Microsoft is releasing Office 2011 for Mac users on October 26, 2010. If you already have purchased Office 2008 in the last couple of months, you get a free upgrade to 2011. The office suite looks very promising. Among other improvements to the suite, Office 2011 is including Outlook for Mac. Up until now, they have offered Entourage, which is an ostensible version of Outlook with considerably less features and a less polished user interface. With Outlook, calendar integration, task integration, and collaboration ought to be quite a bit easier. As to the new version of Word, one can expect to see the “ribbon” user interface that is present in the PC version of the suite. According to MS, “Office for Mac 2011 gives you an enhanced user experience overall, as performance and launch times have been improved in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. Your documents feel “lighter,” since they load fast, and respond quickly to your commands. And searching text within documents has never been faster.” Overall, this sounds like a worthy update to a program that needs to come up to speed for Mac users, especially those of us in the law. Try finding a usable pleading template for Mac Office 2008 some time !!!
