Office 2011 has a number of new, very useful features, and is a refinement over the previous edition of Office for Mac. The program is cleaner in appearance and much faster to load. There are two glaring issues, however, that would lead me to STRONGLY advise against purchase of the software at this time. First, there are widespread issues with product activation. Office 2011 comes with a new "activation PIN" that must be activated by the sale merchant (similar to how a giftcard will not work unless they scan it at the register). You are then required to enter the PIN on Microsoft's website, at which point (if all has gone well), you will receive your product ID (CD key) that you then use to install the software. In theory, the process should be painless---but Microsoft has been having issues nationwide with activation of the PIN (even if you pay for the software) and I had to deal with about a week's worth of hassles and e-mails/phone calls between Microsoft and my vendor before I could get my legitimately bought-and-paid-for software installable on my computer.
Second, despite its flashiness and cosmetic improvements, this software is just not ready for prime-time in terms of stability. This is an essential point for anyone that works on important (or long) documents--you do not want to risk using this product, because it has not been adequately beta-tested or debugged, and the development team and Microsoft have not provided its customers the courtesy nor respect in ensuring data loss is minimized when using their software. The previous version of Office for Mac has been out for a while and has had hundreds if not thousands of megabytes worth of updates and patches over the years, which makes it relatively reliable to work on. Prior to purchasing Office 2011, you should be aware that there are significant stability issues with MS Excel that make even window-rendering painfully (and reproducibly) difficult (this is on a well-equipped Core i7 Macbook Pro)--where the screen stutters and ghosts when you try and resize documents, for example. MS Word has a glaring bug in it that causes it to, at times, abruptly quit, or worse, convert lengthy documents into asterisks without warning (or option for recovery). Microsoft has been notified of these issues but it is unclear whether or if they are working on solutions. I would recommend sticking with the previous iteration of MS Office, wait for at least 6-8 months prior to purchasing this, or use something alternatively that has an established track record of stability, ease-of-use, and features, such as Apple's iWork. Office for Mac 2011 Home & Student -Family Pack
I like the interface, a combination of the Window's ribon I hate, but have learned to deal with and the menus I know so well. I like the ribbon on this version more than the floating tool bars in Excel 2004. This is the good.
However within moments of first opening Excel 2011 I went to see if the most annoying bug from Excel 2004 had been fixed. When you try editing a formula in a conditional format in Excel 2004, you cannot use the cursor keys for editing. All cursor keys do is to add cell references. My work around is to have a text editor handy so I can copy the formula, edit in the text editor, and past back into Excel. One would think that after 8 years, Microsoft would have had lots of opportunity to fix this. Not so. Same bug.
I need to keep an Excel 2003 for Windows format for most clients, so I set the default file format to be Excel 97-2004. I also tend to use a lot of conditional formats. But when I saved a file with those same conditional formats I created in Excel 2004 (that is I didn't add any new conditions), Excel 2011 added sheet references in the format formulas, which is not recognized by older versions. When I enabled strict backward compatibility, Excel removed those references, but changed every cell reference to the first row. I spent 2 hours fixing this in the 2004 version of Excel.
Try copying an existing worksheet to a new worksheet. Works just fine. Well, unless you have a filter in that existing worksheet, and you highlight the whole (filtered) worksheet, then copy and try pasting into a new worksheet. Excell 2011 appears to freeze, until it finally tells you it ran out of memory.
I have some fairly large worksheet with conditional formats which use formulas. No where near the limit of Excel 2004's capability, but enough that it slows a recalculation down to about one second. That same spreadsheet takes Excel 2011 nearly a minute to recalculate. Funny when Excel 2004 is running in a virtual machine emulating a PowerPC, and Excel 2011 is running in native Intel mode.
I can't speak to the other applications in the suite, I tend to use iWork for editing and presentation, but I live in Excel, and I've had to remove Excel 2011 in order to be able to get anything done.
Excel Mac for 2011 still seems to be missing some of the events in the Windows version, like Worksheet_FollowHyperlink(). Either that, or macros are really flaky, haven't really tested that aspect just yet.
I've seen Alpha software which was more reliable. I can't believe Microsoft actually released this version. Apparently they don't have any power users in their test cadre.
If Microsoft gets their act together and fixes these defects, it might be a decent upgrade. But if you do anything more than the basics (which Apple Numbers does just fine), stick to the 2004 version. Amazon still sells it. - Word - Excel - Mac - Microsoft'
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