David Braue12 February 2010, 2:03 PM
They may be bitter rivals in the operating system stakes, but Microsoft has openly praised “the Apple design philosophy” in its new release of Office for Mac.
They may be bitter rivals in the operating system stakes, but Microsoft has openly praised “the Apple design philosophy” as the company announces plans for a major refresh to its Office for Mac productivity suite that it hopes will boost its fortunes on the increasingly-popular platform.
Microsoft today announced that Office for Mac 2011, the successor to the current Office for Mac 2008, will ship before the end of the year and will include a broad range of enhancements that will bring its user interface and functionality far closer to the Windows version of Microsoft’s flagship productivity suite.
Above: Word 2011 -- high res version here.
The headline improvements to the new Mac version include the ditching of the love-it-or-hate-it Entourage application, which will be replaced by a new application, Outlook for Mac. Whereas Entourage has been roundly criticised for its incompatibility with the corporate-standard Outlook, the new application will bridge that gap through support for features like importing of Outlook for Windows .PST mailboxes; the previously Windows-only Information Rights Management (IRM); and a new message database built around large numbers of small files for fast and easy backup and Spotlight searching.
The entire suite will benefit from the reintroduction of Visual Basic, the scripting language whose absence has been one of the most widely-lamented shortcomings of Office for Mac 2008.
That version of the suite was Microsoft’s first to make the shift to Apple’s Intel-based architecture, boosting speed dramatically compared with Office for Mac 2004, which could only be run on Intel-based Macs using Apple’s Rosetta software emulator.
While the 2008 version offered strong file compatibility with Windows, this time around the company has focused on providing a more consistent interface and functionality. A customisable ribbon bar replaces Office 2008’ Elements Gallery, and the overall look and feel will be familiar to Office users but more closely follows Mac OS X design conventions.
“This is the version that everyone wanted,” Han-Yi Shaw of Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit told Macworld. “Because we’re die-hard Mac users, we look at the [Office] technology and try to translate it. Following the Apple design philosophy really takes you in the right direction.”
In a real sense, that means Microsoft has relied heavily on Mac OS X’s Cocoa development framework to provide a Mac look-and-feel, and uses features such as Core Animation to provide smooth animation of onscreen elements.
Online collaboration and document sharing are key selling points, with seamless online collaboration and file sharing via Microsoft SharePoint, SkyDrive, and built-in links to Office Web applications. A new Presence Everywhere feature builds on IM capabilities to give real-time status updates on who is working on the document directly in the application.
Whether or not the new features will provide enough feature parity to convince business users to go Mac, remains to be seen. But with its announcement, Microsoft has made a renewed commitment to Mac users – who will no longer be poor cousins to the Windows version. But with online alternatives sprouting and Apple’s iWork proving popular amongst Mac users, time will tell whether the new version can fulfil its goals.
The Mac Business Unit maintains a presence on Twitter (@OfficeforMac) and on Facebook.