A First Look at Office for Mac 2011

by P. J. Connolly

Office Web Apps are available to both personal and small business users via Windows Live, and enterprise customers that use SharePoint; files can be hosted on Microsofts SkyDrive service or on a SharePoint site.

Excels reworked tools allow users to add useful visual cues to spreadsheets and other reports, and new quick-select rules allow users to easily include icons and data bars within a document.

The core Office for Mac applications—Word, Excel and PowerPoint—now offer powerful photo editing capabilities, which can be accessed without ever leaving your document.

Much of e-mail is a volley of messages within a group, and Outlook for Mac 2011 automatically condenses those conversational volleys down to a single line in the Inbox.

The newly redesigned Template Gallery functions in Word, Excel and PowerPoint allow users to customize document templates from the gallery and preview changes before using.

Visual Basic for Applications returns to the Mac platform by popular demand, and allows the automation of awkward or repetitive tasks; these automations can be shared with other Office users.

The new dynamic reordering tools in Word and PowerPoint make it simple to manage layered content, and offer a 3D view of document layers.

Accepting meeting invitations used to require switching back and forth between e-mail and calendaring tools; Outlook 2011 provides a view of ones calendar from within the invitation.

Office for Mac 2011 will launch on Oct. 26 and is available in a Home and Student edition made up of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, as well as the Home and Business edition, which adds Outlook.