Microsoft offers Office for Mac 2011 for less

PRODUCTIVITY SUITE DEVELOPER Microsoft has released pricing information for its Office for Mac 2011 suite.

Thanks to its position of being the only viable productivity suite on Apple's Mac OS X, the Vole has managed to produce software of even lower standard than usual and, for years, get away with it. Now it has revealed how much users will have to fork over to get the latest dose of misery when it arrives at the end of October.

Given the horrors users will suffer when using Office for Mac 2011, we thought a simple list would be the most painless.

Microsoft Office for Mac Home and Student 2011 - $119 (£75)
Microsoft Office for Mac Home and Business 2011 - $199 (£125)
Microsoft Office for Mac Academic 2011 - $99 (£62)

The difference between Academic and Home and Student is that paying £13 less will result in getting more, in the shape of Outlook, if you call that more. Quite why Microsoft bothered to have these two versions is beyond us, that is unless you think it is just trying to swindle cash out of hapless students.

There is a "family pack" for the Home and Student 2011 version that goes for about £20 more but will allow three separate installs. Wow, that's almost good value.

The Vole is trying to generate interest in its upcoming Office for Mac 2011 productivity suite by drip-feeding information about all its new features.

The company released the first in a series of videos showing that it will finally replace the cumbersome Entourage personal information manager with Outlook. Other additions include the debut of the ribbon interface on the Mac and a template gallery to browse tacky and useless Powerpoint presentations.

For years Microsoft decided not to port Outlook to its Mac suite, instead sticking with the pretty but useless Entourage. While the application had many functional similarities with its Windows cousin, poor integration with Mac OS resulted in a program that was difficult to use over prolonged periods.

Long suffering users will be delighted to hear that Outlook for Mac will properly integrate with Sherlock, the built-in search for Mac OS. At this point it is unclear whether Outlook will be able to handle large mailboxes more efficiently, avoiding the common database corruption that was suffered by users in the past.

The demonstration sees the appearance of the much maligned 'conversation view' from Outlook 2010 on Windows. Whether it will work more reliably remains to be seen, but it is nice to see Mac users having some sort of features parity, even useless ones, on Microsoft products for the Mac after all this time.

Microsoft has also updated PowerPoint's template gallery, which now enables easier browsing. The firm also mentioned that it will integrate with third-party template web sites, allowing users to easily manage their library. Surely not another way to drain even more cash from customers? Spare us.

Again, there was no mention of increased compatibility between versions, which is vital for those times when presentations have to be loaded onto another machine.

In this preview Microsoft made no references to increased stability or inter-operability between Windows and Mac versions. Those who use Word and Excel will have experienced first hand how poor the applications work in an enterprise environment, where documents are shuttled among users with different versions and operating systems thrown in.

Perhaps it was too much to ask Microsoft to comment on these important software design features. After all, what's to worry? You can now view Powerpoint templates better than ever before. The majority of the video was spent trying to demonstrate how Microsoft can create nice looking software, something which of course is vital in a word processor.

The firm mentions that it combines the best of Apple design with its software development expertise. The problem for heavy users of Office on Mac is not design flourishes, but the ability to rely on a piece of software that, rather than helping to reduce their workload, adds to it.

So far, little of what Microsoft has announced in Office for Mac 2011 points to an easier life for Mac users. Its decision to ditch Entourage is a positive one, but major improvements to Word, and especially Excel, will be needed if Microsoft's claim of Office 2011 being the "definitive version of Office" will be seen as true. µ