Review: Microsoft's Office 2011 for Mac - Page 2

OK, what I meant was: I have no problem getting Word to put images where I want them. However...


It does sound like you were tackling more of a page-layout type problem than a word processing problem. Pages is more of a consumer-level InDesign than a simplified Word. All I know is that for what I do (technical writing) Pages just doesn't cut it. There's no way I would use anything other than Word.


When 2008 first came out, Excel was actually mindblowingly slow. Like, it was almost impressive that they had managed to make it so slow. Since then it has come on leaps and bounds, and from the sound of it 2011 makes some more serious improvements.


I've tried other stuff like Pages (never tried Numbers or Keynote), NeoOffice and OpenOffice and none of them compare to Office.

What the hell are you talking about? You can use your "Pages" procedure in Word too.

Try doing something simple like, uh, searching for something in a document in Word 2011. You've got two options: either the idiotically basic (unremovable) search field in the top toolbar, which pointlessly "glimmers" when you hit Command-F, or the advanced find, which is now buried with no keyboard shortcut and is still obscurely named "EditFindDialog" in the customization options which, incidentally, freezes Word every time I right-click on the toolbar and select "Toolbars > Customize Toolbars and Menus...". And when you do manage to find the Find ("Find the Find" a sick Microsoft game?) it now automatically finds and highlights every instance in the document. To get to "Find Next," it takes a couple of arbitrary clicks to activate it.

Oh, wait, there's a third, sidebar-style find option. Which adds no functionality to either the standalone dialogue box or the search field variants.

Or better yet, try copying and pasting something. Do it a couple of times, maybe with formatted text. Watch Word choke and crash and lose every change between now and your last save.

These are more than beta bugs. It's garbage. Complete and utter garbage.

Oh damn... After Office2007 release even M$ users hate that suite Do MS really think Mac users would love its improved (well, they think it's improved... version? I don't think so. The only thing I hope for is that there would be drag and drop, so I could open doc(x), drag document to the Writer and work there

Can't stand iWork. Can't stand Office 2008.

Love the Ribbon, just wish they could make the exact menu system as they have on the PC.

Just my opinion.

I have to agree with Mr. H here. I do not know what you are doing, but all you have to do is drag --> drop -- > resize. It REALLY is that simple, and I have been doing it for years.

Not in Office 2008. Not a chance man.

And yes, your previous assertion is correct. I was trying to layout a letterhead with text fields so that a client could type the date in a text field, then the salutations, then body text. Some text knocked out in white over a photo or color box. Can't be done. Not on my version of of O 2008 at least. It becomes a margin nightmare and every single text box has to be 'hard coded' in their nested preferences pane instead of clicking and dragging text boxes and field sizes.

Do Apple, Adobe & Quark control all the patents on simple page layout design or what? Is there a Microsoft equivalent to a simple page layout program? And finally, if Word is just for writing letters and technical writing... what the hell are they updating? What possible new features does it do now that it didn't do before if it can't handle the simplest of layout tasks?

Oh, and lets not forget that Word does NOT recognize vector images like .eps files. So no clipping masks for you. Pages on the other hand... drag n drop.

I used to think that all secretaries had horrible horrible design sense - inter office documents like Christmas party invitations made me cringe... now I realize they were just victims of the tools they had at their disposal.

I am the IT Director of a company, and I extensively tested moderate-to-advanced features on Office 2011.

We are not zealot on any OS/app credo. We have a mixed environment of Linux/Mac OS X/Windows, according to user familiarity with the platform and availability of tools.

That said, we have a preference for the Mac on the users for its capabilities and simplified maintenance.

We have iWork, OpenOffice and Microsoft Office on the Macs. We tried using OpenOffice mostly, but there are interoperability issues - mostly formatting loss. We use it where it makes sense e.g. to export documents as PDF, or for internal uses only.

Our main goal on trying Office 2011 was to evaluate whether it could completely replace the Windows desktops/notebooks, so that we could simplify our environment.

Sadly, we found roadblocks in the most important app: Outlook.

I will detail it out a bit later in this comment. Let me talk about excel first.


Excel

The Good

The best thing in Excel for moderate/advanced uses is Visual Basic support. This allow files to be useable in a truly cross-platform fashion, as long as the programmer avoids using ActiveX (on Windows) on Forms.

The Bad

The are maximization issues on Excel. If I maximize one file, the other open files are de-maximized. It's odd, and certainly seems like a bug to be quashed on a future patch.

The Ugly

Excel has a single history for all open files. That is, if I have file A and File B open, and delete a line on FileA, then delete a line on FileB, then add a cell contant on FileB, I cannot undo the FileA line deletion without first undoing the cell insert on FileB. The history of all open files is entangled, and it is an incomprehensible design decision.



Outlook

We speak from the perspective o users which *must* work with mailboxes several GB big. It's not lazyness, it's the sheer size of the work we do, plus the need to quickly access information which may have been sent last year, or the other, or the one before that... It's also about the fact that people shouldn 't have to micromanage their mailboxes with constant cleanups, and likewise should avoid creating offline archives as much as possible, because an offline archive is way more fragile to data loss than a synchronized folder in an IMAP or Exchange server.

Outlook is one of our most important (and hated) pieces of software, and we really want to see it get better.

The Good

Outlook 2010 for windows has so little changed, it's apalling. It may have a bit of multitaskng under the hood, but with big mailboxes it still stays unresponsive for long times - though the duration has reduced. Outlook 2011 for Mac has major improvements over Outlook for Windows, Entourage and Apple Mail.

First, it can actually work offline, unlike Apple Mail. Try working offline, you will see you really can't get completely offline, or you suddenly can't see your folders contents. Apple Mail is decent - as long as you are online.

Entourage has the 'database file nightmare' and does not play nice with Time Machine. that alone is reason to burn it on the stake. Outlook for Mac made the sensible choice and has each email as an individual file on your disk. It also handles big mailboxes much more gracefully than Outlook for Windows.

The Bad

Lack of configuration options. Users with vast mailboxes soon realized that they need the software to do one thing:

Do not mark my email as read. It is only read when I say so.

Power users with loads of email coming in want to read it but leave it as unread as a way to be reminded that the subject needs attention. In Outlook for windows I can simply select the option 'do not mark as read'. In outlook for Mac, the best I can do is to tell it to mark as read only when opened in a separate window. It sort of works, but is sub-optimal. People want to open several emails in separate windows to be able to alt-tab between them, but still having them as unread. It's a perfectly valid workflow, and works in windows.

Unified mailboxes are an all-or-nothing game. The problem is: most people use their machines around the clock. They don't have separate machines for personal/business. I would kill for 'groups' in unified mailboxes. If I had 'Groupified Mailboxes' I would be able to unify all my work-related email in one, and all my personal email in the other.

I though I would be able to use smart folders to emulate it, but I was soooo wrong...

The Ugly, ugly, ugly

Smart Folders are broken. As in, programmed by an infinite amount of monkeys with typewriters.
Searching works like a treat - if you only need to a simple search with one or two words - but the moment you want to save the search as a Smart Folder, you've opened the pandora's box upon yourself.

A Smart Folder is supposed to work like a folder, but if you type anything inside a smart folder, whenever you try to navigate away from it you are prompted 'do you want to save your changes?' Translating: If you click yes, the beloved search criteria which compose your smart folder will be changed. And it happens every time. and you can't disable it. Seriously?

Smart folders should behave like folders and not change until I click on 'Edit'. simple as that.

Constructing searches is also utterly broken. First: you can't use boolean searches unless you go on the arcane 'Raw Query'mode. It's always an 'AND' search, there is no way to change the multiple criteria to an 'OR' search. Want to get email from either joe@gmail.com OR joe@yahoo.com? Good luck with raw searches. They are not a problem for me, but the average user will not grok them. And they shouldn't have to, for certain trivial cases.

But wait, there's more. do you think you can group two folders in a single advanced search? Well, I found a way, but not without much hair-pulling and head-banging on the keyboard. are you still following me? Let me elaborate.

First, folders inside Outlook aren't folders in a tangible sense, like folders inside your disk. Surely, Outlook arranges the files in folders on disk, but it's for it's internal organization only, and the structure means nothing for the average user. It's just a bunch of folders and subfolders named as two-character hexcodes.

Outlook folders are there only to represent the mailbox structure, and there is no 'folder tree' exposed in any way to the searches. So, if you want to do a smart search picking up only the files inside a specific folder and its subfolders, you are out of luck. There is no way to do it, period.

You can concatenate one or more folders though, like I found out, in an extra-convoluted way.

First you must locate a file in your first folder which is there and only there. The easiest way is to create a draft with a unique word like 'rumpelstiltskin' or 'mytzoplyk' and move the draft there.
Then you must locate the real file on-disk using the Terminal, with the command-line version of spotlight, mdfind. This file will be in an obscure folder in the not-intended-for-humans structure created by Outlook. Still using the Terminal, you must locate the 'so-and-so-FolderID' file attribute, which you do using 'mdls', another command-line program which lists all attributes useable to perform searches using Spotlight. If you are still with me, you are brave.

With this valuable information, you can then start to write your Raw Query: so-and-so-folderID = (number) || so-and-so-folderID = (other number) . You must search for a unique file on each folder to get its ID using the command line. Simple, don't you think?

Only, it may not work, because Raw Queries are not as Raw as you may think. On the Search ribbon, there is a group of four buttons to the left, which set a super attribute to your search. If you left it on the 'folder' option, your 'Raw Query' will have an invisible restriction and will take place only in the current folder. You must click on 'All Folders' to be able to concatenate folders using the above excessively-arcane way.

And, for some reason, the Smart folders are at the BOTTOM on the left pane. It's like they knew it was so broken they wanted to hide it. Outlook for Windows has 'Favorite Folders' on the TOP of the left panel. Apple Mail has its smart folders (which work as advertised) at the top too, it's where it makes sense. Outlook for Mac's Smart Folders don't work, but if they did, they should be placed where it makes sense: at the top of the left panel (or let the users decide).

So, if you come from windows, and especially if you are a power email user, don't delude yourself thinking that Outlook for Mac will solve all your problems.

If you are willing to give up a bunch of functionality to ditch windows and go all-mac though, feel free to give it a try. But buyers beware, this Outlook is still in its infancy, and its immaturity shows up on its lack of options, polish and ill-advised interface decisions.

Surely a date field would be better in this situation? Saves some typing


Do you have some webspace where you can put all the source files and a sample completed PDF? I'm all intrigued now as to whether I could get Word to do what you want.


According to the AI article, yes, it's called Publisher and is only available for Windows, but some of its features have been rolled into Word 2011.


The Mac version supports PDF.

Not sure how to explain it. On any 'layout' program, you can throw down pieces like text or photo's and arrange them without any constraints.

With Word, every object has constraints. You can't freely move pieces around the document without them conflicting with the others. This requires you to go into the preferences for every item and mess around with all the settings to get it to play nice with the other objects.

If you are telling me you know how to do all of this without having conflicts of any kind... I'm listening. Because I don't know anyone who can. Not the level of layout I'm looking for anyways.

This is incredibly frustrating since OS X's dictionary / thesaurus blows Office's away, and always will.


Don't be so sure. I've stuck with 2004 because I can't stand anything afterward. When Rosetta is no longer an option I'll either go with Pages or OO (probably the later, but who knows).

Problem is - not all clients have Publisher. All have Word.
Generating e-letterhead templates for clients in Word... it hurts

Sounds like you need to change the layout/wrapping options for all the objects to "in front of text". If they are set to "square" or "tight" they will interfere with each other, and if set to "inline with text" will be restricted to the page's text margins and will be impossible to position on top of each other.

Also, you need to make sure that in the advanced layout options for each object, "move object with text" is deselected and "allow overlap" is selected.

WTF? This has to be a bug, right? Right?

I can't stand drop-down menus. I never find what I want to use. Ribbon was a God-sent when I started to work with office 2007. I was vey disappointed to see they didn't port it to Office 2008 when i switched to mac. The tool box is a mediocre copy of inspector and a bad substitute for Ribbon \

You need to edit the layout/text wrapping feature. I write manuscripts with lots of figures imported mostly from Prism, but sometimes from Excel, and I have never had the issues you described, even when moving multiple figures around the page to get the right layout.

Keynote is a easy replacement for powerpoint, because 99.9% of the time, I distribute presentations in PDF format, so nobody has to worry about file formats.

Pages is not. Often, people expect to edit word processing docs. The MS Word export feature of Pages is not ideal. If Pages used ODT format, or had a very reliable import/export ability, it would be a slam dunk. It is easy enough to tell people to download OpenOffice, which uses ODT, has versions on every platform, and is free. It is not easy to tell people to go buy a mac and get Pages. I love Pages, but until it supports ODT, it is just a novelty, albeit a strikingly good novelty.

I wholeheartedly wish this to be a bug, but I can't confirm it is being treated as such, at least yet.

Seriously, what are they thinking?

I think this is the most accurate description of the "Office experience" I've seen yet.

There are some simple facts about Office and Microsoft that explain why their products are as bad as they are though.

For starters, it's important to remember that their "customer" is not you, it's actually the corporation you work for. Office products are designed to a spec that basically comes from talking to office managers of large corporations. It's an incestuous little circle that never includes actual users of the product. Even if you are a corporate slave or an office manager yourself and thus feel that Office is still designed for you, it really isn't. The goal with each new version of Office is simply to have a product to sell that ticks off all the boxes from the surveys of the office managers' reactions to the previous version.

It's far more important for Microsoft to have Office appear to do many things, and to have Office appear to do some new things that "people have been asking for," than it is to have it be an efficient way of actually doing those things. There is literally no incentive for them to do otherwise. Microsoft doesn't make money by getting the user interaction right, and they don't lose money if they get it wrong. The whole system is set up to get the part where the software interacts with the actual users ... wrong.

Finally, Microsoft differentiates it's products into "regular" and "pro" versions, but their idea of the difference between regular and pro, is that pro has some more expensive stuff in it. Get it? Your choice is not between "easy" and "complicated," but between "complicated" and "complicated/expensive." This tendency to complicate Office by throwing everything including the kitchen sink into the apps, means that if you are anything less than a super Word/Excel expert, the product is again, not designed for you. Office products include everything that the most demanding, technical, niche user asks for. The small number of basic features that almost everyone needs are thus always hidden under layers of crap and complication that only appeals to this tiny portion of the people that actually use the product.

I work at a big Institution with a lot of super-smart academics and scientists so you'd think Office would be made for a place like that, but in fact most of the features in Office are completely useless to us.

Also, despite the fact that it's a big Institution, most of the people that actually use the software are secretaries (I would argue that most places using Office are like this). So while Excel may have some features that Mr. SuperWhiz in Finance needs, it's mostly impenetrable to the majority of folks at our place that actually use it. Same with Word, mostly it's used by secretaries to type letters or occasional reports. 99% of the features are not only useless, they get in the way.

I use both as well and hands down Office 2011 is way better if you have to even work with one Office Windows user.

iWorks Export is total BS. iWork needs the ability to default save to Office formats, the 2007/2008/2010/2011 xml format. Even if it could it magles most things even slighlty complicated during the export.

iWork is not bad if you NEVER have to colloborate with MS Office users. If you have to even just a little forget iWork.

All that said Office 2010 for Windows is way better than anything on the Mac.

"Finally, Microsoft differentiates it's products into "regular" and "pro" versions, but their idea of the difference between regular and pro, is that pro has some more expensive stuff in it"

Total and utter BS. The pro versions include products that really are only used in a corporate enviroment. Outlook for example can work with POP3 or IMAP accounts but its really designed to work with an Exchange Server. So Office with out Outlook is great for home users or students that dont have access to an Exchange server.

Outlook with Exchange cant be beat for coporate Email. I guess that is why 72% of corporations use it.

Is it just me or is it that Office 2011 isn't even out yet and people are complaining ALREADY? Well, at any rate, I'll be sure to flame after I've actually tried it out. I'm optimistic about the ribbon, seems far more useful than the "elements gallery." I just hope that the trial comes out earlier this time, for office 2008 had to wait a while before the trial came out.

This is complete and utter tosh. Microsoft have several focus groups consisting of "normal" end users, and sophisticated methods for analysing how their products are used "in the field". If you'd care to find out more, and I urge you to do so in order that you cease peddling nonsense, check out this presentation about why and how the ribbon interface came to be.




I would have to agree that the vast majority of Office users do not even scratch the surface of what it is capable of. Most Office users shouldn't really be using Office but rather something like Microsoft Works or even just WordPad/TextEdit.

No wonder Ray Ozzie is running from this bunch.

Open office it is.

Wait a minute. Did we just catch a Moderator sw.........

I find it funny to criticize Office for a lack of following Apple's Human Interface Guidelines when Apple hasn't followed them for years, and the UI on Apple's software is all over the place. iTunes, iWorks, iPhoto. MS is trying to walk the line between Windows familiarity and Apple familiarity; they are bound to displease both sides.

- Jasen.

Finally Messenger gets video and audio chat with PC! Whoohooo!!!

I suppose you've sold you iPod too, and bought a Zune? Or are bad monopolies only ones by companies you don't approve of?

And for even more simple tasks, nothing beats the speed and ease of use of the Notepad.

You know if you right click on a photo (Windows) and select layout, change to square, you can drag the image anywhere you want on the page right???

I'm still a VI user myself

More trash. I pity those of us who are forced to use this crap for their work or the like...

I only have Office 2008 installed for legacy document use and Excel. (Sorry Steve, Numbers just isn't up to even casual spreadsheet use.) As it is, I wish I could go back to 2004 to get something that works decently. 2008 on my MBP is actually SLOWER than 2004!

I will NEVER give so much as a PENNY to M$ ever again.

I'm sorry that you had a difficult time, but I don't think you quite understand something. Word does not screw up Word documents. Word defines Word documents. If Pages told you it made a Word document, but that document did not look right in Word, then Pages lied to you.

A few weeks ago a report from AI indicated that Excel 2011 would not support pivot tables in the Mac version, which was an astonishing deal breaker for me.
Glad to see that this has proven false, but wondering how such a specific and vital detail could be reported so incorrectly the first time around.

[In checking back I see it was actually AI quoting a review by Mossberg. He has not impressed me (positively, that is.)]
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles..._mac_2011.html

I did not know that apple became so fishy.
(Emphasis in the quote is mine.)

It was so easy in Word 95 (which also had double-click 'EGO for Word' embedded graphics editing, good EndNote integration &c.), so why have they gone so far backwards? I also used ClarisWorks for a few things involving graphics - though it was rather quirky and awkward it was still heaps slicker than Word 96, 98, X &c..

I've posted before... and I will again: the development of usable Suite software over the last 7-10 years has been seriously disappointing with every version, whether from Adobe or MS.

Has anyone done a study to graph the productivity gained (or lost) with these ever-increasing bloatware suites? Why do I think that the graph would be a simple flat line?

I have an old Mac PowerPC 8100/80 sitting a couple of feet from me in the studio, that I every once in a while have to boot up to open an old FreeHand 5/7 or Photoshop 2.5 eps (to see it's profile). I also have PS 7 running under CrossOver on my Mac for certain old, non-ported filters like FFT (Furier Transform).

Amazing how simple, elegant, and productive those old-school programs were, and still are. No ribbons, funky GUIs, 2-sided flip preferences(!), whatever. All we were ever after was more speed. Today we have it... but it's consistently being abused by bad software programming. Imagine THOSE packages updated to take advantage of today's hardware and speed, a few format compatibility issues, and a resolution bump to their GUIs (icons, dia-boxes, etc.).

Yes, Pixelmator (PS alternative) and Bean (great simple text app!) do just that. However you would think that the big players could do the necessary "optimizations" far easier, and still keep their "pro-users" quite happy with powerful additional functions, WITHOUT screwing up the GUI and base app every Suite iteration. Basically what Apple did with SL vs. Leopard: trim and optimize. I'm afraid to even ask how many GB's MS-Office needs to install, or GB's of RAM to operate smoothly.

As posted above, most people (>90%) just don't need, or use the features in (for example) Word. When you need a so-called "Word-expert" to do something like set up a letter template for a secretary, that says tons about the software in regards to "user-friendly (GUI)"... and "productive".

Agree with the "Prof" 100%": "manager-friendly" is the proper term for Suites such as these.

Man, I completely disagree. The search tools are absolutely excellent.. If you're crunching enormous quantities of text, the ability to see all your search terms in context with a simple apple-f is a gift from god. It doesn't take an abitrary click, it takes a single one to select the place in the document and you jump right to it instead of having to click individually through each one, one by one for a word you might have mis-spelled anyway. The new way is joy.

And honestly, I haven't had any problems with the clipboard. I copy and paste willy nilly, and so far so good.

Yes, indeed. For people that know what they are doing, CLI is in fact faster and more productive than GUI can ever be. Some things simply can't be done in the GUI nicely or effectively.

But, the whole idea with the GUIs is to enable users who would never use a computer otherwise, to use one by clicking in pictures, instead of learning to read and write.

I use Entourage 2008 for Exchange in a corporate environment, and one of my biggest complaints is that it won't support a simple table in an email. Even forwarding an email with a table completely mangles the layout of the forwarded message.

Thanks,
Stacy