Office: Mac 2011

Office for the Mac comes in two versions, a Home and Student Version (single user package, $119; three-user family package $149) and a Home and Business Version (single user package, $199; licensed for two machines, $279). The Home and Student version includes Word 2011, Excel 2011, PowerPoint 2011. The Home and Business version matches the Home and Student version plus Outlook 2011, which replaces the Entourage mail, calendar, and contact manager app in recent versions.

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The most newsworthy changes in the suite include the shiny new Outlook and the collaboration feature that lets multiple users edit a document simultaneously when the document is stored on Microsoft's free SkyDrive cloud-based storage or on a SharePoint server. I tested this by editing documents at the same time from a Mac and a Windows machine, and the whole procedure was surprisingly smooth, although I needed to click a Save button on each machine before the actual content that I had created on one machine was visible in the other.

Pros

Fast, flexible office application suite. Most powerful Mac office software. Highly compatible with Office for Windows. Well-integrated with OS X. Visual Basic for Applications recorded and programmed macros fully supported. Newly-designed Outlook replaces Entourage as mail/calendar/contact app.

Cons

No calendar synching with iCal. Outlook won't synch with or retrieve mail from Exchange Server 2003 or earlier.

Bottom Line

Office for the Mac roars back with fast, powerful application suite the best of its kind for the OS X platform.

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