Microsoft drops early Chrissie pressie on Mac Office fanbois

Microsoft's not been kind to Office for Mac over the years: since the last major update in 2010 fanbois haven't had much to get excited about. Redmond recently revealed revisions are on the way, with a late-2015 target delivery date. But the company's now snuck out a small set of enhancements to Outlook for Mac. The updates …

[Tim99]

Sorry, too little, too late

I never bothered to upgrade from the previous version. I'm retired and really don't need it.

On the Mac, TextEdit, Pages, vim, and nano do most of what I want. I am also sad enough to type: echo Put text in a file by echoing from the CLI. >>somefile.txt

If I need a higher fidelity copy of a Microsoft file, starting up the free MS Word or Excel viewers in a Windows VM in Parallels then printing the file through a PDF printer does it for me.

The free iPad versions of Excel, Powerpoint, and Word are also handy...

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Sorry, too little, too late

We're very happy for you. I, too, don't need MS Office for Mac. Lots of people don't need it but actually like it. There are, apparently, real fans of Outlook around.

I do have Office 2011 for development purposes. I think it's actually a lot nicer than the Windows version.

I'm pretty sceptical about the move to subscription-only software but the market will decide.

[Erik4872]

The 365 shoe drops...

I knew it was coming, but wasn't sure where they were going to start. The fact that you can only get the updates if you're a 365 customer is a pretty good indication of your status if you buy a one-off perpetual licensed copy. Second class citizen, indeed.

How much do you want to bet Microsoft is releasing the ability to change the blinding white-on-white color scheme in Office 2013, but only for subscribers? (Unfortunately, I'd pay for that - I spend at least a couple hours a day in Word and Excel and even in "gray" mode I'm getting headaches!

[BubbaDave]

Re: The 365 shoe drops...

Even better is if you paid for a few dozen perpetual licensed copies AND paid for Software Assurance so that you'd allegedly get upgrades for the life of the product, and THEN get to be a second class citizen. Just a bit annoying, that.

[P. Lee]

Re: The 365 shoe drops...

Office 2011 forever then. I'm at the stage I no longer care that much about updates. Certainly not enough for a subscription. I hardly use Office any more and LibreOffice is also installed. Linux does all the browsing and opening of documents to see what they are.

[PCS]

Can it now connect to outlook.com via activesync as the Windows 2013 version can?

[Hans 1]

How I do feel for those tied to office ... my minute of empathy.

[BobChip]

Libre Office

Libre Office for Mac. No subscription required, no MS tax to pay, no ongoing financial commitment. Nothing else to say.

[Tim99]

Re: Libre Office

Libre Office for Mac. No subscription required, no MS tax to pay, no ongoing financial commitment. Nothing else to say.

Unfortunately to get full use of Libre Office, it needs Java, so no, thank you.

[Quentin North]

In business, no one can hear you scream.

As a large organisation with a mix of PC and Mac desktops Outlook 2011, and God forbid!, Entourage have been dismal failures as Exchange clients compared to Outlook Windows. The tweaks to Outlook 2011 does little to improve this. Forget it.

We also have Outlook 2015 Mac through a O365 sub, and whilst this is an improvement on Outlook 2011, it is still sufficiently far from Outlook Windows that its utility is second class. I am hoping that MS will address the shortcomings of Outlook 2015 before formal release and so make it 100% feature comparable with Outlook Windows, but I won't hold my breath.

You might ask why we use MS products in general, Exchange in particular and O365 subs? In short, because they are generally good products that require fairly minimal attention once set up and there is a large pool of people who can support them when they go wrong. For a business, renting software can make more sense.

[razorfishsl]

Yep the key is 'once setup'........

I am still in the middle of an office 365 migration... it is a complete nightmare once you get up to migrating several hundred staff.

Very difficult to delete accounts if you make a mistake, cannot initially install a hundreds of users with the same password then change on login......(yep each user has to be dealt with separately...thanks Microsoft for making me type in EVERY notification email address)

CANNOT have a catch all situation to route unknown mails, almost impossible to copy messages and route through.

( FAILS on China based staff)... weird you are using encryption in Exchange--- 'get lost' messages...... but works on OSX client!!

Microsoft partner & Microsoft don't know why.......