Office 2011 Service Pack 1 due next week, improves Outlook compatibility
The upgrade from Microsoft Office 2008 to 2011 has not been without its drawbacks; for users of Entourage who moved to the all-new Outlook for Mac, in particular, there have been a few holes in the feature lineup. None of them are necessarily showstoppers, but the collection of odd omissions has given the flagship mail/calendar/contact management platform an air of unfinished business over the past few months.
Good news, though: Microsoft's Office for Mac blog reports that we will be seeing Service Pack 1 for Office 2011 next week. The big-ticket returning feature for Outlook is calendar support in Sync Services, meaning that Outlook calendars may once again synchronize locally with iCal, BusyCal or tethered iPhones, iPod touch or iPad units through iTunes.
Outlook's punch list also includes editing support for Exchange's server-side rules (which last appeared on the Mac in Outlook 2001 for Mac OS 9!), the return of the Redirect and Resend options in addition to simple message forwarding, and editing of messages in the Inbox. Excel is also getting better Solver integration, and there are sure to be hundreds of other bug fixes and minor improvements.
While the Sync Services calendar support is welcome, it's slightly ironic that it's coming back to Microsoft's PIM at the same time that Apple's MobileMe calendars are transitioning to CalDAV -- which in turn is breaking Sync Services support for those hosted calendars via iCal and BusyCal. That means there still won't be a supported way to get MobileMe calendars to synchronize with Outlook for Mac (or Entourage 2008, for that matter), at least in the short term.
There are some Outlook users who will be able to synchronize to MobileMe's CalDAV servers... but they aren't using Mac OS X. 32-bit versions of Outlook 2007 or 2010 on Windows can indeed sync up to MobileMe, with the help of Apple's MobileMe control panel on Windows XP, Vista or 7.
The Office 2011 SP1 download will be available sometime the week of April 11; we'll let you know when it drops.
Hat tip to The Loop.
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The upgrade from Microsoft Office 2008 to 2011 has not been without its drawbacks; for users of Entourage who moved to the all-new...
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I am very concerned over what I perceive as a troubling flaw in Apple's priorities regarding their customers. For all of the glorification of Apple in regard to hardware and OS, the quality of their software is inconsistent and they have not always managed their relationship with competitors in a manner that optimizes the end result for Apple's loyal clientele. The Outlook issue added to the botched release of the iPad 2 leaves me wondering what has gone astray in Cupertino— like why can't the "grown-ups" put aside their differences and let our calendars get along with one another and must MobileMe be an agent of sabotage?
April 09 2011 at 2:35 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyCan they sort the bibliography in a Word document properly, please?
April 07 2011 at 5:51 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyCan they fix the damn Automator action "Convert to PDF" so I can batch convert .DOC or .DOCX files to PDF.
April 06 2011 at 8:34 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI'd be glad if this update would increase the compatibility with shadows in a Word document with 3 pages. At the moment it gets so slow that I have to use Pages '09 again.
April 06 2011 at 6:21 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyRe: Exchange 2003
I'm one of those Exchange 2003 users. Unfortunately supporting us would further OS X in the Enterprise so it's not likely they'll ever support it. I was pretty bummed about that myself.
Overall, Office 2011 is a stinker for me. I've never seen so many basic usability bugs before. Let's not forget that bugs in the rest of Office 2011 cannot be dismissed as version 1.0 hiccups. It's almost as if it was never even tested. Do these guys at MacBU eat their own dog food or are they all using PCs?
PowerPoint always crashes when displaying a presentation (Office/Radeon bug?...Office 2008 works fine), the search box in Word randomly decides to not focus, and switching between Office windows frequently doesn't bring the selected Office application to the front. Bizarre bugs.
I'd also love to see support for Exchange 2003 but it is never, ever going to happen -- and this has been on the roadmap for a long time.
April 06 2011 at 9:28 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyEh, I'm happy using Apples office and Google Docs and Open Office.
April 06 2011 at 4:49 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyHow about Exchange 2003 compatibility for those who are still stuck on it (yes, there are quite a few of us)?
April 06 2011 at 4:26 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI'd give up the idea of that right now. It seems that the Web Services interface for Exchange is the future so Microsoft isn't going to spend time incorporating the legacy interface into Outlook 2011. That's a shame but seems to be the way things are.
April 07 2011 at 6:48 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyCan we sync our Google calendars with Outlook via iCal once this update is released?
April 06 2011 at 4:21 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI can't believe that you guys (all the press) have given Microsoft a free pass on Outlook 201 for the Mac. It is an unadulterated piece of junk. Let's hope they fix it this time.
"but the collection of odd omissions has given the flagship mail/calendar/contact management platform an air of unfinished business over the past few months."
Yeah, that sounds like a free pass. (?)
Bully for you. How long did it take you to dig that up.
It is not just omissions that are the problem. What MS deserved is a consistent campaign to get them to fix the problems -- not one comment in the middle of the night!
Let's see what they do with the release this week -- though I am not holding my breath!
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