Who is using office 2011 for mac? i am and its not a good experience so far...

It feels so sluggish compared to its windows counterpart (2010) and my MBA has better specs than my i3 windows machine. And this is just even a typical office suite that is generally left open most of time during work and play.

word:
1. document compatibility - it cannot display a background image at all.

excel:
1. document compatibility - cannot open an xls files in the dropbox folder which every other computer could. It says that there might be other computers who are currently accessing the file...

outlook:
1. contacts sync with mac addressbook - worked on first try; suddenly disappeared. Now wont sync at all. Tried to restart already.


arrrrgggh!!!

if you ask why i'm using outlook; well I came from postbox and what I didn't like about that is their text formatting capabilities; it is too outdated and using outlook 2010 at work - composing an html email is so easy as writting a word document. Composing on postbox is like replying on a browser text area box.

Anyone else have tried the new office for mac?

 

Yep, cant bloody install it but from your review i might just give it a miss and try iworks.

 

I use it daily. I have had no issues and I quite like it. That being said, I am not a power-user. So I can't comment on some of the more advanced features.

 

I have been using Office 2011 for about the past 5 months and have had a generally positive experience. The whole ribbon navigation is better under Mac OS X simply because it doesn't lean on that heavy aero appearance thus slowing things down for no reason. Excel 2011 finally added macro compatibility for Office Mac. Office 2011 has been a huge improvement over Office 2008 in terms of reliably running (i.e. I am not having to force quit anything), added features, and compatibility quirks.

I still come across issues in terms of formatting compatibility but I also experience the same thing when opening a file made under Office 2010 in Office 2007. MS needs to work out those small formatting compatibility issues with their main software first before any changed can be ported over to OS X.

 

Same here—although I should add that when I say, 'office', I have almost exclusively Word in mind. Office 2011 is a huge improvement over the previous version; I suppose I'm a 'heavy user' of Word, with usually 5-10 documents open at all times, and it's very reliable and snappy on an ancient MacBook/OS 10.7 (albeit with an SSD).

I do all my note-taking (and note-bookmarking, and note-bookmark-hyperlinking) in Word, and it never usurps too much system resources, like Apple's 'Pages', which is a lot more 'sleek', as they say, but was a huge resource hog, at least on my system.

There still remain a number of annoyances though, and I guess that's mainly due to Office still not having become a full-Cocoa application; searching, window management, etc., often have the quirks of non-native standards.

Office also installs a host of utility software, none of which in my experience works very well (read, 'at all'). One of those utilities is supposed to provide access to the user's "Skydrive", since this function is not integrated to the Mac versions of Word etc. Since this utility doesn't work reliably at all, there's no real online sharing component to the Mac version; that's a major let-down.

There's always OpenOffice.org, or LibreOffice to consider, of course, but especially the latter hasn't been performing very well on my 10.7 installation (frequent crashes, resource hog, etc.) I did try going all-ODF recently, and do my day to day work on LibreOffice, while resorting to Word only for documents that I'd be sending to other people; but there were so many 'hiccups' (and worse) along the way, that I grudgingly returned to MS's notorious 'Open XML'.

Also keep in mind, that Office for mac installs a really helpful set of 'actions' to the MacOS Automator; you can define system-wide Services that can manipulate documents in various ways.

ps. Beware of giving Outlook a 'test try', by the way; I learned this the hard way, by foolishly importing all my Mail archive into Outlook: When I changed my mind after a month of use, and wanted to go back to Lion's new Mail application, I found out that Outlook can import Apple Mail mailboxes, and settings, and so forth, but DOESN'T EXPORT to a format that Apple Mail can read. I was saved by the reference in one of David Pogue's articles concerning the same problem, to a database program called "EagleFiler". EagleFiler appears to be the only program capable to extracting mails out of Outlook's archive, in a format that Apple Mail can read.

 

Outlook for Mac is the bane of my existence. I've never tried Entourage, but it can't possibly be any worse.

 

Hmm, that's an odd one. While I do have a very positive experience with Word, I have an even better experience with Pages. I have to do a lot of brochure creation with for my business with Pages and I use Inspector a lot to add 3D graphics and I have never once noticed any system resource hogging with Pages. I have a 15" 2010 MBP and an iMac 27" Quad Core.

How do you know Office 2011 is not a full Cocoa app? Microsoft said it was? Do you have any way of proving this to not be true?

 

I specifically said, 'a resource hog, "at least on my system"', which, I indicated, is an ancient MacBook.

No need to make it sound like an indictment; this is not a refereed publication.

I've got two 'ways' of 'proving' my point, see the Mac BU blog post from a while back, to retrieve which I wasted five minutes of my day, on the wayback machine:
Office for Mac Drinking Cocoa at WWDC | Office For Mac

And here's another 'way':
Microsoft Word 2011 is Worth the Journey | In-Depth Review | The Mac Observer

Clear enough, now?

 

No need to get hostile and defensive. I asked you a simple question and I wasn't being rude about it.

 

/me steps in to referee.

 

I don't know about Office 2011 but Office 2008 has some annoying problems, like lack of ribbon. Also whenever I open a file with Word 2007 equations it basically explodes.

I would highly recommend Office 2011 over Office 2008. If you can get it.