Quick Review of MS Office 2011 for Mac

Microsoft has announced the local availability of Office 2011 for Mac, which the company said comes with some important additions.

One of the additions to the new productivity suite is Outlook, which replaces the ill-received Entourage e-mail client in the previous version.

Outlook for Office 2011 features a combination of e-mail, calendar and contact management and is designed to be an all-in-one application for checking your e-mail and planning your schedule.

The other components of Office 2011 for Mac are Word, Excel and PowerPoint, all of which come with new features.

Word 2011, for example, has a new full screen view mode, which is billed as a tool for taking away distractions when you need to get some serious work done.

It also supports Visual Basic scripting for accessing complex documents like macros.

Users will also be able to choose from a variety of different templates to add some visual flare to their documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

For number crunchers, Excel 2011 benefits from new features like Sparklines, which are thumbnail-sized charts that represent large volumes of data at a glance.

Adding media to PowerPoint 2011 has also been made easier with new tools like the photo-editing and document layout tools. Microsoft said the tools allow you to make simple changes to documents such as remove the background from a picture and manage stacked images by layers.

In addition Office 2011 for Mac will support online collaboration tools such as Windows Live SkyDrive and Microsoft Office Web Apps, which will allow Mac and Windows users to simultaneously edit documents over the Web.

Office 2011 for Mac will be available in two editions: Home & Student (RM468 for single install; RM599 for three installs) and Home & Business (RM768 for single install; RM1,099 for two installs).

Both editions will come with Word 2011, Excel 2011 and PowerPoint 2011. However, only customers with the Home & Business edition will get Outlook 2011.