“In Office 2011, we’ve made investments in better compatibility between Office for Mac and Windows Office, which is the largest request we receive from customers,” Hoelter reports. “We think we have some outstanding improvements to show you in this area, and we’ll continue to share details in coming weeks.”
“Our work to increase compatibility means we haven’t completed the transition of moving the entire user interface over to Cocoa yet,” Hoelter reports. “And because Apple’s frameworks require us to complete the move to Cocoa before we can build a 64-bit version, Office 2011 will be 32-bit only.”
“What does this mean to you? While Cocoa makes our job building Office easier, Office 2011 will look and feel great regardless of what technology is powering which bit of user interface. The largest difference between using a 32-bit and 64-bit version is the memory capacity available for your content,” Hoelter reports. “Most users with typical or even larger-than-average document content will not notice a difference in performance. Where 64-bit can make a difference is for people working with huge amounts of data, such as those creating very large Excel files with data in millions of cells, or PowerPoint presentations with thousands of high resolution images.”
Hoelter reports, “The Windows Office Engineering team explained the differences earlier this year, recommending that most people use the 32-bit version of Office 2010 for the best compatibility, even on 64-bit versions of Windows.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
MIcrosoft: 10 years behind the times…
Epic Fail.
*Raises glass* May Steve Ballmer remain at the helm for as long as it takes. *clink*…
Figures.
If they could, they surely would, but were taking Microsoft here…
Get a Mac, Get pages and get over it.
Pages? You have GOT to be kidding me. It’s a pretty app, but nowhere near functional.
And Numbers… again, great for home users.
Are you kidding me???
Office ships 16+ months after Mac OS 10.6 and is STILL Carbon based?
I don’t remember off the top of my head, but wasn’t Cocoa announced 8+ years ago? Wasn’t Cocoa effectively complete and fully useful in Mac OS 10.5 (October 2007!)?
There really is no excuse for MS Office for Mac to be 32-bit and Carbon based.
@MooLatte – Function Count ≠ Functional
@Moolatte
“great for home users”
Uh, yeah, and that’s where Apple is concentrating their efforts to sell Macs. Pages will suffice for millions of home users, and is 90% compatible with Office. I use it all the time, and it works great, even for my wife’s home business.
Folks send her Office docs all the time, and rarely do we see a function that Pages will not translate that makes a real difference in reading or using that document.
I really couldn’t care less whether it’s 32 or 64 bit, as long as they speed the damn thing up and fix some of the annoying formatting issues when opening Office documents created in the Windows versions.
Oh yeah, and how about making the e-mail client actually work with the rest of the suite?
Agree with MooLate. Wish Pages and Numbers were true replacements for Office apps, but the are not.
Until Numbers can control calculations like Excel and Pages doesn’t give a huge list of document incompatabilities for even simple Word documents, iWork will be relegated to lite users.
Then again, I’m not holding my breath for iWork to reach parody as true desktop computing (not the iPad lite stuff) will soon be a lonely truck.
OK, WHY do we need a 64bit to version of Word again
Hmph…..I always saw MicroShaft software as 2-bit
I hear comments about how iWork is only for home users, but 90% of the people who send me Office documents at work quite clearly have no clue how to use any of the features of Office and iWork would be more than enough for them. It always amuses me to see Word documents that have quite clearly been edited and edited from ages old templates because they have this huge mess of formatting styles, along with numerous instance of people manually changing the font styling to try and make it look like something else on the page because they have no clue about applying styles.
MS seems kinda slow to me to update to modern standards (64 bit-cocoa). Is it deliberate or is it because they do not have enough programmers devoted to it?
I still prefer Office for Mac over iWork for doing papers and journals. Besides, every time I export to Word from Pages (even with a simple document), formatting always messes up somehow.
For word processing – Word wins. For creating flyers, posters, and “family newsletters” – Pages wins.
Numbers, although easy to use, has even worse exporting errors than Pages does. Your Numbers file will look nothing like its original when you export to Excel.
I do really prefer Keynote over Powerpoint though, this is where Apple has improved functionality and use over Office.
My 2 cents.
Years late and not current when it ships. My eyebrows didn’t exactly shoot off my head reading that.
I know it probably doesn’t matter when you’re running office, but still…
M$ slowly but surely slipping away… bye, bye… We won’t miss you.
Big question; Will it open docx, the propriety XML owned by Lucent. The technology they have lost 2 appeals over in US high court. The older generation are the only ones to scared to move to try new apps to do old tricks.
Word better than Pages?
Word don’t handle small caps!
Epic fail!
Apple will be on 128-bit by the time Microsoft gets it’s 64-bit working without the bugs! Cocoa was out about 10 years ago and Microsoft isn’t there yet. I am shocked! (No not really … It’s the Microsoft way of doing business.)
The only unstable / crashing applications on my MacBook Pro are from Microsoft!
And Final Cut Pro? iTunes? Color? Motion?
Let’s see. When I use Word 2004 or 2008 for a technical report with inserted graphics from other sources, it gets very squirrly after about 2 insertions. At about 5 it is almost unusable. Not to mention jumping pages and awful tools.
With Pages, placing inserts (graphs, charts, pics, pdfs, etc) is a breeze and it doesn’t get squirrly for many pages. I hate the user interface. Can you believe they use the paragraph symbol for three entirely different things. Very confusing. Hard to find functions buried under many menus. Very un-Apple like.
But back to topic. If I have a “tedious” document to create, which is frequently, I do it in Pages, then export it to pdf. I may export it to Word if necessary. I have had no problems with the Word version, unless I want to edit it, then it does its usual self destruction.
Numbers is another story. I have the “08” version of Numbers. It is not ready for prime time. I would rate it as “not ready for release”. It is too far below a good finished product.
I use OO.org for a lot of my work, and Excel for the rest.
What do we expect?
MicroSoft has a 32-bit mentality.
Mircoft Office for Mac? is there a office for the Mac from Microsoft? wow.. and who use that? why would any one want to use a microsoft product in a Mac?
Before we get too righteous about Office 2011 being 32 bit…
iPhoto is 32 bit only
iTunes is 32 bit only
I think the righteousness (at least for me) is the Carbon *and* 32 bit. I guess that is the price of writing bloated spaghetti code, makes it difficult to clean up.
Easy to tell who the blind followers are here. They are the sanctimonious ones trashing Office just because it’s from MS. They are obviously just email and web surfers with no need to actually be productive.
They are also the ones who will strike out in this news conveniently ignoring facts pointed out about Apple’s core programs being 32 bit.
You folks make Apple fans look like fools!
YAWN! who cares? Keep that POS for windoze POS. Don’t infect your mac with it!
Actually meant to write iWork. Numbers is up to excel, keynotebis better than Power point and I agree that pages is not yet what a pro word processor could be but is pretty nifty and offers good desktop publishing options that are useful and valuable to most word processing users. Nisus and many other Mac word processors offer same for better functionality and translators than Word though.
If Apple gets it act together on the office suite and make a version of iWork that is 75% as functional as M$ Office… They will bury M$ for good.
just my $0.02
P.S. It may require bundling Bento with iWork, though.
Who the Fu*k cares?
The only thing ms office to good for is making me money off of morons that won’t listen to me after I try to talk them out of it.
I always get a chuckle from people complaining about Pages. Whenever I ask about the “missing” feature they need, it turns out not to be missing. The list of things Word does that Pages doesn’t is much shorter than people think.
My $0.98
I use iWork. I recommend it.
-jcr
Microsoft = poor performance.
And something is supposed to surprise me here?
MS’s products ALWAYS equal sub standard performance, and designed below current standards used by the rest of technology.
Same old MS. Too bad our office insists on it, That’s how MS survives in spite of all it’s crap. Stupid, clueless business staff insists on clinging to it. If business ever buys a clue, MS is done. At home, I have nothing MS.
I use Office 2000 with VMware running Windows 2000. That has the best feature set, the menus make sense, and there is no stupid ribbon.
How about a 64-bit version of Excel that doesn’t truncate data at 65,000 lines?
What is Office for Mac? Never heard of it.
@The real deal
Yeah true, people who complain about pages are normaly that much into Word, that they expect Pages to function the same way, and because it doesn’t, they believe there must be some functions missing. For people who have no idea about typography, layout, etc. but learned 15 years ago how to write a business letter with Word, yeah get Office and be happy with it. If you like to rethink your old habits and be more productive, give Pages a try, but intensively, not just 10 minutes.
This reminds me of the Mac vs. IBM-PC discussion: yeah the mac is a toy computer, only good for home user, business user need IBM, corporate standard, compatibility, blabla…
1. Read more carefully people:
Rewording from m$ speak into English:
The #1 priority from our users, compatibility, is better but still not 100%; in other words, we’re not done – its still broken but we’re going to ship it anyway. We expect our customers to settle for a partial fix. Yes, even though we own the Mac and Windows code, we still can’t figure out how to make them work the same.
And, we’re so embarrassed at how behind we are at adopting core Apple technologies like Cocoa that we put a lot of effort into that, and we diluted our resources. And we didn’t finish that either. Yes, we violated the #1 rule of getting stuff done – focus on the #1 objective – we don’t follow basic best practices.
2. It sounds like people are saying that Keynote is functionally superior to Powerpoint, and nobody is complaining about compatibility.
Give Pages a couple of more solid revisions, and Numbers a few more beyond that, and I’m sure they’ll be at the level of Keynote.
But Apple is busy elsewhere now – they’re focused on “iPadizing” iWork – that task is #1 for now, but, once that is done…
How long before iWork is more compabile with m$ office pc than m$ office mac is? Yes, they have work to do here, and this needs to be absolutely bulletproof, but once it is done, m$ office Mac is toast.
3. Don’t forget about OpenOffice and NeoOffice – they’re free, remember – its costs nothing to try. And there is a peecee version, too (as well as Linux). And its opensource.
Generally, the word processer in OpenOffice is superior to word, functionally, and very, altho not perfectly compatible (but different versions of m$ office aren’t 100% compatible m$ office either).
Hot tip: The OpenOffice word processor is also more robust – it will open mildly corrupt m$ word files that m$ word refuses to open. Very handy for last minute disasters…
The Openoffice spreadsheet is not at the Excel level, however, functionality wise, but I would expect that most people will be fine, especially for typical, basic use. The presentation app is a bit further behind, but, again, most users will be fine. Use Keynote if you need more.
The biggest problem with Pages is that it doesn’t use an XML data format.
@Moolatte, and MadMac (more like “Mad-At-Mac”)
“Home users” and “lite” (sic) users?
Oh.
I guess I’d better trash my iWork software, the software being used exclusively, and very successfully, for two of my businesses.
We never liked Office, or Office for Mac, and we now produce fantastic business documents in a timely, stress-free (even, dare I say it, fun) manner.
But, gee, you smart, Microsoft-Apologist Trolls are saying I’m wrong, so I guess I must be wrong.
Do you mean iWork is 64-bit?
@MadMac,
I use iWork for my business to do “real” work all the time. As for it not being a proper tool for businesses; I guarantee you that I make more money in my business than you do in yours.
@ Mintdog:
Please elaborate. What problems does this cause?
Before you all go off about the next Office being 32-bit, you should note that the current version of one of Apple’s most important assets, iTunes 9.1.1, is also still 32-bit as well. And the reason is likely to be the similar. iTunes started out way before even Mac OS 9, as a third-party program call SoundJam MP which Apple bought as the starting point – the first version of iTunes was for Mac OS 9 only. Apple kept adding functionality to iTunes (such as iPod support, video support, and the iTunes Store), and it is probably very difficult to transition everything to 64-bit code. They are no doubt working right now on a completely new “ground up” rewrite (perhaps iTunes 10 or “X”) in parallel.
For iTunes, being 32-bit is a non-issue right now. It’s not a big deal for Office either. You’d need to be working with a humongous 4GB spreadsheet or PowerPoint presentation, before there was an impact from being a 32-bit, versus 64-bit, application.
FAIL. Thank God I realized a long time ago that I don’t need Microsoft crud on my Macs. The iWork ’09 package does everything I need on a daily basis.
TeX Live is free, runs on anything (but best on my Mac as MacTeX), and produces typographically fantastic output or pdfs. Indexing, bibliography, figure placement & captioning, table of contents, etc., are all automagically done. Crap, you have to stand on your head to get a ligature in Word, but LaTeX does it automatically. Why on earth does anyone use Word for anything more than a memo?
As noted by several Keynote is better than PowerPoint.
Unfortunately, nothing out there competes with the advanced functions in Excel: Solver and like such as. Sigh.
“The biggest problem with Pages is that it doesn’t use an XML data format.”
Pages has always used an XML data format, just like all of the iWork applications. The the XML data is zip compressed to reduce file size. Just the unzip Pages document.
What no take from MDN? That’s odd especially when it concerns Microsoft
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and then they wonder WHY the company is FAILING and LOOSING market share, income and customers…