Not too sure whether this is the right spot but does anyone have any clue as to what is happening with Microsoft and support for OS X? have they given up supporting OS X and Microsoft Office 2011 is just on life support to suck the few dollars they can out of Office 365 customers? what is taking so long - it has been almost 4 years since the last release, there seems to be no details - either officially or unofficially about the future of Microsoft and their support for non-Microsoft platforms.
Microsoft Office and OS X
- Thread starter mrnomnoms
- Start date
Watching this thread closely. I'd rather staple my scrotum to my forehead than use Outlook 2011 and Excel is barely better.
Back in March, Microsoft did confirm to MacWorld that they are working on the next version of Office for Mac: http://9to5mac.com/2014/03/11/microsoft ... this-year/
I'm guessing the work they did on OneNote for Mac is an indication of where the interface for the next version of Office is moving, which isn't terrible. It's a breath of fresh air compared to the rest of the Office suite. Maybe we'll see it showcased on Thursday during a demo of Yosemite?
I'm guessing the work they did on OneNote for Mac is an indication of where the interface for the next version of Office is moving, which isn't terrible. It's a breath of fresh air compared to the rest of the Office suite. Maybe we'll see it showcased on Thursday during a demo of Yosemite?
As someone who is forced to use Office 2011 on a Mac all day I welcome new software.
I'd be quite happy if they brought it up to the standard of the Windows equivalent. I didn't really know what Mac users were complaining about before, but I purchased a MacBook this year, installed 2011, and found that it is a bit of a half-finished pig relative to 2010 or 2013 on Windows. OneNote is promising and I'd like to see the rest of the suite follow suit.
I guess I'll note that I'm one of those people who actually likes Office. We exist.
I guess I'll note that I'm one of those people who actually likes Office. We exist.
I have nothing to add but solidarity. I don't regret switching, but I wish I had done some research on Office for Mac first so I wasn't so crushingly disappointed. It's pretty bad, and if I used it any more that I currently do, it would be enough to make me plunk down and run Windows in BootCamp or VM. Fortunately I don't need it much at home.[url=http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=27771153#p27771153:2ntz8eym said:
For the latest version of Office on a Mac, go to onedrive.live.com and use the online version.
We usually would have seen a Microsoft Office 2014 by now. I'm wondering if the delay is to modify Office enough to get it on the App Store?
I think they might have moved most people from the MacBU into finishing the iOS version of the Office apps…
Scott Tarr
Ars Praefectus
My version of Office 2007 on Win8 on fusion is better than Mac.Office 2011.
Won't make that mistake again. I also won't buy a new version until I've seen enough reviews to tell me it's worth dealing with.
If it's as ugly as 2013 on Windows, I won't even touch it either. I made the mistake of buying a copy of Visio 2013 for a system and it was one of the ugliest non-DOS looking monstrosities I've ever seen.
Seriously.
Won't make that mistake again. I also won't buy a new version until I've seen enough reviews to tell me it's worth dealing with.
If it's as ugly as 2013 on Windows, I won't even touch it either. I made the mistake of buying a copy of Visio 2013 for a system and it was one of the ugliest non-DOS looking monstrosities I've ever seen.
Seriously.
We're definitely working on the next version of Mac Office. However, we're not ready to give any details about it.[url=http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=27769685#p27769685:2jla0029 said:
Schwieb
Principal Software Engineer
Apple Platform Experiences Group (formerly called the Macintosh Business Group or 'MacBU')
Nope. The iOS apps are being done by us MacBU folks. However, we've changed our group name now that we're working on more than just Macs. We're now the Apple Platform Experiences Group, or 'Apex' (although there are several groups at Microsoft with the 'apex' nickname, so sometimes we're "Office Apex").[url=http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=27773801#p27773801:umjjzu17 said:
[url=http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=27781961#p27781961:3hc7gdaz said:
Hopefully they have hired more developers to go with increased number of development targets.
[url=http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=27781953#p27781953:3u7u14s6 said:
Has any sort of timeline, even something as vague as "probably next year", been announced?
ditto[url=http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=27782601#p27782601:187c41o2 said:
[url=http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=27782641#p27782641:3c0edtfo said:
And ditto, too.
I always found Office 2011 workable. I moved to Keynote because of the more granular graphic control -- which, sigh, has been made somewhat problematic in the new version -- and I drifted from Word because Scrivener was so much better for long docs and I've grown indifferent wo what I use for short docs (Nisus, Pages, even Google Docs sometimes), but Excel ... I'm an English professor and nothing works like Excel.
[url=http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=27782811#p27782811:304qbf02 said:
Same here. Office X and 2004 were absolute dogs, 2008 was a big improvement but with annoying limitations, and 2011 is quite good. I'm not a huge fan of the ribbon as implemented in Office 2011, but I don't run into document compatibility problems any more and it doesn't generally feel sluggish. Laying out tables and images in Word remains terrible, but that's a Word thing not a Mac Office thing.
[url=http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=27782841#p27782841:26gmdvge said:
This is far and away my number one complaint with Word 2011. Otherwise it works reasonably well for me.
[url=http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=27782887#p27782887:2sdd2pgq said:
You should try the holy trinity of evil software: a long word document with pictures, tables and text boxes embedded in the text and Endnote as the reference manager to create a bibliography. This evil concoction has me screaming at my iMac in no time.
Word could do better with that, even in Windows, but isn't that sort of work the domain of programs like Quark and InDesign (ex-PageMaker)?
Not to be a contrarian or anything, but I really rather enjoy Mac Office, despite it being a little long in the tooth. In general I'm reasonably impressed with all of Microsoft's Office efforts—the web versions are so much more capable than Google Docs it's not even funny. So much so that it may yet convince me to move all my work accounts from Google Work to Office 365.
Although, I think part of this may be because I don't ever try to make the Office programs do what they weren't intended for. That means in Word, no complex layout, etc. outside of highly structured templates (e.g. my letterhead and a lot of other corporate flotsam is constructed in Word and Excel—but those are all build once, use over and over again without adjustment). If I need to build a one-off work document that has a lot of mixed elements, I'll always do it in InDesign or Illustrator. But, I'm also a professional designer, so those programs are as comfortable to me as Excel is to an Accountant. So I'm at an advantage: I can use the right tools for the job.
That being said, Pages (at least, prior to Apple's current hack job) showed that a word processor can be good at allowing mere mortals to do basic layout with minimal frustration; there's a lot the MacAPEX™ (and the whole Office team, Windows and otherwise) could take from what Apple achieved with Pages '09.
Although, I think part of this may be because I don't ever try to make the Office programs do what they weren't intended for. That means in Word, no complex layout, etc. outside of highly structured templates (e.g. my letterhead and a lot of other corporate flotsam is constructed in Word and Excel—but those are all build once, use over and over again without adjustment). If I need to build a one-off work document that has a lot of mixed elements, I'll always do it in InDesign or Illustrator. But, I'm also a professional designer, so those programs are as comfortable to me as Excel is to an Accountant. So I'm at an advantage: I can use the right tools for the job.
That being said, Pages (at least, prior to Apple's current hack job) showed that a word processor can be good at allowing mere mortals to do basic layout with minimal frustration; there's a lot the MacAPEX™ (and the whole Office team, Windows and otherwise) could take from what Apple achieved with Pages '09.
Major problems off the top of my head
Excel 2011 are:
- Sometimes when clicking on a random cell I get a beachball cursor which lasts for a minute or two.
- If there are column filters in a document to do a search I have to click to select the topmost cell in a column (the cell containing a filter), having any other cell (or no cell) selected will result in 0 search results
- Navigating back and forth to different open documents can bring the program to an extremely slow crawl which can last anywhere from 1-4 minutes
- Having a spreadsheet open on each monitor sometimes plays havoc with window sizes (maximizing the window size of one will frequently have an unintended effect of the other), this causes a frustrating "back and forth" of window sizing until I eventually luck out and get it right again.
Outlook 2011:
- The program will often jump to a random email in my Inbox no matter where I am or what I'm doing at the time. This even happens if I'm not using Outlook at the time (I have it maximized on a 2nd monitor). It's especially frustrating when I'm looking through a sub folder or trying to perform another task and I'm all of a sudden in my inbox looking at a random email.
- In "conversation" view emails contained within a "conversation" will be organized randomly and not according to last email received like I want
- In general it's a very slow program to open, it's slow to connect to the mail server and receive the first emails of the day, it's slow to deliver emails (I get them on my phone much quicker)
- Searching sucks, if I want to search for multiple "facets" of information, the information entered is "live updated" - aka, it's not waiting until all the search "facets" are entered, because of how slow the program is this can cause the program to slow down and it's sometimes difficult to enter the other search "facets'
Excel 2011 are:
- Sometimes when clicking on a random cell I get a beachball cursor which lasts for a minute or two.
- If there are column filters in a document to do a search I have to click to select the topmost cell in a column (the cell containing a filter), having any other cell (or no cell) selected will result in 0 search results
- Navigating back and forth to different open documents can bring the program to an extremely slow crawl which can last anywhere from 1-4 minutes
- Having a spreadsheet open on each monitor sometimes plays havoc with window sizes (maximizing the window size of one will frequently have an unintended effect of the other), this causes a frustrating "back and forth" of window sizing until I eventually luck out and get it right again.
Outlook 2011:
- The program will often jump to a random email in my Inbox no matter where I am or what I'm doing at the time. This even happens if I'm not using Outlook at the time (I have it maximized on a 2nd monitor). It's especially frustrating when I'm looking through a sub folder or trying to perform another task and I'm all of a sudden in my inbox looking at a random email.
- In "conversation" view emails contained within a "conversation" will be organized randomly and not according to last email received like I want
- In general it's a very slow program to open, it's slow to connect to the mail server and receive the first emails of the day, it's slow to deliver emails (I get them on my phone much quicker)
- Searching sucks, if I want to search for multiple "facets" of information, the information entered is "live updated" - aka, it's not waiting until all the search "facets" are entered, because of how slow the program is this can cause the program to slow down and it's sometimes difficult to enter the other search "facets'
You're not kidding anyone, Schwieb, it's the APE Group.[url=http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=27781961#p27781961:2tdgbklz said:
I don't believe we've said anything publicly about a release date yet.[url=http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=27782433#p27782433:36y5gd8i said:
I have tons of UI issues with Office and am eagerly awaiting a new version.
1. Office stops working with Expose. It stays in the background.
2. powerpoint presentations decide to open off-screen when switching from multi-monitor to single-monitor setup. Fortunately, Window->arrange all fixes that.
3. sometimes arrow keys stop moving images in Powerpoint, and instead switch between elements on the active slide.
4. you can't arrange your spaces by workflow. Each app needs to exist entirely in one space. If you split excel up between spaces, making it active causes it to bounce between spaces a couple times before deciding which one to converge on.
5. bringing one excel window to the front brings ALL of them to the front, blocking any other application that is open.
Working with Office Mac is an extreme annoyance, and we're in desperate need of an update. However please ignore the UI decisions made in Office 2013. Excel 2013 is universally hated by everybody I've talked to. AND FOR THE LOVE OF FSM, we don't need animations in Excel. the new version of Excel is extremely sluggish because of them... not that the UI hangs. It just takes too long to move between cells.
1. Office stops working with Expose. It stays in the background.
2. powerpoint presentations decide to open off-screen when switching from multi-monitor to single-monitor setup. Fortunately, Window->arrange all fixes that.
3. sometimes arrow keys stop moving images in Powerpoint, and instead switch between elements on the active slide.
4. you can't arrange your spaces by workflow. Each app needs to exist entirely in one space. If you split excel up between spaces, making it active causes it to bounce between spaces a couple times before deciding which one to converge on.
5. bringing one excel window to the front brings ALL of them to the front, blocking any other application that is open.
Working with Office Mac is an extreme annoyance, and we're in desperate need of an update. However please ignore the UI decisions made in Office 2013. Excel 2013 is universally hated by everybody I've talked to. AND FOR THE LOVE OF FSM, we don't need animations in Excel. the new version of Excel is extremely sluggish because of them... not that the UI hangs. It just takes too long to move between cells.
I don't think this is a reasonable request. The functions of Office are, in many ways, tied to its UI (the Ribbon, for example). Where the
Look at Office 2013 on the Windows side, along with Office 365, and the iOS apps: Any hints you may need as to what the next version of the Mac Office apps will look and work like are already there. It would make zero sense for them to deviate from that baseline.
(And ironically, Apple's moves toward a more flat interface in iOS 7+ and Yosemite will help the Windows "Metro"/Modern Interface aesthetic work much better in Apple environments than it would have previously.)
I'd be really happy if we finally got 1:1 parity between the Windows and Mac Office ribbons.
The Mac Office 2011 ribbon is wrong. It's like they didn't even talk to the people who designed it on Windows-- they missed a lot of the little details that make the Windows ribbon work well. (Sorry, Schwieb.)
The Mac Office 2011 ribbon is wrong. It's like they didn't even talk to the people who designed it on Windows-- they missed a lot of the little details that make the Windows ribbon work well. (Sorry, Schwieb.)
IMO the ribbon is for dumb windows users, personally I find very little functionality improvements by using the ribbon. It's poorly organized and I always have to hunt for whatever it is that I'm looking for. Not that my minority opinion will change anything, I just needed to vent.
Don't apologize! If you have specific, concrete feedback I'm always happy to pass it along to the right people. It's the generic complaints that are frustrating to hear, not because of the criticism but because it doesn't give us anything to target directly.[url=http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=27784367#p27784367:199d8w7d said:
I'll write up some more this evening if I get a chance, but to give you something now: probably my biggest complaint about Office 2011's ribbon is that, as windows are resized horizontally, commands can disappear (try resizing Excel 2011 at its home tab to see what I mean). That's something that the Windows Office team went through great pains to avoid-- Windows Office will resize buttons, hide galleries, and collapse groups of icons into popup menus as the window gets smaller, but ribbon buttons never become completely inaccessible.[url=http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=27784417#p27784417:26ogi6rw said:
[url=http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=27784413#p27784413:2e34z29n said:
And I thought it was just me. The thing about the ribbon is that it replicates the functionality found in the menus, which are just right there. And, honestly, clustering functionality by columns and then scrolling down rows makes more sense -- at least to this aging brain -- then clicking on a series of buttons horizontally that then spread shit, horizontally, much of which is organized horizontally but occasionally its grouped vertically.
Even the palette, the poor much belabored palette was solo much better than that. And it was much much much better when trying to handle styles.
Uh. Retina support for the entire suite including the updater and system prefs would be just swell.
As the author of one of those frustrating, non-specific complaints, thank you for commenting and please accept my apology - I wasn't sure if you were still around and didn't expect this thread to get into any discussion of specific features or issues. I'd be happy to share a few, based on my use of Excel 2011, if you're interested.[url=http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=27784709#p27784709:387ozafp said:
- I second Jonathon's issue with how the ribbon behaves when the windows are resized.
- The UI feels disjointed. Excel for Windows' UI works well because virtually everything is accessed via the ribbon. Excel on Mac sees features in three places (not counting keyboard) - ribbon, toolbars, and menu bar. The ribbon was specifically designed to eliminate toolbars, so I was rather surprised to see Excel 2011 include both in the same view. Understanding that the menu bar is a Mac standard, I feel the UI / UX would be greatly enhanced by putting only the bare minimum (preferences/options) there, and push everything else to the ribbon to get as close as possible to parity with its Windows counterpart.
- The toolbar has never worked properly for me. Every time I launch the application, it disappears. I have to change the settings to display it twice, the first time nothing happens. Then I can use it for that session as expected, but it disappears again if I close the app.
I have a really easy criticism of Office on OS X. What possible reason is there for putting a folder called "Microsoft User Data", which is full of settings, in my Documents folder? OS X already has a designated solution for storing user settings, it is the "Library" folder. It drives me nuts having this folder full of stuff I will never look at, smack in the middle of my documents.
Don't listen to them, the ribbon is great. Once you re-learn where all the stuff is, it's much faster to do basic tasks. Mom hated it until I forced her to learn *why* it's there and has on it what it has (and how to change it). Once she adapted, she's a lot more productive.
[url=http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=27786439#p27786439:17puw1tm said:
The ribbon is 1000x better than the multiple layers of menus and tiny icons that I rarely recognized.
My biggest problem with the ribbon is its static nature. I find myself always switching between the different ribbon tabs because there are 1 or 2 things on each ribbon that I need, however, most space in each ribbon tab is occupied by things that I never use. I'd like to make my own ribbon where I collect everything that I use the most.