For as long as I’ve been reviewing 'microsoft' Word, it has been recently difficult to see almost any relationship between Word with regard to Mac and Word pertaining to Windows, beyond the brand and file format. These were essentially two completely various products designed for just what, in Microsoft’s thoughts, were two completely diverse sets of users.
Word for Mac 2011 modifications all that. The Intel-only Word next year is a significant as well as substantive update to Ms’s flagship Mac expression processing and page-design application. It is a great update that unifies a user’s experience across programs, and it’s another release that contains numerous valuable new features along with improvements—more than 30 in all.
The bottom line is this: Microsoft Phrase for Mac no lengthier feels like a second-string word digesting program in the 'microsoft office' suite. It is in fact a powerful tool for creating all your personalized and business documents and then for collaborating with others. Moreover, Word 2011 now assists you to insert a Mac straight into nearly any business natural environment and offer Mac customers the same set involving features found in Term for Windows, without bargain.
Look and feel
Term 2011 has the exact same look and feel because Word for Windows, but is in many methods more refined and far better organized than its Home windows sibling. Word 2008 employed the combination of a virtually useless Elements Gallery in which appeared at the surface of every document and a new floating Toolbox to give you formatting tools for your document.
Word 2011 has got the Ribbon, an intelligent, customizable toolbar that provides a person with a set regarding formatting tools suited to your current task. Working on a word processing document? Your Ribbon displays a list of text formatting tools. Adding a table or any chart? You’ll discover a complete set of equipment for editing and format the same. Inserting a photo into a document? The actual Ribbon contains everything you need to resize, color correct, wrap text around, or in any other case format that image. If you would rather not use the Ribbon, you can conceal it.
While initially the Ribbon may seem challenging to master, in train I found that My spouse and i wasn’t wasting occasion looking for the methods I needed to acquire my work done. And because you’re able to cover the Ribbon, you can get it out of how when all you want to work with are phrases.
King of the Expression: Word’s new Urinary incontinence unifies the interface among Mac and Windows types and offers Spotlight-just like find and replace resources.
Enterprise-level tools
Phrase 2011 has significantly enhanced collaboration tools, making it obvious that Microsoft currently considers Word for Mac, and thereby the Mac pc itself, to be a good enterprise-level work device. Word 2011 includes assistance for Microsoft SharePoint, SkyDrive, simultaneous document enhancing, the option to contact others while you edit documents together, and enhances the control you possess over the kinds regarding rights users have to examine and edit documents. This kind of security feature requires that you employ Microsoft’s Information Protection under the law Management (IRM) tools, which also means that you’ll need a volume permit edition of Office next year and a Microsoft Legal rights Management server, but the actual upside is that you’ll have much better control over what various other users can do with the documents you create. Including setting expiration dates with regard to documents and controlling whether or not the contents of a document can be printed, edited, or copied.
Additionally, should you save your documents to Microsoft’s SkyDrive, as well as if your business is employing SharePoint Foundation for the year of 2010 Enterprise, you have use of the Word Web Iphone app. So by using virtually any supported Web browser (Safari, Firefox, and Web Explorer), you can entry and edit your documents via the Web. I could view documents on a great iPad, but I cannot use the Word World wide web App to edit all of them, at least not at this time in time.
The World Wide Web edit: Using Microsoft’ersus free SkyDrive you can conserve documents to the cloud and edit them using the Word Web App.
Report tools
If you’re also accustomed to using Term to create not only basic word processing documents, but also the literature, menus, meeting minutes, calendars, proposals, and posters you have to do business, Word 2011 offers a significant collection of professionally made templates, as well as many more that are created by and shared with some other Office users. While My partner and i still don’t come across Word’s Publishing Structure tools to be as simple or intuitive to utilize as those offered inside Apple’s Pages '09, when it comes to wholesale customization of these kinds of templates, Word has several distinct advantages over Webpages.
At the top of this list is Microsoft’ersus Themes. Themes, which you can use with both word running and desktop publishing documents, take advantage of the actual Styles used in any document, allowing you to produce instantaneous changes to fonts, paragraphs, colors, and other layout elements simply simply by selecting a new style. Word 2011 ships with over 50 layout themes, however you can also create custom themes to turn a plain Word template into something which’s unique to both you and your business.
Another excellent feature is full-on Highlight integration and a new Spotlight-inspired tool for locating and replacing text in the document. You’ll now see a search discipline at the top of each and every document that, when an individual type a word within the field, highlights every occasion of that word within your document
Word 2011 now has a built-in equation editor that makes simple to use to add and edit mathematics equations. The picture editor, which appears as an Equation Tools Ribbon once you add an equation in your document, gives Word a new leg up on Internet pages, which requires that you buy MathType for the exact same functionality.
Word 2011 has a few other welcomed changes and additions. Office 2011 for Mac also marks the reintroduction of Visual Basic for Applications, which signifies that Word is no more time limited to Automator and AppleScript for automation. Generally there’s better organization from the tools you use to control footnotes, endnotes, and bibliographies, along with a new customizable, distraction-totally free full screen mode. This full screen mode is just like what you’ll find in Pages or other expression processors like Hog These kinds of Software’s WriteRoom. Even though the differences between these methods in these different programs is negligible, Word possesses a unique read-simply mode that makes it simpler for you to see, examine, and navigate through all of the pages in your file. This read-only mode also allows you to view all the changes produced by the different authors which may have worked on a report if you have Word’s track changes feature turned on.
Speaking involving track changes, there’azines always the question concerning how well Word’s track changes feature operates and how well paperwork shared between Mac and Windows versions retain formatting and paragraph styles. While I wasn’t able to do any extensive cross-platform testing, inside the limited testing I could do, I did n't have any issues with formatting, paragraph styles, tables, or photographs added to documents. You may run into issues in the event the fonts you have entirely on one computer are not available on the other computer. With regard to adjust tracking (again with constrained testing), the only problem I have is Word 2011 still does not really track changes made for you to images that you put in more documents.
In benchmark assessments performed by Macworld Lab, Word 2011 was considerably faster than Word 2008 from opening a file; in our Scroll and Save File test, the times were closer. We'll have much more benchmark results in a future lab report.
Results have been in seconds. Lower results are generally better and are in bold.
How we examined. We open 250-site file and stopped timing when the pages have been calculated. We timed the scroll from the very first page to the very last page. We performed any Save As operation.—Macworld Lab testing executed by James Galbraith
Macworld's buying advice
After years of wailing what Word for Macintosh personal computer lacks, I find me in the odd yet enviable position of asserting that Word 2011 is great. It is a solid word processing application that is powerful and well designed, and makes it no problem finding all the features you will need. But what’s most crucial is that it’azines designed to move the Mac into your office with no regrets, simply no compromises, and no explanations for why your Macintosh can’t play nicely with the Windows edition of the same program.
