What's New in Office 2011 for Macintosh

Microsoft gave Office 2011 significant improvements over its predecessor, Office 2008. You can’t miss the new ribbon and Spotlight search box—but there’s also an array of less obvious enhancements. Here’s a list of the most interesting new features.

Word

• Coauthoring features
  You can work with equal ease with colleagues whether they’re of the Mac or Windows persuasion. It’s now possible to edit the same document at the same time, and there are multiple ways to share over the Internet or your office network.
  
  
• SkyDrive
  Similar to Mac’s MobileMe, this service lets you save Word documents on the Internet. Once they’re there, you can share and edit them with coworkers.
  
  
• Full Screen view
  This new view makes the most of your screen real estate and lets you focus on your text rather than computer widgets. Use the Read mode when you don’t want to make any changes. Use Write mode to edit in Full Screen. When you need to save, print, or format your precious prose, just mouse up to the top of your screen for quick access to a simplified set of tools.
  
  
• 3D Publishing Layout view
  Word’s Publishing Layout view gives you a separate page-layout program at no extra cost. Now when you want to change the way text, pictures, and other objects overlap on the page, you can use a snazzy 3D view to see their exact position.

Outlook

• Threads
  This feature arranges messages with the same subject in a single collapsible conversation. It helps you organize your messages and cuts down on Inbox clutter.
  
  
• Multiple Email accounts
  If you have different email accounts for work and home, Outlook lets you manage incoming mail your way. Want to see everything in one unified inbox? No problem. Want to filter email and stash it in separate folders based on the subject or sender? You can do that too.
  
  
• Scheduling Assistant
  When you’re responsible for scheduling a meeting, inviting attendees, and keeping track of who’s coming and who isn’t, this tool puts you in control. Outlook makes it easy to give everyone all of the details and update them when plans change
  
  
• Sharing Calendars and Contacts
  It’s much easier to share your information with Windows workers whether your office uses Microsoft Exchange or not.
  
  
• Spotlight search
  Find what you’re looking for quickly with Spotlight—which now can search even in message attachments.
  
  
• Enhanced junk filter
  Outlook now does an even better job filtering out junk email—and can even warn you when it detects phishing messages.

Excel

• Sparklines
  These little graphs, also called datawords, are here to help you spot trends. They can reveal interesting trends that you’d miss on a full sized chart.
  
  
• Conditional formatting
  Makes important data stand out. Your spreadsheet can speak to you in a clear voice when you apply conditional formatting to your data.
  
  
• Data tables
  With this new answer to List Maker, it’s easier than ever to keep track of data in Excel. The tools to sort and filter your data are in one spot and better organized.
  
  
• Coauthoring features
  Like Word, Excel has new, improved tools for sharing and working with others. You can work with Mac or Windows folks over the Internet or on a local network.

PowerPoint

• Broadcast presentations online
  Use Microsoft’s web servers to broadcast your presentations. These are live broadcasts, so you need to gather everyone to their computer screens at the same time.
  
  
• 3D layering tools
  As in Word’s Publishing Layout view, PowerPoint gives you a 3D view of the elements on a slide. You can change the way elements overlap by dragging layers to a different spot.
  
  
• Media Browser
  Use the Media Browser to drop photos and audio visual clips into your presentation. The streamlined media browser works with all the Office programs, but it really shines in PowerPoint.
  
  
• Coauthoring
  Often presentations are more than a solo act. If you work with others, PowerPoint makes it easy to review and comment as you build your presentation.
  
  
• Slide templates
  PowerPoint comes packed with dozens of professionally designed slide templates with coordinated fonts, backgrounds, and effects. Assemble your presentation quickly, with elegant results.
  
  
• Export to iPhoto
  Keep your presentations always available on your iPod—no laptop required! You can give presentations directly from a video iPod thanks to PowerPoint’s ability to export presentations to iPhoto. Then transfer the resulting photo album to your iPod, which you can then connect to a video projector, for example.
  
  
• Apple remote control enabled
  If you’re giving your presentation on a MacBook, iMac, or other Mac that came with a remote control, you can control your presentation without being anywhere near your computer.

Office as a Whole

• Office Web Apps
  Along with Office for Mac, you get SkyDrive, where you can store your documents and Web Apps that you can use to edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations from almost any computer with a browser.
  
  
• Ribbon
  This über-toolbar adds order and consistency to Office commands. Great for beginners, the ribbon puts the most-used tools within reach. Even if you’re a grizzled Office veteran, you owe it to yourself to give the ribbon a test drive.
  
  
• Visual Basic returns
  Gone in Office 2008, Visual Basic for Application makes a comeback in 2011. You can record macros and write visual basic code for Word, Excel and PowerPoint programs.
  
  
• Elements Gallery
  Quickly find templates, charts, tables, SmartArt graphics, and so on in the Elements Gallery—located below the toolbar in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. No more choosing from the labyrinthian Insert menu or fumbling with the Toolbox.
  
  
• SmartArt graphics
  Quickly create designer quality diagrams and charts using SmartArt graphics. Use these highly customizable graphic elements to illustrate processes, hierarchies, and so on.
  
  
• Improved Help
  No hokey help icons. Office now provides better help using familiar OS X help tools.

What's Gone?

If you’ve used Office on your Mac since the previous century, you’ve grown accustomed to the Formatting Palette, a petite panel of tools for formatting text, paragraphs, pages, tables, and just about every part of a document. Indeed, in Office 2008, the Formatting Palette was merged with the Toolbox, so you only had that one familiar little rectangle to refer to.

You can quit looking around for the Formatting Palette—it’s gone. Tools for adding and formatting objects and documents are now larger and easier to get to on the toolbar and ribbon.

The Office Toolbox still exists, but it’s back to its old Office 2004 minimalist structure. For example, in Word it holds Styles, Citations, the Scrapbook, Reference Tools and the compatibility report. If you like to use menus to open the toolbox, the commands are in the same place whether you’re using Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. So, if you want to add an image from your scrapbook to your PowerPoint presentation, just go to View→Toolbox→Scrapbook.

Choosing Which Version is Right for You

Microsoft has often been criticized for publishing too many versions of its programs. The Office offering has been trimmed down to just two versions.

Microsoft Office for Mac Home and Business 2011 comes in a black box and contains Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. In addition, you’ll get utility programs like Messenger and Communicator (instant messaging programs), Remote Desktop Connection and Microsoft Document Connection (network sharing tools). Technical support is provided for one year.

Microsoft Office for Mac Home and Student 2011 comes in a yellow box and contains the same programs except it doesn’t include Outlook. Technical support is provided for 90 days.

Time was, folks who had previous versions of Office got a lower-priced upgrade path to the latest and greatest. That’s no longer the case. It’s one price fits all. The list prices are $199 for Office for Mac Home and Business 2011 and $119 for Office for Mac Home and Student 2011. With a little comparison shopping, though, you can often find Office 2011 discounted a little from the list price.

Those prices, by the way, are for a single license. See, when you buy Office, you’re not really buying a box or a disc, you’re actually buying a license that permits you to install and use the software. You can buy a single license that permits you to run the programs on a single computer. If you have more than one computer at home—a desktop Mac and a laptop, say—you may want to buy a two- or three-license pack so there’ll be enough for everybody.

Consult www.microsoft.com/mac for additional information.