Office for Mac 2011 Focuses on Cross-Platform Scenarios

Office for Mac 2011 should prove to be a better Mac peer for Office 2010 from a cross-platform document support perspective, assuaging fears that Mac users will lose key functionality when receiving or interacting with documents or e-mail from Windows users. Additionally, Office 2011 provides closer parity with Office 2010 on fundamentals, features, and look and feel while still providing a Mac-like experience. This should enable organizations to support Macs without requiring use of a virtual machine for full Office functionality or making Mac users feel they have a less functional version of Office. One significant change from Office 2008 is the lack of an e-mail client in the base version of Office. Microsoft has made this change to provide feature parity with the base Windows version of Office, which also does not include an e-mail client.

What’s New in Office 2011

Office for Mac includes three of the core applications from Office for Windows—Excel, Word, and PowerPoint—plus clients for e-mail and real-time communications (instant messaging and presence).