Details on Microsoft Office 2007 for the Mac

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.

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Source: http://www.apcstart.com/site/dflynn/2006/09/1511/exclusive-f…

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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...

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Edward wilford

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.

September 18 2006 at 2:32 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

tim

@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

September 18 2006 at 11:04 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Farhan

Why is it that I don't see any incentive to upgrade to office 2007?

September 18 2006 at 10:47 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

JJA

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...

September 18 2006 at 10:02 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

MrM

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.

September 18 2006 at 9:51 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Christopher

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/

September 18 2006 at 9:08 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

aylwin

Guys, I think the Download Squad link is wrong...

September 18 2006 at 8:50 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Tony Ward

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.

September 18 2006 at 8:27 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jonathan

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 ?)

September 18 2006 at 8:16 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

i hope that it will include multilingual right -left support, ie Hebrew and arabic.

September 18 2006 at 8:07 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply