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Despite not having access via Technet to any of the Microsoft Mac apps (hey MS please change this!) I have been able to conduct some testing with the betas of the new office suite coming this holiday season.

Where Office 2008 was a combination upgrade (file formats, tools) and downgrade (no vba support), the coming release looks much more viable particularly if you are using a Mac as your system of choice in business.

The big change is the replacement of the much maligned Entourage with Outlook. While I don’t need to connect to Exchange for business and don’t use Outlook, my research shows this offering as significantly better than Entourage and for those who are accustomed to working with Outlook, I think you’re really going to like this change. Look and feel is similar to Outlook 2010 for Windows, and they’ve done a great job on that one. If I had to use Windows and worked in an Exchange shop, I’d be ok.

I started my testing with beta 2 and just installed beta 4 at time of this writing. The new build is more stable as one would expect and the implementation of the ribbon interface is far less disconcerting than I expected it to be. Particularly in PowerPoint when I revert to the Office 2008 version for production work, I find myself missing the ribbon interface! It’s that good. I just wish there was a ppt player for the iPad as the Keynote iPad app needs a lot of compatibility work.

Excel works nicely although I had to change the default display zoom on the Mac Pro so I could read the content. The Vba macro support works for the most part although I’ve had complex Corp Finance created macros make the boom boom.

Word is just excellent, with great performance and ease of use. I typically use the very strong Neooffice for work since we do everything in the open document format, but when I need to share something in the MS formats I pull into Word to do a quick format verify. I also like the track changes functionality when working with teammates on RFPs. It’s very simple and clean. I ran into some formatting challenges with documents coming from Office 2003 for Windows, particularly in tables and bullets but when I cleaned them up, I was able to confirm that they went back to Windows as doc files without any problems. This is critical because of the significant growth of Macs in the enterprise and the need for seamless interoperability. Microsoft looks to have some really good work here.

I’ll look forward to future betas and the final FCS release as what I see so far is a winner.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010 at 10:13 am and is filed under Applications, Macintosh, Office Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.