back to article YES, new Office for OS X is COMING, says German Microsoft bod

A Microsoft manager has said that Redmond plans to release a new version of Office for Mac this year, giving new hope to Apple loyalists stuck using the aging OS X version of Microsoft Office. In a brief interview with German tech pub Computerwoche at the CeBIT conference in Hanover, Germany, Microsoft's new German Office boss …

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  1. Herby

    Maybe they should install something "better"

    Like LibreOffice or OpenOffice and be done with it.

    Do you like letting Microsoft manage your private documents in their cloud?

    1. Zacherynuk

      Re: Maybe they should install something "better"

      Outlook ?

      All we need is a replacement for outlook and I (along with millions of others) are with you.

      I hope this new version allows mac people to open more than one email at a time and perhaps even look at their calendar whilst writing an email....

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Maybe they should install something "better"

        >> I hope this new version allows mac people to open more than one email at a time and perhaps even look at their calendar whilst writing an email....

        Uhh, not sure you were being serious, but my Office on Mac does both those no problems

        1. Zacherynuk

          Re: Maybe they should install something "better"

          Oh really ? We have clients that swear blind it cannot be done unless they have dual screens or "Open New Main Window" even then side by side is very lacking without extra programs to help split the screen.

          (cheers for the heads up, i'll investigate now)

          1. big_D Silver badge

            Re: Maybe they should install something "better"

            It works fine for me, opening multiple mails and looking at the calendar... Just as long as you don't use full screen mode. A 27" iMac isn't an iPad you know, you can rearrange those "screens" into windows and put them side by side.

            1. Hans 1

              Re: Maybe they should install something "better"

              Re: [maximized windows]

              Considering Apple have made the maximize/normal window size feature idiot proof, you hit the green/grey plus and it will resize to show just what is visible (as far as possible of course) or maximize, this story beggars belief.

              So, when one of those Mac users asks, tell 'im/'er to click the green + on the window ...

          2. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Maybe they should install something "better"

            "Oh really ? We have clients…"

            pebkac mate, pebkac

      2. big_D Silver badge

        Re: Maybe they should install something "better"

        An exageration, but Outlook is the biggest Achilles' Heel in Office:mac. It is always causing problems for us. Our CEO has a MBP Retina and uses Outlook heavily, the biggest problem is I keep getting "how do I do X?" Answer: "You can't," to which he replies "but I've been doing that for years."

        Yeah, not on a Mac he hasn't!

        It does enough that it sort of works, but not fast or reliably and is really an advert for installing Windows on the Mac and installing Office 2013 and just getting on with it!

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Maybe they should install something "better"

          "Outlook is the biggest Achilles"

          Works fine for us, 200 mac users and not much whinging other than the usual operator error.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Maybe they should install something "better"

        "to open more than one email at a time and perhaps even look at their calendar whilst writing an email…."

        Office 2011 allows you to do this anyway

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Maybe they should install something "better"

      LO/OO Writer still suffers from compatibility problems when handling anything more than a basic Word doc. This makes collaborative efforts with Office users extremely annoying.

      Also, there are many simple features that were implemented in the Office equivalents literally decades ago that are still lacking.

      Case in point, try printing a chart directly in Calc. Not possible!

      The feature was requested in 2002(!) for OO and ignored for 10 years, at which point someone opened up a new request in LO and as of last January, it still has not been addressed.

      OO request to print charts: https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=6010

      LO request to print charts: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45893

  2. Dieter Haussmann

    "and its feature set lags behind that of Office 2010 on Windows" - I personally prefer it that way.

    I'm also really enjoing the new Apple Pages for fancier stuff.

    The ability to type letters, make slides and do spreadsheets is such old hat, I don't know why anyone would BUY software to do such basic stuff. I can only see this being bought by large stuffy institutions headed by loathsome older men in grey suits and fat ladies with footrests and too many cat photos around their workstation.

    1. big_D Silver badge

      And those templates for official company documents in Word format? Or the automated templates that fill out key parts of a letter? Or those handbooks and reference documents, with hundreds of pages and indexes? Pages might be fine for the simple 1 or 2 page documents, but it can make a hash of long documents.

    2. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Although I generally use LibreOffice I think MS Office for Mac is a reasonable product. The Mac team at Microsoft has a history of overdelivering in detail (yes, I know there's stuff it can't or doesn't do).

      Though compatibility has come on leaps and bounds there are still things where MS Office excels. I know that quite a few people prefer Powerpoint to Keynote - personally I find Keynote much better - and a lot of people seem to love Outlook.

      It's looking good that, over time, Microsoft will have to support ODF properly. This could lead to a genuine competition about tools. Plenty of people would be happy to pay, presumably somewhat less than they currently do, for an MS product that guaranteed interoperability in documents but provided an edge when working with them. Who knows, maybe they'll give up the monster that is OOXML and embrace ODF for their own stuff. I'm sure their own programmers would thank them and they could retire the army of unproductive bods associated with the standardisation. Well, one can dream they might, anyway! ;-)

  3. J. Simon van der Walt

    About time too

    I'm no fan of word, but itrw I really need this. My workplace is addicted to word documents produced on the PC with embedded drop down menus, form fields, checkboxes and stuff which can't be made to work on the mac.

  4. Frankee Llonnygog

    Obligatory post

    Bring back Word 5.1

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    And?

    Since it will undoubtedly be about as interoperable as the last few attempts, who cares? I'm done with giving/being given a document only to find that the application of some 'feature' or other doesn't quite play on one of the two versions, so it chokes.

    A windows version Office on VMware Fusion has given me far fewer headaches and doesn't even cost much more when you factor in time-wasting and the fat premium charged for the Mac version of Office, and the VM has plenty of other uses.

  6. Zombieman

    Microsoft Mac development

    About the "personnel reshuffling within Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit" description. Makes me imagine people shuffling along to some other company.

    At one point Microsoft did write some really good software on the Mac, including their Outlook Express 5 which was one of the best email clients I'd used on any platform (personally didn't even remotely like Apple's until OS X 10.4, the first time I decided it was usable)

    Today's "Outlook" for Mac seems to have strong ties to Entourage, which started off fairly disastrously (in my experiences) and still has some of the original bugs, particularly connectivity. It even misses out certain features Microsoft implemented in Outlook 2003 on Windows (e.g. polls/voting, which personally I don't think should have been part of Outlook but there you go).

    As for interoperability, some of the blame can I think laid at the docx/xlsx etc formats. I remember seeing a document pass from Mac to PC (or vice versa, can't remember) and on the receiving machine where background colours had been chosen (from the default palette no less) both the yellow and green turned into a single colour, and on saving stayed that way even when sent back.

    I don't even want to start thinking about the UI on Mac Office 2011, a bizarre mix of menu bars (forced by the OS), toolbars and "ribbon" elements (and I personally hate ribbon UIs).

    OpenOffice.org, NeoOffice, LibreOffice, take your pick and add Apple's Mail and Calendar and I'd say you don't need anything from Redmond's suite.

  7. Quentin North

    Outlook is the MS USP

    Today I use Outlook 2010 on a Mac with Parallels. I do this because as a desktop organiser it is one of the best and Mac Outlook 2011 falls woefully short of the desired functionality and reliability. Sure, the Mac has separate Mail and Calendar clients which are fine, but for serious business use Outlook 2010 trumps the lot. The key USP for Outlook 2010 for me is the combined Inbox, with folder tree left sidebar and upcoming appointments and tasks on the right side bar in a single window. You can't beat that at a glance integrated view. The "My Day" app on Mac is shite. A case of too much adherence to Mac UI guidelines which say everything should be in a separate window. Usability wise, it does not work. Bring Outlook 2010 to Mac for 2014!

    Word, Powerpoint and Excel? They are convenient I could live without them. I would like to see MS Project back on the Mac. I had this on a Mac under OS/9 and OS/7 in both 68K and PPC forms, so the code is around somewhere.I would also lie to see Sharepoint WebDAV support Macs too. In this day-and-age I find it incredible that you can't have a filename that starts with a "." or contains special characters, and the total path string length must be less that 255 characters. What year is this, 1984?

  8. David Kelly 2

    Yawn.

    The history of MS Office for Mac repeats itself. Microsoft doesn't want to provide an excuse for users to jump to MacOS.

    Long time ago I got tired of new versions of Word not rendering the previous version's files the same. Word costs too much money, costs too much time. OpenOffice has its quirks and idiosyncrasies but it gets the job done.

  9. OffBeatMammal

    I hope as part of this they finally fix the horrible Lync/Communicator thing ...nothing more annoying than an IM client that falls over several times a day :(

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