“Microsoft is behind the schedule it used for the last several iterations, and has not breathed a word about its Mac intentions,’ Gregg Keizer writes for Computerworld. “In fact, the blog kept by the California-based development team that works on Office for Mac hasn’t been updated since Aug. 5, 2013, more than seven months ago.
“The last time Microsoft launched a new Office for OS X was October 2010, when it rolled out Office for Mac 2011,” Keizer writes. “Prior to that, Microsoft issued upgrades in January 2008 (Office for Mac 2008), May 2004 (Office for Mac 2004) and November 2001 (Office v. X).”
“The average spread between Office for Mac editions — going back as far as Office v. X — has been 1,088 days,” Keizer writes. “But as of Thursday, it had been 1,213 days since the launch of Office for Mac 2011.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Who cares; isn’t Office bloated enough already?
Oh well, don’t bother…
The world is a better place, without MS, FB, Goggle or Whatapp( must come down…)
Office is a relic only needed by unimaginative truck drivers.
A Prius is nice but sometimes only an F350 is gonna haul the load.
Without trucks, Prius drivers don’t get their Prius parts, Whole Foods won’t have food, the list can go on for a hundred pages.
I am assuming that Dusty Mac’s use of the word refers to desktop computers, without which 99.9% of the useful computer apps could not exist. Love my iPhone and iPad, but without my Mac Mini, the only thing on them would be entertainment junk.
And no I dont use Office and wouldn’t for any real work.
Still need a truck for work
Not all truck drivers are unimaginative. Got it?
I’d rather plug my butthole with cork than install MS’s latest Orifice.
“Microsoft is behind schedule”
Yes, we know that. Standard Operating Procedure.
Yeah, no one needs office… Unless you have a real job then of course… you need office. People act like Mac’s are just for play or movie editing. Mac’s are for work to, I use mine in my office at a multi-billion dollar organization and guess what? People here use office to get real work done and when we collaborate with other organizations (finding cures for cancer and other diseases) we also have to use office to keep some semblance of format parity within the documents we use.
Thank you for the intelligent answer.
Work on a university campus (or at least this one) would become too chaotic without document parity. Whether you like MS Office or not, there are few viable options when it comes to doing the variety of things Office can do AND be truly cross platform. Throw students and their computer choices into the mix, using MS Office as the university standard just makes life easier for everyone. I use a Mac and don’t want to switch; without MS Office for the Mac, I’d have no choice but to use a PC at work.
I agree. I hope MS updates Offce for Mac soon and makes it even more like it’s hated PC variety. Dislike Office all we like, for the time being it is still the standard in big business and government. I am glad I can use a Mac at work, and it is mostly because of Office on the Mac.
iWork apps do every single thing that your company does daily and the odd rarely used features that Office has can be done in other ways. Yes, iWork apps will output Office compatible formats.
What iWorks doesn’t do is let you easily collaborate with people using Office. As much as I hate Word (I actually use Adobe FrameMaker for my serious word smithing) it is the *only* solution when you have to deal with several different organizations.
Given how often Office 2008 for the Mac crashes, and how some features don’t translate well from PC to Mac versions, I’d almost be begging for a Mac update. OTOH, I absolutely refuse to get into the software subscription racket, so I make do. That said, iWorks just isn’t an option, as much as I’d prefer that it be.
I don’t think many people give iWork a fair try. Just because many say it can’t replace Office doesn’t make it true. I was frequently the only one at my work who could consistently open Office documents from my Windows colleagues when they couldn’t.
Ok, I’ll bite…
Last month I worked on a stupid flyer for our condo association. I did it in pages.
My colleagues said, “we want to make some changes”. I said go to iCloud and use the web version. It’s free.
They said “don’t have it, can you send us the Word file?”
So. There you go. Fair chance given. Failed.
Why didn’t you send the Word file output from Pages? Did you not know that Pages can do that?
You know the outputs aren’t perfect word files. Neither do the tables convert properly. Further, pages can’t split rows of tables over a page break. It shifts the whole row to the next page. Which is not helpful.
… with Word that you CANNOT do with Pages – the latest, or the previous – maybe you should examine WHY you are doing “that” thing, “that” way. Maybe you are showing off? Maybe the twit who designed the form the company requires you to use is showing off?
Seriously, WHY must you do a simple thing in a complex way?
Yeah. Try holding it another way.
Doesn’t iWork include online collaboration per document?
The employees in the Mac Business Unit were transferred to Office for Surface project. I have sympathy for the MBU. They worked in an isolation lab. Even today, their 2010 Apple iMacs and MacBooks might cause an epidemic of malaise throughout the campus. The MBU was like a UN mission in Somalia. Doomed, I say!
/s
Here is a hint at what MacBU’s been busy with and why Mac Office is delayed:
http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-office-on-ipad-its-alive-and-coming-sooner-than-most-think-7000026372/
I disagree, its still a standard in business and to be fully or close to fully compatible as possible Office is needed on the Mac for some places. Open Office, etc isn’t and alternative in some situations.
Office is already available for the Mac.
I agree; Open Office isn’t 100% compatible and you can’t take the chance and the labor expense needed to check everything in every document.
Yes, it is a standard, and Excel in particular is an amazing tool for people who actually have a need to REALLY know how to use its full functionality (or even 20% of its functionality). Most Office users don’t have clue about “pivot tables,” for example, and the most complex thing they do with Excel is to make simple data tables and charts.
Because it is a standard, Microsoft does not need to update it very much at this point. They are only adding more tool bars and “ribbons,” and other “eye candy” features. They do this in the Windows world, because they need to give customers a reason to pay for the next upgrade. And now, they are trying to make Office (for Windows) “touch first,” which will alienate Office power users in the same way that Windows 8 alienated non-tablet Windows users in general.
Mac users who use Office by choice or necessity should be happy that there is no new version in the works for the near future.
The biggest problem with the persistence of Office is that it it could be easily replaced for the vast majority of enterprise users by other tools (such as Pages), and no functionality would be missed. However, as nobody in IT ever got fired for buying Microsoft, we are simply stuck with Office as THE standard, without any possibility to consider alternatives.
In the enterprise a large portion of the server backend is Microsoft. Sharepoint, Exchange, etc. work best with Office as the client software. Unless the entire company moves off Microsoft’s server products it’s better to keep the Mac users on Office. To do otherwise is to introduce a world of pain to the Mac users.
People on this forum love to pretend the 90’s didn’t happen but sorry they did, MS became the standard practice for companies and the bigger the Co the longer it will take them to change to a different standard. I use Excel not just because I’ve used it for nearly 20 years on both Macs and Windoze but Numbers does not do it on really large complex stuff. Numbers is great for simpler spreadsheets. What other option is there? Google spreadsheets aren’t as good as Numbers is, what else is out there that competes and provides 100% file compatibility with the other people using Excel?
If you don’t have an intelligent answer, then there is the answer as to why it still matters about MS office on the Mac.
The more Mac’s that sell and hopefully catch up to Windows share the better.
Here’s the problem for business users. I have tried on several occasions to generate not-to-complex documents in Pages, using iCloud collaborative editing, sharing the documents as PDF, and/or “saved-as” Word versions with colleagues on Windows computers. At some point, I invariably need to give a MS Word version over to Windows folks who need them, and little things will creep in that simply do not export well from Pages to Word. At some point, the trouble is more than its worth and I would have been better off starting out and staying with MS Word from the beginning. Too many other users and businesses are Word users to start and stay with Pages. Pages is great for personal documents or in an all-Mac environment, but when sharing with the world at large, its problematic. Going with “free” or Word-compatible software (Google Docs, OpenOffice, etc.) sometimes have similar issues. There is good compatibility between Mac and Windows Word, so that is not an issue.
So — it is possible to avoid Word, but not always productive.
At least the Mac versions of Word have a decent (not as good as Pages, but…) interface compared to the convoluted Windows versions — I do hope that any future upgrades to Mac Word will avoid that.
It’s been 1473 days since Aperture 3 was released.
Signed, a reluctant Lightroom user.
I’ve given up on finding an alternative to Office.
I just run a windows 7 VM now and roll with it.
Excel is the big one for me. Nothing comes close to the amount of data that application can crunch.
With the add-ons for data analysis and the built in ability to access from multiple sources it is miles ahead of any other spreadsheet out there.
The existing version is a bug riddled piece of crap. Just fix it. No new version needed. No new features. Just include full document compatibility. That’s it.
OpenOffice is the next version for Mac! 🙂
I need to use Excel all the time because Numbers is just not up to the task of heavy number play. But I got so frustrated with some of the quirks in Excel and the lag time when working on remote files that I downloaded NeoOffice last weekend. It may not be as pretty as Excel, but it seems to work fine without the issues that Excel has.
So Microsoft, you just spend your time making the next version of MS Office like Windows 8. I might actually purchase that product just so I can see how totally FU’ed a piece of software can get.
I used to love Excel and Word back in the day, when Mac versions were miles ahead. But every “update” since has seemed to add bloated clunky “features” that screwed up the former elegance, and constant complications to the UI that made it more and more difficult to get the results you want, as MS “helps” you to get it the way they think you should want it.
I need it for work. It’s a sad reality but it’s fact. All you people saying iWork is sufficient are living in fantasy land.
Oh! Oh! Oh! I know what happened to Office for Mac!
I deleted it when I got iWork.
Does Roz the Ho even work at MS any more?
Ha! That was my first thought as well after reading the headline. Who Cares?
“Rolling ball of Mud” This is what Word is. Mostly foreign spaghetti code with thousands of lines doing the same thing yet never being cleaned to actually work better, by a “real” group of programmers. I would rather use TextEdit, as I do not have to wait forever for it to open.
Microsoft has outsourced most if not all of it’s source code so how in the hell are they ever going to right this wrong? They are not. Let us all pray that the NextSTEP programmers do not all leave Apple behind and all the bugs of late are fixed (yes there are quite a few in xcode, Mavericks and iOS 7, newly introduced, probably by replacement developers after the Forstall exodus). PURE SPECULATION /s
Haven’t used it since switching to my MACBook. Guess what? Don’t need it ever again in life
Who cares? MS Office for Mac sucks!
Many here have stated the obvious.
Numbers is not in Excel’s league and the ONLY reason I cling to MS via VMWare Fusion.
Billions sitting IDLE in the bank, eh Apple?
Make Aperture better than Photoshop. Make Numbers better than Excel. Make FCP better than all the competitors.
Really, if you look at how many products Apple releases in a year with all their resources, employees and money — needless to say — they should do better.
Look, EVERY contemporary Mac word processor can open and save in *.doc and *.rtf formats. I send stuff from my Mac at home to Windows users all the time without a complaint.Ii don’t use Excel much, but I think there’s a standard format that can be used by both Excel and Numbers. And I’ve seen PowerPoint presentations that look 1000% better when they’re begun on a Mac.
Microsoft is an anachronism.