Office 2011 to ship October 26

I love the tons of features within MS Office, as they save me time. (You'll never go back once you understand MS Word styles and how to map them to keyboard shortcuts.)

I love the portability of Google Docs and the ability to easily collaborate with co-workers. (Yes, MS Office has putative solutions, but they cost extra and are difficult to implement.)

Why must we continue to live with this dichotomy?

I was hoping Office 2010/2011 would address the G-Docs beast head-on, and allow editing the same documents in desktop version and online version, as with Evernote.

Does anyone notice the Microsoft Word ad uses Apple laptops in their ad and not a Windows based machine?

I would give up 5-10 seconds of launch time if they'd just fix their awful, bloated, unclean-able HTML output.

I LOVE that exploded layers feature! That would be ideal in Adobe's Suite!

I had to write a review of Office 2010 for PC today and was thinking how its fast falling into irrelevance.

A hardcore Outlook user, I ditched it over a year ago for GMail/Google Calendar and wish I had done it much sooner.

As it stands now, I think 90% of users and businesses could not only cope but thrive with a commitment to switch to Google Docs for Spreadsheet and Word Processing, but admittedly that would probably be premature on an ROI basis for businesses - even personally I prefer Excel and Word for now.

I have been working a lot with rich application development in HTML5 and the future for software models like Microsoft Office is definitely in serious jeopardy.

HTML5 reminds me alot of early web development - its potential to disrupt computing and software revenue models is scary, especially as hardware-accelerated rendering for canvas arrives (already in IE9).

Sorry Microsoft, but I'm not biting. You've screwed up many of the charting features that were a must for me in the current version. You've released buggy, slow, and crashy versions too many times in a row. You've promised the world and delivered crap. I'll wait to see if they actually live up to half of what they promise before I even consider upgrading.

Pre-ordered today (£176.99 from Amazon UK, in case anyone is interested). I'm still running Office:mac 2004 since 2008 was a bit of a dud so the new version, given that it apparently (according to MacWorld) nixes many of the issues, was a no-brainer. My wife is an Excel junkie so she'll certainly appreciate the new version.

I've been running O11 for about a week now, as it was released to those with with Volume Licensing Service early. I freakin love it. It's enabled me to leave my Windows machine behind at work and totally move to the Mac without compromise. Entourage was ok, but having Outlook on my Mac is what I needed to be able to fully use my Mac at work. Best of it is very snappy, most the visual stuff might be neat to the folks at MS, I just needed something that worked and worked quickly.

Why don't they talk about being able to start in under a minute on an 8-core MacPro ??

How about being able to start in 5 - 10 seconds like decent apps do?

I was suckered on Office 2004. And again on 2008. Not going to happen again. No performance - no money. It's *that* simple.

Especially since Office is no longer the "only game in town". Thank goodness.

Why don't they talk about the features that actually matter like VBA in Excel and seamless formatting between different operating systems/office versions?

Microsoft just doesn't get it.