Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 October 26th Launch Date and Review by Macworld

Submitted by lalit on September 28, 2010 - 6:59pm.

Microsoft announced today that they will start shipping Office for Mac 2011 on October 26 and you can preorder Office for Mac 2011 on Amazon today. Office 2011 Home and Student edition with single license is priced $119.99 and Family Pack with 3 licenses is priced $149.99. Office for Mac Home and Business 2011 is priced $199.99 for single license and $279.99 for two licenses. Microsoft says:

One of the most visually impactful features in the new suite also is called Dynamic Reorder, it gives you the ability to interactively re-order all of the layers in a document or presentation – one of the ways that we are solving a very real customer need with a fun experience. The new suite also introduces a new view in Word 2011, Full Screen view which has two views: one optimized for writing and the other for reading.  Allowing you to block out the distractions and focus on putting your idea on paper.
And we know that those features wouldn’t mean much if the overall performance of the suite wasn’t up to par. In fact, improving performance was a priority across the suite. We hope that you will notice this right away with the launch speed of each app and overall speed throughout the applications.

Macworld has posted reviews of the three most important components of Office for Mac 2011 application suite - Word, PowerPoint and Excel. Word for Mac 2011 gets four and a half Mice (stars) as it offers full parity with Word for Windows, much better UI and document formatting is much easier. PowerPoint also gets same rating with enhanced interface, support for path animation, online collaboration and sharing, and improved movie options. And Excel for Mac 2011 also gets four and a half Mice for improved UI, new Sparklines, greatly improved pivot tables, Visual Basic support, much faster recalculation times, new themes and cell styles.

I have been using Office for Mac 2011 beta for past few weeks and it’s much faster, easier to use and more stable than Office 2008. Simple things like application launch, document formatting and even saving the document when closing the application is much faster. Definitely the UI is bit different, but once you learn it (which takes very little time), accessing key features and functions becomes faster and easier. We believe all Office 2008 users should upgrade to Office for Mac 2011.

You can pre-order Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 on Amazon today for delivery on October 26th. Checkout the last behind the scenes video of Office 2011 below.