APC Magazine had a chance to sit down and snag some juicy details from Mary Starman, group product manager for the MacBU, on the next version of Microsoft Office for the Mac. Probably the most significant change will be a UI redux (while still accounting for Apple's UI guidelines), borrowing from the controversial new 'ribbon' UI Microsoft is introducing in Office 12 for Windows (if you want a rundown on the new Office for Windows UI, check out Download Squad's killer video review, but remember - that isn't exactly what we'll be getting). For standards buffs, the new versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint are adopting the new native XML file format.The next version of Office for the Mac will, of course, be a Universal Binary, and Mary referred to that alone as a big milestone for the team, as they cited many of the same major challenges as Adobe in updating a lot of really, really old code for Apple's Xcode. This challenge, however, is one of the reasons we aren't going to see a new version of Office for the Mac until sometime between July and September of 2007 - as long as everything stays on track.
For more details, check out APC Magazine's interview with Mary for more details on what to expect in this major Office update.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
9-18-2006 @ 8:09AM
mo said...
i hope that it will include multilingual right -left support, ie Hebrew and arabic.
Reply
9-18-2006 @ 8:28AM
Tony Ward said...
So far, I HATE the new UI (big surprise). Ah well. As far as release date goes, don't head to Vegas with that wager.
Reply
9-18-2006 @ 9:08AM
Christopher Jones said...
The Download Squad link goes to APC Magazine's interview.
Heres the link for people looking for the video review:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2006/08/23/word-2007s-easy-new-features-video-review/
Reply
9-18-2006 @ 9:57AM
MrM said...
The ver. up of MS Office is certainly a great news, however I really appreciate if you could also provide any news/updates on the next version of Apple Pages. Apple Pages is not that refined that much yet, but I like how Pages can produce good-looking documents.
Reply
9-18-2006 @ 10:06AM
JB said...
Christopher Jones,
That I assume would be the Windows version of Office 2007 and not the OS X version in the videos. Thus while we might be getting a preview of the 2007 version of Office it doesn't help us OS X users...
Reply
9-18-2006 @ 10:47AM
Farhan said...
Why is it that I don't see any incentive to upgrade to office 2007?
Reply
9-18-2006 @ 11:03AM
Aylwin said...
Guys, I think the Download Squad link is wrong...
Reply
9-18-2006 @ 11:04AM
tim said...
@farhan -
im with you, even as a non UB, i dont see any speed issues with office 2004, i mean, what are you doing while typing a word document or spreadsheet that is THAT heavy of a task. unless there is some super advanced funtion in any of those programs that ive just NEVER heard of, but for the most part, i cant imagine this is more than a new date and UB program
Reply
9-18-2006 @ 11:53AM
Jonathan said...
Those XML files are good for large files (every file is 75 (!) % smaller, but they also oblige you to buy the new version (my noob Windows friend with the beta once sent me some docx file, which was pretty annoying) I hope OpenOffice (neooffice for me) will support them (aren't they called open-something something ?)
Reply
9-18-2006 @ 2:37PM
Edward said...
Personally, I'd rather strip away functionality from Word than add to it. particularly handling large files (anything over 100 pages and Word gets anxious). I also want to be able to REALLY turn of autoformatting, which keeps turning itself back on.
Reply