Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac screenshots leaked

Still the scrollbar and tab bar are next to each other! Is not anybody else frustrated by this terrible gui decision? If you have more than a few tabs, they get bunched up and you have to constantly scroll them back and forth or make your scrollbar tiny.

The ribbon is the most vile thing to every emanate from Redmond. It throws away 20+ years of MS office learning curve and makes everything impossible to find. After being an Office power user for 20 years, I'm still hunting and pecking for features hidden by the ribbon. If it comes to the Mac, I'm not "upgrading."

This looks like a mash-up of Mail and Entourage. A mock-up done by a marketing team or something. This can't be real, can it?

I really wish somebody would Applize microsoft office. iWork is great... but its support for .doc is absolutely horrible. I just want a word processor with a good, simple and powerful user interface. It's absolutely disgusting that in 2010 we still have a panel that has 100 buttons.

Hm, I also wonder where all that hate for the formatting palette comes. It's not perfect but useful – better than having dozens of toolbars around that you don't need most of the time.

Based on my experience with Office 2007, the ribbon is okay, but takes a while to get used to. But since it fulfills more or less the same function as the formatting palette, that makes one of both rather redundant.

Another thing: "Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac is being rewritten entirely in Cocoa..." Are you sure about that? So far, in the official announcement of Office 2011, I have only read that Outlook is entirely Cocoa, but nothing about a complete rewrite of the other Office applications.

The screenshots don't provide much but everyone is eager to finally have a 100% working Exchange solution with Outlook.

Mac users have ALWAYS been behind in Exchange - and supposedly now they won't have to worry. It's one more reason for businesses to consider Mac replacements over PC's with their next purchase cycle.

Anxious to try it out... Entourage is terrible, and Mail doesn't offer support for Exchange 2003. It does support Exchange 2007 but only very basically. What our organization needs is a mail client that supports all versions of Exchange, can Auto Archive, and can create HTML signatures. It would also be lovely if it could support OWA as a "Connect from anywhere" option, like the PC version.

Will there be Visio? This is the main thing missing for the Mac. I have to view/edit many Visio docs, including ones embeded in Word Docs.

I'm surprised at all the hate for the formatting palette. I've always found it very useful.

Now if only Outlook can get away from using a single *huge* file for it's data store (outlook.pst) I may consider it.

Using a single huge file for store all my emails with the potential for a single file corruption error to lose it all is too much risk for me.