved) it is the standard and the most purchased app on the Mac. I'm sure MS is paying attention to iPad sales and they should know that they will make a killing off such a product. It would continually be in the top 5 of purchased app and the App Store would be a good way for preventing piracy.

I realize that the vast majority of users don't need a 64-bit office application but there are certainly some that do. I'm a grad student working in molecular modeling, which generates large amounts of data. It would be nice to occasionally be able to use Excel for certain things but, as it stands, Excel is virtually unusable for this application. Sadly, it looks like it will remain unusable for the foreseeable future.

I understand the sentiments that MS (and Adobe) have had plenty of time to get their apps moved to Cocoa, but note that Apple also had the same time and more to get their apps moved to Cocoa and there seem to be plenty that are 32-bit Carbon apps.

If Apple isn't going to be on the ball migrating their apps then I can't cry foul on MS for doing the same. Sure, Apple's iWork is completely Cocoa but it's a new suite that started off as Cocoa so it's not a great argument in Apple's favour.

I just got Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac from school after first trying Open Office (runs terribly on in MAC OS), then I stuck with Neo Office for over a year. It was good, not great. Office 2008 can get sluggish, which is annoying. But yeah, its much more compatible with Windows folks, and does a better job at grammar and spelling I've found.

I have Office 2007 on my PC at work, and I actually like it a lot. I do not like the separate window that floats around in Office 2008 and Pages that pulls all the font/spacing/styles/margin/paragraph etc out of the top bar. Come to think of it, I bet theres a way to put all that stuff in the top menu in Office 2008 where it belongs.

I have to agree with you here. It takes forever, and on a PC it loads and runs pretty zippy.

Long time ago their was a good Mac word processor named MS Word 5 for Mac. Then Microsoft decided to absorb the MacBU back into MS's application division with the goal of developing both WIndows and Mac Word from the same code base, same look, same GUI. That abomination was called Word 6 for Mac.
It was big. It was slow. It was buggy. The college I was attending refused to support it because it was so bloated it had difficulty running on the campus macs and was so different in style that they needed to retrain students and staff on how to use it.
Nobody liked it and Microsoft eventually released the MacBU from their application division and let them do their mac thing. And people rejoiced.

Office 2011 will be a welcome upgrade as I need Excel because Numbers is a toy and can't hold a candle to Excel when it comes to working with pivot tables.

I can't help but recall back when I owned a computer store in England. 16 bit machines were making appearances and all the same talk went on the. "Who the hell needs 16 bit software? 8 bit is all you need for .... "

Be that as it may it still makes little sense. You would have thought they would merge the two over time to find a GUI that was acceptable to both Windows and Mac users. I remember jumping from Dreamweaver on Windows to Mac and being frustrated at the differences. Why not the same? Sure, stick to platform conventions but beyond that try to make them as damn near identical as possible. Just makes life easier for everybody.

Too bad, you're missing out on iWork. It's a nice suite, and inexpensive. OOo is still kinda ugly, and it isn't as smooth. But, it is free, so that's nice.

First thing I said was about small docs or more complex larger docs. Did you read what I wrote?

MS interface has long been the kitchen sink version of a sucky WinWord GUI. Why do they feel this need to put everything in the front like a pawn shop (i.e. toolbar, ribbon and menus from hell)?

I actually prefer Pages for creating a document.

I find that in the business world (developing software and such) that I need to use Word. I have no desire to have that huge hunk of bloatware on my machines. I do however find it to be almost a requirement since there is so much of the world that has standardized on it.

The point I was trying to making was that preparing large (yes -- a subjective term, because it is not that easily quantified) and/or complex documents are not suited for creation on the iPad IMO. I would however, embrace the idea of an application that accurately rendered all Word documents, both cross platform and cross version, and then allowed me to mark up, do some limited editing, and comment on existing formatted content but not necessarily for the creation of complex/large docs.

I hear regularly that Pages will render 98% of a Word doc, or OpenOffice can handle all but a few MS Word features here and there. Until it can do it all it does not meet what I would like to have. Hell MS does not have a product AFAIKT that can translate all of even there latest version documents cross platform. It seems there is always some exception.

I never said Pages was a lite version of anything -- you did. I certainly did not plea for it but would be more than willing to use a product that met the requirements above. I am no lover of MS and would love to see Apple deliver with Pages in a version that would be able to read it all. It is a shame that MS got in and managed to play a part in the standardized XML format. It would have been nice to have had a platform agnostic file format.

As far as being an insult I think you must have some other interest here that I am not aware of since I made no disparaging remarks about Pages. WTF? Having a bad day are we?

I can feel your pain.. every time I use these apps I loose time shifting stuff around or some other clean-up jobs that isn't productive. It's a real time-waster and frustrating... and if I didn't have to use them I definately wouldn't.

I don't think MS will ever grasp how to make a sleek Office suite. They are in "more is better" land

so what is the advantage of 64 bit that makes it so vital for a program like Office.



thank you for playing but no. WWDC is not all iOS.

3 of the special events had nothing to do with iOS. One was by NASA, one by some folks at Pixar and one by CNN. The sessions and labs cover both iOS and MacOS. As is fitting since it is the DEVELOPERS Conference and not the iphone conference

More than 4GB of RAM for a spreadsheet? As previously noted by a poster who needs it for scientific data collection.

That is specific to one person, even one small subset. Not something that everyone would need and thus the application is total shite.


That's not entirely true. Microsoft did initially decide on their own to make a Mac version of Word etc. But then were prevented from stopping due to a lawsuit. Actually a couple of them, from the early 90s. it's a big complex mess but in the end, Apple agreed to install IE as the Mac web browser for a set period of years and Microsoft agreed to keep updating Office for Mac. For the same period of time. Now it's a matter of keeping the inflow of money as many businesses are so engrained in Office that they don't want to relearn to switch to iWork.

Do most users need 64bit Office? Yes because they run 64bit Mac OS X.

The number one reason why Flash kicks in the fans hardcore is because it is a 32bit app running on a full 64bit OS. That means on the fly translation from 32bit to 64bit which means more work for the computer to do.

64bit isn't just about faster speeds it's about efficiency and the more efficient you can be the better.

Considering for the past 5 years Macs have been on a 64bit platform Microsoft is way behind the ball but then when are they in front of it?

I actually paid for the very first iWork release. Keynote totally owns PowerPoint, and that was 5 years ago. It probably annihilates it by now. I haven't had to do any slide presentations since then that would warrant revisiting Keynote.

Pages I was sort of on the fence about. It was absolutely amazing with things that would normally be the domain of something like InDesign, but not that great in the traditional Word Processor department. Again, we're talking 2005 -- obviously things have matured.

Numbers I've never used since it didn't exist back then. For what I do with spreadsheets I'm sure its fine.

iWork hasn't been ruled out. Yet if the feel of Pages is the same as back then, I'll likely end up in OpenOffice land. I work as a writer so I get comfy in certain environments and don't like drastic change. That's one reason I haven't moved to Office 2008 and its horrible interface, even on Intel hardware.

I'm retired and don't need MS Office to be fully compatible anymore. The next time I upgrade my word processing and spreadsheet software I will go with Apple's iWork. It doesn't seem to have all the capabilities of MS Office but that may only be because I'm not as familiar with iWork.

I am about as big an Apple fan as a person can be, and I sometimes cringe at the thought of a world without Apple, and I shudder at the thought of ever having to use Windows again. That being said, Word is a tool to create documents -no more and no less. A hallmark of Apple design is that it tends to avoid obsessing over technical specifications, and focuses instead on utility and experience.

If the new Office proves itself to be a more capable tool than the previous version, and is less cumbersome to use, then I think it will be appropriate to consider it a success. If, alternatively, it fails to be more useful and/or user-friendly, then those should be the bases on which the product is chastised.

I do think that we, as Apple users with a higher level of knowledge and understanding than the average user, should avoid fueling the debate over tech-specs that are really nothing more than fodder for arguments between people who are not sophisticated enough to qualitatively critique technology in a meaningful way.

If it were another company, who had a full plate of software on their table, I don't think many people would be outraged about it being part-Carbon or 32-bit.

The fact is though, the MacBU doesn't have any other project but Office, so you'd think they could get it right. I wonder if they'll delay right-to-left language support yet again, blaming it on the Carbon interface? Windows Office has had it for over 10 years.

When I hear the word MacBU all I can picture is 50 people with their feet on the desk, playing video games -- taking calls and checking E-Mails in between. Why is it a company like Panic can turn out awesome apps with one or two devs behind the wheel, but these jerkoffs can't even get one product right with 50 people working on it and a huge budget? Load a 100+ page document into Word on a Mac and watch it trudge through; then open the same doc on a PC and it handles it splendidly. Better yet, load the same doc in something like OpenOffice and watch it fly. Remember when the XML switch happened on PCs, and open source methods of reading XML Office docs on Mac arrived on the scene months before MS provided a workaround? That's why people shit on MS when they hear stuff like this.

I remember Roz Ho speaking at WWDC or something one year, sounding like she had no idea what was actually going on. It was laugh inducing. When you have someone leading your department whose presentation skills are equal to a sixth grader's, you know that division is not being taken seriously. Yes, I know she's gone now but . . .

And Apple's excuse for iTunes (as one example) being 32 bit Carbon is what exactly?

Exactly. It would be nice, but not because of 32 vs 64 bit. I would prefer that they completed their transition to Cocoa, but I couldn't care less that it's 32 bit.

Can anyone explain why I need a 64 bit word processor?


I would go one step further. I hate the ribbon interface, but I'm willing to live with it if it's identical to the Windows version. If there's ANY difference (even colors), what's the point of forcing Mac users to accept the crappy ribbon convention? Either make the UI identical or optimize the UI for each platform and let them look different.

In the immortal words of Mr. Miyagi:
"Walk on road, hm? Walk left side, safe. Walk right side, safe. Walk middle, sooner or later get squish just like grape."

I use Mac Office at work. I need it to be compatible. It does that well.

Entourage is shit. Lack of VBA is shit. They are fixing those, good. Strangly, I'm most looking forward to Outlook to push sync with Google. Probably not what MS or Apple had in mind. Bits? Not gonna affect me.

I will be smug that Mac Office 2010 still has a menubar in addition to the ribbons. Ribbons have destroyed what user experience there was for many.

Always something left out of OFfice for Mac users.

So, it's been like what, almost 10 years since Apple told everyone to get their a$$ onto Cocoa? 32/64bit doesn't really matter with office apps. Don't care about that. I just can't believe MS STILL hasn't transitioned to Cocoa. There are other good reasons to make the transition - like leaving outdated slow/bloat code behind.

Despite their feet dragging, I'll probably buy Office 2011 for use at work. It looks to be a huge improvement over the '08 version, and I'm glad it does NOT look exactly like the Windows version - I can't stand to use the Windows version. *hair pulling*

Like I said above

And Apple's excuse for iTunes (as one example) being 32 bit Carbon is what exactly?

Agree. PowerPoint is worst of them all. Horrible, just horrible

A speed boost isn't a benefit?


Absolutely, the coverage of this reminded me of iTunes.


If I had a better alternative I'd use it.


Excellent point. Apple has tended to be just as bad an offender if not worse.


Speed. True, it's not a major speed bump, but apps this bloated need all the help they can get.

I have yet to see an app that didn't run faster in 64 bit mode.

Song Bird is pretty good, but not perfect.

What's sad is that Office-type programs have gotten so bloated and inefficient despite how few demands people have of it. If it were efficient in the first place, I don't think you'd notice if it were 32 or 64 bit. I do just as well with a ten year old Office-type suite as I do with the latest, I've run the old suite for a long time just because it was so much more efficient than something that's current.


That's not the number one reason why flash sucks. Just another reason. Macromedia scripting-type products have been exasperatingly inefficient even in the 16 bit era. Though I don't know about this "on the fly translation" business. Most of the 32 bit code should be running natively.

Does anyone actually remember that Microsoft Office (well... Word actually...) was actually released on the Mac *first*?

As I will remain with Office v.X until it quits working.

I'm certain Excel was originally written for the Mac; it was distributed on a single floppy disk.

Word was originally a DOS program. The first Windows version was awful, but became marginally useful after Windows 3.0.

AFAIK first Mac version of Word was 5.1 and it was pretty good. At least one subsequent version was a Windows port and it was abysmal. I'm pretty sure I used Word 5.1 until OS X.

Microsoft's business seems modeled after the US car industry. Every year they have to come up with something different, just for the sake of it.

This didn't help the US car industry.