Microsoft Office For The Mac 2014
Microsoft gave a hint in this direction when it released an Android SDK at its SharePoint Conference 2014 in Las Vegas last week.” And here’s the comment from the MS spokesperson: “A representative for Microsoft confirmed that development work for the next version of Office for Mac is ongoing.
“Microsoft is behind the schedule it used for the last several iterations, and has not breathed a word about its Mac intentions,’ Gregg Keizer writes for Computerworld. “In fact, the blog kept by the California-based development team that works on Office for Mac hasn’t been updated since Aug. 5, 2013, more than seven months ago.
“The last time Microsoft launched a new Office for OS X was October 2010, when it rolled out Office for Mac 2011,” Keizer writes. “Prior to that, Microsoft issued upgrades in January 2008 (Office for Mac 2008), May 2004 (Office for Mac 2004) and November 2001 (Office v. X).” “The average spread between Office for Mac editions — going back as far as Office v. X — has been 1,088 days,” Keizer writes. “But as of Thursday, it had been 1,213 days since the launch of Office for Mac 2011.” Read more in the full article.
MacDailyNews Take: Who cares; isn’t Office bloated enough already? Work on a university campus (or at least this one) would become too chaotic without document parity. Whether you like MS Office or not, there are few viable options when it comes to doing the variety of things Office can do AND be truly cross platform. Throw students and their computer choices into the mix, using MS Office as the university standard just makes life easier for everyone. I use a Mac and don’t want to switch; without MS Office for the Mac, I’d have no choice but to use a PC at work. What iWorks doesn’t do is let you easily collaborate with people using Office.
As much as I hate Word (I actually use Adobe FrameMaker for my serious word smithing) it is the *only* solution when you have to deal with several different organizations. Given how often Office 2008 for the Mac crashes, and how some features don’t translate well from PC to Mac versions, I’d almost be begging for a Mac update. OTOH, I absolutely refuse to get into the software subscription racket, so I make do. That said, iWorks just isn’t an option, as much as I’d prefer that it be. Yes, it is a standard, and Excel in particular is an amazing tool for people who actually have a need to REALLY know how to use its full functionality (or even 20% of its functionality). Most Office users don’t have clue about “pivot tables,” for example, and the most complex thing they do with Excel is to make simple data tables and charts. Because it is a standard, Microsoft does not need to update it very much at this point.
They are only adding more tool bars and “ribbons,” and other “eye candy” features. They do this in the Windows world, because they need to give customers a reason to pay for the next upgrade. And now, they are trying to make Office (for Windows) “touch first,” which will alienate Office power users in the same way that Windows 8 alienated non-tablet Windows users in general. Mac users who use Office by choice or necessity should be happy that there is no new version in the works for the near future. Set tab word for mac 2016. People on this forum love to pretend the 90’s didn’t happen but sorry they did, MS became the standard practice for companies and the bigger the Co the longer it will take them to change to a different standard. I use Excel not just because I’ve used it for nearly 20 years on both Macs and Windoze but Numbers does not do it on really large complex stuff.
Numbers is great for simpler spreadsheets. What other option is there? Google spreadsheets aren’t as good as Numbers is, what else is out there that competes and provides 100% file compatibility with the other people using Excel? If you don’t have an intelligent answer, then there is the answer as to why it still matters about MS office on the Mac.
The more Mac’s that sell and hopefully catch up to Windows share the better. Here’s the problem for business users. I have tried on several occasions to generate not-to-complex documents in Pages, using iCloud collaborative editing, sharing the documents as PDF, and/or “saved-as” Word versions with colleagues on Windows computers. At some point, I invariably need to give a MS Word version over to Windows folks who need them, and little things will creep in that simply do not export well from Pages to Word. At some point, the trouble is more than its worth and I would have been better off starting out and staying with MS Word from the beginning. Too many other users and businesses are Word users to start and stay with Pages. Pages is great for personal documents or in an all-Mac environment, but when sharing with the world at large, its problematic.