Macworld 2010: Microsoft's MacBU talks Office for Mac 2011

I'm stuck with Excel 2004 for mission-critical VBA. So buggy though. For example if Exposé is used with Excel, Excel will eventually go strange and hang that session. You have to Quit and re-open prior, to prevent it. That's just for starters. Hang, hang, hang, Excel is not responding. Manually back up every time I make a significant change, I've been caught too often.

Click the mouse too quickly mid-function, and it could hang.

Use Excel 2004 VBA and my 2009 UniBody MBP Trackpad becomes permanently unresponsive requiring up to six clicks to register until the PRAM is flashed. Get the trackpad working for weeks OK, use VBA once and dead trackpad again.

But I need VBA so have to just put up with my trackpad not working properly anymore at all.

My spreadsheets are really complicated and Open Office simply crashes trying to open them. Only Excel will do it.

But there's lots of crazy stuff with 2004 Excel, I'm hoping it's sorted in 2011. I've had to put up with this head-banging walk on eggshells on a daily basis for at least five years.

So I'm hanging too: I'm really hanging out for something better.

Looking much better! Really hope it has the zoom function as in 2007; control+mouse scroll to zoom in and out of the document! One of the main things missing in mac 2008!!!

The new office 2011 needs to have close to 100% compatibility for it to be a real breakthrough, small things always go wrong going back and forth b/w mac and pc. The other thing is Excel 2008 is one of the biggest disappointments, no macro..

This is all incredibly good news, as long as the Mac Business Unit really follows through on their promises for the performance and usability improvements that were mentioned, and which have consistently been in place in the Windows iterations of Office.

I say this as a thoroughly disappointed Office:Mac user. As of now, I resort to Boot Camp literally every time I want to use Microsoft Office. Office for Mac seems to have been more about screwing Mac users than providing them the same experience that Windows users gained. Excel, in particular, is insufferable on the Mac side. No support for macros or VBA, as well as the complete reformat job Excel:Mac gives to any files that were created in Excel 2007, make it useless for use in a Windows-dominated work/learning environment where complex models are built and shared. And why the easy-to-use ribbon from Office 2007 was never included in Office:Mac 2008, despite the fact that Microsoft knew it worked well after years of beta-testing it, is beyond me.

For those Mac users who have not become accustomed to the ribbon, it's time to graduate. I too was a non-believer until I tried it. The ribbon allows me to access any basic function in any Office app with the press of 2 buttons on the keyboard, and includes onscreen prompts so I don't have to worry about forgetting those key combinations.

The Office Ribbon is the most vile creation to ever come out Redmond. I've been using Office since Word for DOS and the UI has remained somewhat consistent across version upgrades. The ribbon threw away 20+ years of Office experience & learning curve and I now have to spend 5 minutes hunting & pecking like a freakin novice every time I want to try some function I haven't used recently. I absolutely hate the ribbon. If the Mac version of Office has the ribbon, I won't be getting it.

From what has been published so far, it looks like Word for Mac 2011 will still not be able to handle Arabic, Hebrew, or Indic scripts -- really hard to believe after all these years.

Get the real statistics package into Excel or no-sale.

I am looking forward to the new changes for Office. I use my Office applications often and it sound like you know what the consumer wants. So I give you my kudos for whats coming and wait with anticipation....
JOE

Ribbon: meh

One thing I do hope they do is speed up the start up time dramatically. I hate hate hate waiting 5 minutes while Word 'optimises the font menu', only to do it all again when I need to open Excel. Oh, and fix the palettes and spaces. There's no logical explanation for having a document in one space, while it's palettes are on another.

Too little, too late. Moved away from that long ago. Somebody ill informed emailed you a docx? Open it in Google Docs.

This is the only product I really like from Microsoft. It's the thing they must do, softwares like this and let the OS to Apple :)

What's the problem with Messenger with A/V? WHENNNNN?????