Office for Mac 2011 will be launched on Oct. 26, Microsoft announced on Tuesday. The launch date had been rumored for several weeks, and pre-orders begin now.
This is the first major revision for the Mac office suite since early 2008, and the productivity package has been retooled to largely resemble Windows Office 2010. Some of the new features include a full-screen view in Word and a Dynamic Reorder feature that allows layers in a document or presentation to be moved around.
‘Almost Forget You’re in Word’
In a video posted on Microsoft’s Mactopia site, Mac Senior Evangelist Kurt Schmucker said something users will “notice right away in Office 2011 is the launch speed of each of the apps.” He also pointed to improvements in charting, which he said is much faster in the new Excel. Schmucker recalled that one tester described the new Word and Excel as “light because they are so much faster.”
Full Screen actually offers two views — one designed for writing, and one for reading. When in the full-screen view for writing, the user interface disappears. A formatting toolbar appears when the mouse is moved to the top of the screen. In the same video on Mactopia, Senior User Experience Manager Han-Yi Shaw said that, when a user is in this view, you “almost forget you’re in Word because all you see is the page.”
Shaw said the company has “long had this idea to, in one swoop, dynamically reorder all the layers in a presentation or document.” He described Dynamic Reorder as “exciting” and “futuristic,” helping to make a Word document or a presentation “enjoyable and intuitive at the same time.”
Free Upgrade from Office 2008
Other new features include a view of multiple e-mail accounts within Outlook, access to Microsoft’s SkyDrive file-sharing service, and reportedly complete compatibility with…