“First the good news: Microsoft Office 2007 for Mac will feature an all-new look and feel to match Mac OS X’s interface evolution, and enhanced features, while running natively on the new Intel Macs,” John O’Brien reports for Reuters.
“Now for the bad news: It won’t be available till the latter half of 2007,” O’Brien reports. “Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit group product manager Mary Starman recently met some Aussie journalists at the unit’s headquarters on the MS campus in Seattle. There she revealed some details about the new version of arguably the most important software package on the Mac.”
O’Brien reports, “The Mac version will hit shelves six to eight months after Windows users get their version. That makes it up to a year away, and 3½ half years after Office 2004 for Mac.”
Full article here.
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They’ve got to do it for Winders first, you see – massage the code to work around all the slapped-together, kludged, code of the underlying OS before showing the finished product to the MBU. Wouldn’t want to reveal too much too early, you know – might bring up too many uncomfortable questions. Like, “WTF were you thinking!!??”
This isn’t bad news.
It might be a good idea for Office to be released after Leopard, so that it can be optimized for the new OS.
I am concerned about MS bloat, which really slows me down.
Can anyone suggest a light-weight, but fully-compatible alternative to Word?
kaekae thanks for the info!
I actually liked the demo of ribbons, but based on your comments will wait until the verdict is in.
I am not a Word expert, but we do put it through it’s paces. I for one do not like Words propensity to try and second guess what you are trying to do, and frustrate all attempts at (re)formatting a lengthy document with numerous levels of subtopics/paragraphs. You shouldn’t have to wrestle with your word processor. Word in two words is too complicated.
My favorite wps are and were Corel’s Word Perfect (3.5) and Apple Works. I have tried the demo of Pages and I do not like it. Quite frankly unless we were missing something really obvious, we couldn’t figure out how to format a simple text document. Our wp needs are strictly text based, and Pages seemed geared toward multimedia in text output, that is fine, it just didnt suit our needs at all.
zac
Big effin whoop-de-doo. I use M$ Word daily. Just what in 2007 would thaey have that would justify me upgrading. I can write text, search in it and print the darn thing. I have a dictionary and thesaurus and I can compare documents. If you already have something that makes most people happy, I am thinking that their strategy may be one of incompatibility. Bring out Word for PC first….make it so that Word for the mac is not overly compatable so then all mac users who interact/share with Windoze users will be forced to upgrade.
Remember…you heard it here first!
MS…eat fecal matter and die!
I use iWork and added a program called Tables for a spreadsheet, it looks and feels like pages.
I am totally M$ free!!!!!!!!!!
its funny that the transition to intel went very smooth but Adobe & Microsoft still have nothing…….makes you think
There is one area where interoperability is going to be an issue.
Microsoft has stated that Visual Basic for Applications is dead on the Mac. This is not good for anyone who uses scripting in their spreadsheets. Exchanging scripted files with Windows users will be a huge issue, given the number of scripted Excel files generated in the Corporate world.
And there are other applications that use VBA on the Mac such as Equation Editor and Endnote to name a couple. The decision by MBU regardong VBA is an important fork in the road for anyone who uses these two apps.
Come on Apple.
Get some balls and make iWork 07 a serious upgrade.
You don’t have to market it as a MSOffice killer. (We understand you need MS to be happy.)
But for those of us in the know, make it a killer. We’re tired of the bloat, slimy lock-ins of Microsoft, plus, we hate giving money to evil companies.
Keynote is 90% there.
Pages is 50% there.
A spreadsheet is needed.
One serious and major update will get you home.
Why don’t they just call it 2008 and sell it in the Fall of ’07. So it could seem relevant longer than 3 months.
http://www.neooffice.org baby!
Nisus Writer, OmniOutliner, and Textmate, Microsoft who? F them!
Word 5.1a that was the perfect version.
Excel is the killer app in Office, and it’s a crying shame that Microsoft are removing VBA from Excel for the Mac in Office 2007 as this will make it next to useless for anyone who does any real work with the program.
well I need Word. Until another program has full integration with EndNote then I am not switching. I might even have to buy an intel mac and use Word on Windows if Thompson stopped making EndNote for the Mac.
Rapscallion, you certainly seem to like your toolbars!
The things you surgest are newbie stuff for anyone who has a bit of word processing experience and you could just as easily do them in any of the open source word processors.
Word for pc works pretty well although it has way too many features for the regular user, why do think they don’t offer a basic version of it like they do with xp home/pro? Because 99% would buy the basic version since they don’t need the added functionality.
Word on os x is crap, sluggish and about as stable as a tjernobyl nuclear core!
“six to eight months after Windows users get their version. “
Must suck to be on a platform that’s always behind the mainstream. No Adobe UB, No Core2 laptops, 8 months wait for new Office software. That’s the furture of Mac ownership, purpetual following.
The two or three times a week that I use Word, I can do with X.1.6 under rosetta.
These days, all my manuscripts are written in Pages first, then saved as rtf. EndNote 9 can handle rtf, so I’m happy. If Pages would learn to highlight changes, I’d be even more happy.
Keynote beats PPt anyway, hands down.
Spreadsheet would be nice, but I still have Apple Works for the few cases where I have to open xls files. NeoOffice works, too, and it’s free. Excel is horrible anyway. Prizm has much better features.
I just hope, iWorks keeps improving with version ’07, then I’ll have no real need for Office and I can realise a true, Microsoft-free zone. Oh Happy Day!