The installation for Office 2011 for Mac is quite painless. Unfortunately, there is no upgrade pricing for Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac because Microsoft found that most people buy Office when they buy a new computer and there was little interest in carrying upgrades at retail outlets. If you don't need a business-level desktop e-mail client, you should opt for the Home and Student version (at $119 for a single install and $149 for three installs), which includes just Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. This suite includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. We reviewed Office 2011 Home and Business, which costs $199 for a single install or $279 for three installs if you want to put it on three computers at home or work. This latest Office client for Mac is definitely a solid offering, but how long can Microsoft hold on to its dominance? New Coauthoring requires that you use SharePoint Foundation 2010 for enterprise use, but for personal or small businesses, you can save and access files over SkyDrive (25GB of available online storage) on Windows Live with a free registration.Īll of the new tweaks to the interface and each of the apps in the suite make Office 2011 for Mac a great option, but with the rise of cloud-based computing and online office suites like Google Docs, we wonder how long the big desktop apps like Office will remain on top. One of the major new changes to the suite (on the Windows side, too) is the ability to collaborate and share your work using Web apps.

Add the ease of compatibility with a strong feature set across the entire suite and you have a desktop office package that's almost a must-have in both large and small businesses, and even home productivity settings. But if you work with primarily Windows users who use Office, it's tough to beat the automatic compatibility of using the same programs. Certainly many Mac users will look first at Apple's iWork for a productivity suite, and it is a great office suite in its own right. Once we dug deep into the feature set of Office 2011 for Mac, we saw there were several enhancements that made the whole suite better, and some of the niftier tweaks are even Mac-exclusive. Not only has it nearly reached feature parity (and cross compatibility) with the Mac counterparts to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, but it has finally added Outlook, the e-mail and scheduling client Mac business fans have been clamoring for for years.

Though the latest package is still not on par with the Windows version (you get only the four main programs-a big difference when you consider the Windows version has 10), Microsoft made a big leap with this latest version for the Mac in several other ways. Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 offers a solid update to the Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and the other members of the productivity suite.

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