Today is an awesome awesome day, for Office:Mac 2011 is now available at your favourite local Apple retailer. I’m in an airport right now, but I’m going to see if I can make some time to check out an Apple Store to see my product on their store shelves.
If you don’t have your copy yet, you can purchase and download it online from us. The Apple Store and other retail stores have it today, and the fine folks at Amazon are happy to set you up too (either the single-license or three-license version of Home and Student Edition, or the single-license or two-license version of Home and Business Edition — and since you simply must have Outlook:Mac, you really want the Home and Business Edition!).
Eric Wilfrid, our GM here in MacBU, has written a blog post to kick off today’s retail launch: It’s here – get your copy of Office 2011 Today! Once you’ve gotten it and had a chance to try it out, I’d love to hear what you think!
I would love to check out Outlook for Mac. However, I’m a little disappointed in Microsoft as there seems to be a special, affordable academic version available in many countries (United States, Germany, …) but Switzerland. It is simply missing on the official Web site: http://www.microsoft.com/switzerland/mac/de/buy
Markus – Thanks for your feedback. I have to admit that I know nothing about how that works since I’m on the technical team. I’ll pass your feedback along to our marketing folks.
I totally understand, but really appreciate your effort. Thank you! I guess, I just got excited about Outlook after all the reviews (well, maybe except Pogue’s) and don’t want to spend quite a lot extra on the Business version just as a trial for Outlook.
My big question concerns VBA particularly add-ins, vba laden custom templates and ribbonX (custom menus). Does office 2011 support these features in the same way Office 2007 and 2010 do? I hope so. Ideally my add-ins and templates for Office 2007/2010 are directly compatible. I sure hope so… but given my experiences, that’s probably asking too much. Can you answer this question Nadyne? (googling all day and I’m still unsure)
I’m a Mac user from the beginning (yes 84′) but I fell for excel soon there after and have had a love-hate relationship with MS since. Frankly, I filed for divorce several years ago when the rumor surfaced that MS was deprecating VBA (and spat upon Mac users by removing VBA altogether). I began learning Cocoa. I’m now doing native OSX apps but sell some add-ins for Excel (running windows)… Would love to be able say those add-ins are available for office 2011 users as well. Waiting with baited breath for your reply….
Let me offer the massive disclaimer that I’m not a VBA geek, so I can’t answer this from my own knowledge/experience. I can tell you that we brought VBA 6.5 to the platform. Other than trying to run a few VBA scripts that I’ve received from others (which worked fine), I can’t answer this really well. 🙁
OK Thanks… guess the jury is out. Any others in your technical team that have a blog who might know more? Seems like the sales/marketing folks should address this rather important issue in a more than just a cursory “vba is back” sort of way. Can we do ribbon customization via XML for instance? Nobody seems to know or is telling if the do…
I’ve asked a couple of people if they could find some time to come in here and comment, although it’s launch week so we’re all pretty busy. 🙂
That said, you might want to try the Office:Mac product forums to see if one of the other users there has started to dive into scripting. I’ve just linked to the general Office group here, there’s specific groups for each of the apps, such as Excel. (And I pick Excel since it’s the most likely to be on the receiving end of VBA scripts.)
Great blog! You get a highly coveted spot in my bookmarks bar…
You might want to consider addressing the set-up of Outlook:Mac with the required exchange server. Our company’s IT is outsourced to some pretty up-to-date, top-notch folks. I am fairly certain that they would have to be running Exchange 2007 with updates, yet their resident Mac tech guy and I have failed to get Outlook up and running for hours this afternoon. So much for my post-lunch excitement.
Surely, it’s a server issue. Any tips on what I should tell an IT guy who is trying to help??
Thanks!
The first question is what service pack they’re at on Exchange 2007. They need to be running SP1 RU4 or later.
The best course of action, other than making sure that they’re up-to-date with their patches, is probably for their Mac tech guy to give MS tech support a call. I hear good things about our Exchange support. There’s approximately eleventy billion ways to configure an Exchange server farm, and I’m probably not going to be able to effectively help you out in the comments here. We can cover the basics here, but anything beyond the basics is probably best handled by them.
Thanks for the response!
My calls into our IT support group mainly just get the canned response “we don’t like the new Outlook for Mac.” Beautifully non-responsive and utterly failing to indicate why they can’t get it to work (if they’re even trying…).
I will be sure to send along your suggestions! Maybe call the owner of the IT group, too…
If they’re having issues with Outlook:Mac and Exchange, then they should work with their Microsoft account rep to get them resolved. There’s really nothing exciting that they need to do to their server, other than make sure that it’s updated to a somewhat-current level of service pack. Given that Exchange 2007 SP1 RU4 has been out a year and a half, I’m not really asking for the world here.
If anyone from your provider is going to be at Exchange Connections this week, I’m giving a couple of talks there on Thursday, and would be happy to speak to them in person about what they’re seeing. Otherwise, their account rep should be able to help them get straightened out.
I have been using beta 6 (not from the official source) for a month; I’m so happy with it that I bought it once released.
Now I got a question: should I simply install the release version to overwrite the beta?
Drag the beta to the trash before you install. And next time, please don’t acquire software from illegitimate sources. 🙂
thanks for advice; & I got another issue from Clipart Gallery — It shutdown everytime I tried to launch it
I encounter this since the beta trial, and I used to thought that it is because the service is not lived yet. Only now I realize that it is a persisting problem…
could you advice on how to solve this?
When you say that it shuts down, what exactly happens? Do you get a window for Microsoft Error Reporting that tells you that the application has to be shut down? If that’s the case, please hit the “more information” button on that screen, copy the contents out of that and send it to me via email.
Yes, Microsoft Error Reporting pops to me; an e-mail was sent to you on the error log.
Would you mind to help checking on this issue? it persists…
In addition, would the add-on “Outlook Hotmail Connector” available in Office for Mac?
thanks in advance.
Outlook:Mac does not support add-ins at this time.
so there’s no way to sync with Hotmail except POP3?
That’s correct. Please submit product feedback to tell us that you’d like us to give you full access to your Hotmail account. 🙂 You could also submit feedback to Hotmail (sorry, but I don’t have a link to hand for that) to suggest that they could support another protocol instead of POP, which would likely result in the same end-user impact.