It’s Happening - Office 2007 for Mac
I thought Microsoft had forgotten about Mac users, but it seems like Office will be receiving a much needed update. Office 2007 for Mac will borrow heavily from the Beta released for PC users a few months back. A main feature of Office 12 will be the Ribbon which is sort of like a launcher to doing various tasks in Office, rather than hunting through menus.
Also, files will begin using an XML format which is slowly becoming standard. But the #1 reason all Office-using Mac users should upgrade to Office 2007 - it’s a universal binary and will fly on your latest machine. Expect to shell out big bucks for Office 2007 when it hits computer store shelves 3rd quarter of 2007. APC magazine has the rest.
Or, make use of your student discounts. *cough* kids, cousins, sisters, brothers discount… You get the idea ;) For some odd reason I’m itching for an Office release where users can purchase single applications rather than the entire bundle.
The all new UI sounds good, looking forward to seeing some screenshots and playing with this. Maybe it might force it’s way back into my dock in place of Apple’s iWork?
I think Microsoft is really going to have to fight to regain control of the Mac productivity suite market. NeoOffice development is turning out really well and they’re making advancements very quickly, plus Apple’s iWork seems to have become quite popular. I haven’t seen anyone running Microsoft Office on their Mac in ages - I know I don’t being a NeoOffice guy myself. I also know I probably won’t even give Office 2007 a second look, since I think NeoOffice does everything I would want Office to do and then some.
Wow, that’s a long way off. I was hoping we would see something at the latest around June. Looks like I’ll be putting up with Rosetta for at least another year. :-(
I thought, in my limited testing and fiddling, that iWork blew Microsoft’s Office out of the water on many fronts. And to think it’s basically their first attempt at competing with the Office Suite.
They said they’ll be making next Office as a universal build at the keynote where Jobs announced Intel chips in Macs, but I’m not really excited to hear that it’s still only going to be available a year from now.
Oh well, I’m using Pages for school (just wrote first few pages this week in it since I got my Mac and it’s very nice). The only downside is that being a finance student I have to use Excel a lot and it’s laggy as you can imagine running in Rosetta. Oh well.
Dimitry
The only thing I use from Office on my Mac is Excel…and you better believe I’ll drop it as soon as Apple drops a spreadsheet app. I hate everything about Microsoft Office on Mac and absolutely love Pages.
I’m hoping they update Microsoft Messenger to the level of Windows Live Messenger, seeing as it’s the number one IM app in Europe.
Office’s XML support is a marketting ploy, just because its XML doesn’t mean its usable XML. All of their formats since o’2000 have been lauded as XML, when they were really just the same old binary-stream junk. If you are going to upgrade at all best to upgrade to an open standard, e.g. open document. Now we just need Apple to start supporting it…