Hi, Has anyone had a play with the new office for mac 2011 edition? I'm mostly interested in the compatibility with Office 2007 & 2010 for Windows, such as can files be created and edited in both directions with no problems? I've googled around this and the answers seem a bit vague, Microsoft's website suggests it will work but I have yet to find anyone who can offer a resounding yes it does definitely work! I'm considering moving to a Mac but a lot of my work is done in Excel with people who use office 2007 on Windows so obviously need full bi-directional support. Also, my main bugbear which I haven't seen anything about is VBA support between both editions? As again a lot of my work involves creating VBA code in excel models, so i need to be safe in the knowledge that anything I code in Office 2011 will work in Office 2007/2010 etc. Any thoughts / comments appreciated! cheers.
I have read reviews that have mentioned complete compatibility, and I have no reason to suspect otherwise. Compatibility between previous versions worked perfectly well for me in an enterprise environment. And I hear they have brought back VB scripting, but I suspect VBA compatibility will not be 100% as OSX will never have the full MS runtime environs as Windows. As much as I love my Macs, if you cannot work without 100% "no matter what" compatibility, I would suggest you stay with windows or use at least have a VM environment to fall back on if you get caught out. So you may get away with OSX 99% of the time, and then use a VM on the Mac if you get stuck.
Thanks. I suspected that might be the issue regarding VBA. One thing i have considered is using parallels and taking my copy of Office 2007 across with me and emulating that all of the time instead, which i obviously know will work. My only concern was the performance hit of having a constantly running VM and constantly flicking between that and other open native mac apps.
VBA support is back in 2011 (they removed it from 2008, for some reason) http://www.appleinsider.com/article...ew_looks_support_for_exchange_vba.html&page=2 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/apple/vba-to-make-its-triumphant-return-to-excel-2011-for-mac/7755 Should mean that a my D&D roleplay character spreadsheets will work again once my copy arrives some time this week!
Thanks GOO. i think this quote from the last link sums it up best which all sounds very promising, especially compatible with windows, but im sceptical until i actually see it working lol! Now, only problem to solve is getting zimbra to play nice with Outlook 2011!
Couple of the guys from work have Macs and they've just got office 2011. Its basically office 2010 ported to Mac from what they've said. I haven't actually seen much of it yet but this does appear to be the case.
