All posts by nadyne

Office:Mac, user experience

TechFlash interview with Eric Wilfrid and Takeshi Numoto

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I just saw that my boss, Eric Wilfrid, and his boss, Takeshi Numoto, have an interview in TechFlash today: Mac and Windows: Microsoft’s two Office teams getting tighter.  I especially like Eric’s question about how MacBU manifests its independence:

The pride is absolutely there in tailoring an Office experience for the Mac and for what Mac customers would expect. In 2011, you’ve probably seen the full-screen view in Word. That’s an experience that my team came up with based on Mac customer needs and something that we could do really, really well on the Mac. I think that you can expect to see us continue to do that, where there’s an experience piece of Office that really makes sense on the Mac, whether it’s full-screen view or the way we do the ribbon or the new dynamic reorder. We’ll continue to have a different voice that matches our customer needs.

And that is exactly why I do what I do!

Office:Mac 2011

Office:Mac 2011 is available in stores today!

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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!

Entourage, Office:Mac 2011, Outlook

identities in Outlook:Mac and Entourage

In the comments thread for Q&A: where can I buy Office:Mac 2011?, a commenter named Mark discussed the differences between identities in Entourage and Outlook, and said that the changes would mean that he won’t upgrade to Outlook.  Here’s part of his comment:

I, as well as others I know, share a computer with a partner. The main reason we use Entourage instead of Mail, was the ability to easily switch identities, so that each of us can separately check and view the various personal and business accounts we have.

In Entourage, the identity is where all of your data is stored: accounts, preferences, your data, everything.  The identity is an implementation detail that most applications wouldn’t expose, since most people have little reason to care about how this kind of thing is stored.  However, back when Entourage was first introduced, there was another purpose for exposing the concept of the identity: multiple people who share the same computer.

Longtime Apple users will know that the ability to quickly switch between accounts wasn’t originally part of OS X.  So in the case of email, if multiple people wanted to share a computer but keep their mail separate, it was pretty difficult.  Entourage’s identities allowed for this to happen.

But the introduction of fast user switching in Panther changed things.  Instead of having a single user account, it’s very easy now to have multiple user accounts for different purposes.  Each of those different user accounts can then run Entourage or Outlook to get their mail.  Switching between users is quick and easy.

As we worked on Outlook, we made the decision to continue to support multiple identities, but not to make it quite so obvious.  We don’t need to expose this implementation detail to the world.

Personally, I also have a shared Mac at home, for me and my husband.  For our shared Mac, we have a shared account (named Tipsy) which has all of our shared stuff on it: Netflix, Quicken for our joint finances, iTunes (and then we have playlists for syncing with our individual iPhones and iPods), iPhoto, etc.  Then we each have our own personal accounts for storing our own information.  For us, this is more about ease of access than privacy; he has his own organisational scheme and I have mine, and so we don’t force each other to figure out the other’s scheme.  If I need to access my stuff on our shared computer, I just quickly switch into my user account to get it, and then I usually return it to our shared account when I’m done.  We use different desktop backgrounds for the individual accounts so its easy to see which account is currently the one that has focus.

For my work computer, I also maintain different user accounts.  I have my primary user account, which is where I spend most of my time.  I’ve also got a demo user account, which I have populated with a bunch of demo documents and a couple of test Exchange accounts.  I often use my demo account when I’m giving presentations too, so that I don’t have to worry about whether I’ve logged out of Communicator.  If I’ve got Outlook running in both of my user accounts, it feels faster to switch between my user accounts rather than the old Entourage model of switching identities.

Office:Mac 2011, Outlook, Q&A

Q&A: Can I import my .PST files into Outlook:Mac?

19 Comments

Dean asked:

I am converting from Office:Windows 2010. Do my current .pst files work on Outlook:Mac 2011? If not, how do I convert from Office:Windows to Office:Mac?

Yes!  If you have a .PST file from Outlook for Windows (created using Outlook 2003 or later), you can import it into Outlook:Mac.  Just transfer the .PST file from your Windows computer to your Mac (such as putting it on a thumb drive), and then go to File -> Import in Outlook:Mac.

For full instructions for how to import your .PST file into Outlook:Mac, read this help file: Import a .pst file from Outlook for Windows.

Excel, Office:Mac 2011, Q&A

Q&A: does Excel:Mac 2011 have pivot tables?

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Via email, I got this kinda perplexing question:

i heard that the new excel doesn’t have pivot tables – why are you keeping macs out of business???

I’m trying to figure out where this came from, and I’m not quite sure.  Excel 2008 already had pivot table support (to get started with pivot tables in Excel 2008, check out Create a pivot table report in the Excel help, and there’s a Lynda.com tutorial for it too).  My only guess about this confusion is that someone might have misunderstood Walt Mossberg’s review, in which he noted that Office:Mac 2011 doesn’t have all of the features of Office 2010 for Windows, such as pivot charts in Excel.

In Excel:Mac 2011, we made a big investment in improving matters for our power users, which includes some great improvements to pivot tables.  If you’re an Excel guru, check it out and tell us what you think.  I think that Excel gurus will especially appreciate the performance improvements.

Office:Mac 2011, Q&A

Q&A: why do I have to quit my web browser when I install Office:Mac 2011?

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Via email, I got this question:

I installed Office 2011 last night.  I had Safari and Firefox open, but was forced to quit them during the Office install.  Why?

During the installation of Office:Mac, we install fonts.  Web browsers, since they’re heavily reliant on fonts, don’t particularly like it when you change fonts out from under them while they’re running.  If you install a font that the browser is using, then it’s likely to not display that font properly until you restart your browser.  To avoid this kind of issue, we simply ask you to close down your browser for a couple of minutes.

On a related note, Jim asked this in the comments thread in my post about latest Office 2008 and 2004 updates:

Why does the update to Office insist that I quit Safari????

Our updater uses some of the same code as our installer, and that’s one of the pieces we reuse.  We reuse that particular piece of code because an update could include font updates.

MacBU, Nadyne

user research at MacBU

1 Comment

Inspired partially by yesterday’s post, which included a mention of how I imported all of my existing data into Outlook, I decided to clean up my oh-so-messy Documents folders. We won’t discuss how much stuff was in there that I haven’t needed in years.

In that folder, I found a presentation that I gave earlier this year at the San José State University student chapter of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.  This presentation gives me an excuse to try out embedding a PowerPoint presentation that’s stored on SkyDrive in my blog, so here goes:

Entourage, Exchange, Office:Mac 2011, Outlook, Q&A

Q&A: should I import my Entourage identity to Outlook:Mac?

1 Comment

Via mail, I got this question:

I have Entourage EWS running now off Exchange Server 2010 and will be upgrading to Outlook. Do you recommend:
a) doing a fresh download of all mail and other data from the server when setting up Outlook, or
b) importing the data from Entourage into Outlook locally?

With a fresh download, you’re starting off with a clean slate.  This is important for someone like me who’s been using Entourage since 2004, since gunk can build up in your database.  But, with an import, you get the goodness of keeping all of your local data.  Since I have been using Entourage for years, and at one point I had a teensy Exchange account size limit, I’ve got lots upon lots of local data.

With every release, I’ve gotten into the habit of starting off with a clean slate.  For this release, that means that I first saved out all of my local mail (that’s the only local data that I have: all of my contacts, calendar, and so on live in Exchange).  I let Outlook start off with a clean slate, download my mail from Exchange and from my IMAP accounts, and then imported the local data.

To do this, in Entourage for Web Services, I saved all my local mail folders by dragging them out of Entourage and onto my desktop.  That creates .mbox files, which can then be imported into Outlook (as well as any other mail client which supports .mbox files, which is most of them).  I don’t have any other local data other than mail, but I’d do the same if I did have local contacts, calendar, notes, or tasks.

Then, after Outlook had downloaded all of my Exchange and IMAP data, I made sure that it would show my local data.  Go into the Preferences, then select General, and make sure that the box next to “Hide On My Computer folders” is not checked.  Then, I dragged those .mbox files into Outlook.

In my opinion, that’s the best of both worlds: I start fresh and still get to keep my reams and reams of local data.

Office:Mac 2011, Q&A

Q&A: where can I buy Office:Mac 2011?

9 Comments

Someone emailed me to ask:

where can i buy office for mac?

Once we hit our release date of Tuesday, 26 October 2010, you’ll have plenty of options.  This list is nowhere near comprehensive, and is entirely US-focused because that’s where I live and thus it’s what I know about.  Commenters, feel free to add in other options.

For those of you who want to go to a bricks’n’mortar store to buy it, your friendly local Apple Store and Best Buy will have it.  Other authorised Apple outlets are likely to have it too, and I’ve already seen shelf signs for it at my local Fry’s.

Online, the fine folks at Amazon are accepting pre-orders.  In fact, as of this writing, it looks like they’ve got some discounts from the price for the Home and Student Edition ($10 off the single-license version and $20 off the three-license version), as well as for the Home and Business Edition ($25 off the single-license and $40 off the two-license version).

Office:Mac 2011, Outlook

Walt Mossberg: “by far the best Mac version of the suite I’ve used”

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Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal has reviewed Office:Mac 2011, with a bit of an Outlook pun: Mac Users Are Getting New Outlook From Rival.  It starts out by saying that “[a] new, faster, better version of Microsoft Office is coming out Oct. 26”, and wraps up by saying that the “new Mac Office is by far the best Mac version of the suite I’ve used, and I can recommend it”.

Sandwiched between those two stellar lines, Mossberg notes that performance is “dramatically snappier” and says that Outlook is “fast and capable”.  He also notes improved compatibility and file fidelity between the two platforms, as well as some of our Mac-only features like dynamic reordering and Word’s full-screen view.

Getting Office:Mac 2011 out the door has been a long road.  It’s fantastic to see all of these great reviews come in.  I can’t wait to hear what everyone thinks when it finally hits store shelves on October 26.