Microsoft on Friday released its long awaited Office for Mac 2011 to manufacturing, wich means it should hits the streets in late October for the holiday season. Mirosoft says it will be the “best release yet” and has been working on the project for over 2 years. The latest Office is bringing new features such as a new template gallery, reintroduced Visual Basic support, a new Outlook for Mac application, connections with online Microsoft services, and a new Ribbon interface as well as Sparklines and photo editing.
The software will remain 32-bit, meaning that the entire Office suite has not been completely transitioned over to native Cocoa. Therefore, it cannot take advantage of 64-bit processing and larger memory configurations.
In Product Unit Manager/MacBU Price’s blog post he pointed out that all of our team locations (Redmond, Microsoft Silicon Valley, Beijing, Dublin and Tokyo), were raising a glass to Office 2011 after such a long period of work. Below is also a video the team did to “give a behind-the-scenes look at R and some special features that didn’t make the cut.”
Owners who purchase Office 2008 for Mac between Aug. 1, 2010 and Nov. 30, 2010 are eligible for a free upgrade, while other users will have to purchase the standalone versions. The Home and Student includes Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Messenger, but does not include Outlook and is being priced at $120 for a single user, or $150 in a three-installation Family Pack. The Home and Business edition includes the new Outlook for Mac, which is priced at $200 for a single license, and $280 for a “Multi-Pack” supporting just one additional computer.
