(yX) for Excel for Mac OS v.2.2 A knowledge mining tool that works with data stored in Microsoft Excel for building predictive and descriptive models from this data autonomously and easily. It supports both major releases of Microsoft Excel, 2004 and 2008.
Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 may be the best pick for business users, with major updates to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage. After a, Microsoft plans to release Office for Mac 2008 to brick-and-mortar and online stores on January 15, making this the first update in nearly four years. Office for Mac includes Word, Excel for spreadsheets, PowerPoint for presentations and Entourage for e-mail and time management. There's no Microsoft Access database application for the Mac, although Filemaker's upcoming release of offers Mac users a new choice. Unlike, the interface changes don't look radically foreign next to the 2004 edition. That's good news for anyone who doesn't want to relearn the locations of common functions.
The 2007 applications for Windows arrange functions within tabs, while the 2008 Mac software largely clusters functions within the same drop-down menus including File, Edit, and View. By and large, most of the changes focus on attempting to help users craft more attractive documents. For instance, Office for Mac features the same templates and Smart Art graphics as the Windows counterparts. These are premade templates with 3D and translucent designs.
There are more welcome and substantial changes as well. Now you can save to PDF, and Automator actions are supported. The new My Day widget for Entourage floats on the Mac desktop displaying calendar items and to-do lists.
This is handy if you rely on Entourage but don't want to run it all the time. Office 2007 for Windows clusters functions within a contextual 'Ribbon' toolbar that displays different options.
Office for Mac lacks the Ribbon, but some menu items appear only in step with the task at hand. We found the shape-shifting neither terribly distracting nor useful. For simple tweaks such as changing fonts, you'll need to consult floating formatting boxes. Being accustomed to Office for Windows, we'd rather find all these options at the top of the screen. Office for Mac saves work in the same, new Open XML formats used by Office 2007 for Windows.
We're not thrilled about this being the default option, even though you can save your work in the older DOC, XLS and PPT formats. Won't be available until as long as 10 weeks from now, or 8 weeks after the applications are available in stores. That means for now, should you save work in a new OOXML format in a hurry, someone with the older software won't be able to open it.
Although we're glad that Microsoft offers free converters, we find the forced extra steps annoying in Office 2007. That said, the new document types are smaller and purportedly more secure than their predecessors.
You'll need a Mac with 1.5GB free on the hard drive, running at least OS 10.4.9, with 512MB of RAM and a 500MHz Intel or PowerPC processor. Installation took about 20 minutes on our MacBook running the.
The least expensive option is the $150 Home and Student edition (formerly Student and Teacher), which lacks support for Exchange and Automator. At $400 or $240 to upgrade, the full Office for Mac that we reviewed feels pricey, even though it includes Exchange support. The $500 Special Media Edition handles Exchange and adds media-management software. Fortunately, those who have recently purchased Office for Mac 2004 can for free.
Still, the fees feel hefty next to the $80. Indeed, seem like a bargain, even though they offer fewer tools. Mac users can choose from iWork '08, the free OpenOffice 2, or tools with free online components including ThinkFree, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and Zoho Office. These are all dandy for composing and editing text documents, juggling spreadsheets, and creating slide-show presentations.
Word Although the look and feel are refreshed, Word isn't drastically different from its predecessor. Its changes should mostly please those creating documents they want to show off. We really like Publishing Layout View's elementary desktop publishing tools. Document Elements building blocks make swift work of adding cover pages, tables of contents, and the like.
OpenType ligature support improves the appearance of fonts in Word. Those in academia should appreciate new reference tools, although there are only four citation styles. Users who wrangle with form letters will find that Mail Merge has become more intuitive, with step-by-step instructions. Bloggers don't get a custom layout in Word as with Office 2007, but that's not a big loss given Microsoft's lack of support for the latest Web coding standards.
Perhaps the biggest selling point for the new Word is the ease with which it can make documents easy on the eyes. Excel As well as making charts easier on the eyes, Excel for Mac 2008 adds tools for stepping through complex formulas. Formula Builder walks you through building calculations, keeping recently used ones at the top of its memory. As you type in the Formula bar, Excel will autofill values that may match.
Excel has expanded and can now handle a total of 17.18 billion cells, as many as its Windows cousin. The Elements Gallery offers Ledger Sheets, templates for commonly used tasks such as juggling a household budget or managing company payroll.
We find these handy for getting started with a project. However, we prefer the elegant layouts, outside-the-grid setup, and print preview tools within Apple's Numbers for light users of spreadsheets. Probably the worst thing about Excel 2008 overall is its lack of support for Visual Basic. While power spreadsheet users will find Excel richer than other programs, those who rely upon macros are sure to be disappointed and may be better off keeping Excel 2004 or even switching to Excel for Windows. PowerPoint Microsoft continues to tout its Smart Art graphics, which can turn a bulleted list into nearly any kind of diagram or flowchart with a few quick clicks. However, as with Office 2007 for Windows, we find Smart Art initially a bit less intuitive than advertised. The Toolbox's new Object Palette keeps formatting options in one place.
You can resize elements with a zoom slider in a snap, just as Dynamic Guide lines help to align text boxes and pictures. PowerPoint stands out from Apple's Keynote and other competitors in key areas, such as control over audio narration.
And there are more layout and slide transition themes. While making a public presentation, a detailed digital clock is meant to help keep you on track. A Thumbnail View like the one in Office 2007 may help to keep from losing your place. You can flip through slides on location using an Apple Remote. And there's an option for sending a presentation to iPhoto, making it accessible as a PNG or a JPEG for iPod viewing. Entourage Although Mac users can rely upon the free Mail, Entourage offers more features fit for business.
The 2008 upgrade offers more practical functions than its 2004 counterpart, such as an Out of Office assistant that lets you craft vacation messages specific to the recipient. Filters for junk mail and phishing are beefed up. There are To Do lists, accessible in the My Day widget along with appointments and the color-coded calendar. You can accept or reject a meeting directly within a calendar event.
Meetings can be forwarded directly to others, and conflicting and adjacent appointments are better managed. The workspace is more customizable overall, thanks to toolbar tweaks and the Favorites menu. My Day is a helpful snapshot of upcoming To Do items and appointments, although its bluish appearance can't be customized. We just wish that it showed an entire day's events instead of hiding the morning's appointments in the afternoon and displaying overdue appointments in a separate pop-up window. Setting up Entourage for a Gmail account took no time. However, after claiming to have succeeded at setting up our Hotmail account, Microsoft failed to explain why it couldn't do that after all.
For that, we searched Help and learned that Hotmail's lack of free POP support was the culprit. Messenger for Mac Microsoft also throws in this free instant-messaging application, which enables users of its IM tool and Yahoo Messenger to contact each other. Messenger for Mac enables users to check spelling, pick from among many emoticons, and see what others are listening to on iTunes. Companies using Live Communications Server 2005 can encrypt their messaging, and users can chat with those using iChat, AOL, AIM, Yahoo, and MSN. Service and support Microsoft offers searchable inline and online help menus, which answered most of our questions, as well as Web-based community forums.
Live e-mail or phone help costs $35 for a pair of requests, not cheap but still less than Apple iWork's fees. Video support is not (yet) available. Conclusion Overall, we found ourselves wondering why someone would splurge for Office for Mac 2008. Sure, it's a step up from the 2004 version, and the only one that runs natively on Intel-based Macs. But other companies serve up software that's compatible with Office documents and costs half as much, if not less-or nothing at all. IWork '08, for one, handles the newest, XML-based Office files pretty well. Office for Mac also skips some niceties that give its an advantage over rival software, such as the interface slider bar for zooming in on a document.
The document element templates may be attractive and helpful, but the selection feels skimpy next to Office 2007 for Windows, and Smart Art isn't as intuitive to use as advertised. It's too bad that the easy-to-find metadata inspector and other touted security features for saving work in Office 2007 are absent. Plus, we'd like to see more integration among the applications. For example, in Office for Windows, a chart pasted from Excel into Word will change when you manipulate its underlying data set in Excel. Nevertheless, people who rely heavily upon productivity software for such tasks as bulk mailings or crunching scientific calculations in spreadsheets may prefer Microsoft's package over others.
Although we like Apple's attractive, introductory Numbers spreadsheet application, for instance, Excel for Mac is more robust, handling a million rows of data. At the same time, Excel 2008's lack of Visual Basic support is a serious flaw that shafts power users. Still, Entourage's update may motivate more businesses to use Office on a Mac. Word also offers richer features than Apple Pages, such as mail merge form letters that can accept data from sources other than the Mac Address Book.
There's better support for long documents as well. File compatibility is another reason to skip, say, which can read Office's new files but can't fully edit dynamic charts and Smart Art graphics. If you and fellow project collaborators plan to alter all elements of documents saved in Microsoft's newest formats, you'll have to spring for Office for Mac 2008. Full Specifications What's new in version 12.3.6 This update fixes critical issues and also helps to improve security. It includes fixes for vulnerabilities that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer's memory with malicious code.
General Publisher Publisher web site Release Date March 13, 2013 Date Added March 13, 2013 Version 12.3.6 Category Category Subcategory Operating Systems Operating Systems Mac OS X 10.4/10.5/10.6/10.7 Additional Requirements None Download Information File Size 209.7MB File Name Office2008-1236UpdateEN.dmg Popularity Total Downloads 1,391,120 Downloads Last Week 713 Pricing License Model Purchase Limitations Not available Price Paid.
Editor's note: This is a review of the final, shipping version of Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac, provided to Macworld by Microsoft in advance of the suite's general release. represents the largest step forward for serious Mac spreadsheet jockeys in many years, more so than either ( ) or ( ).
There are literally hundreds of improvements, some very noticeable, others not quite as much so. The big news for power users is the return of macro support (more on that later), but there’s good stuff to be found for Excel users of all levels. Some uneven performance issues and a lack of Mac-standard features, however, prevent this version from Excel from attaining perfection. The interface Excel 2011 looks much different than its 2004 and 2008 predecessors.
Gone are the numerous floating toolbars and the floating formatting palette. Excel 2011 replaces all of those floating bits with two toolbars (standard and formatting) and the Ribbon, a collection of small tabs that provide easy access to often-used commands. You can customize the Ribbon, or even disable it if you wish. It's context sensitive, so it changes to match the task at hand. For example, if you double-click an image, the Ribbon will open to a greatly improved set of image-editing commands. The Ribbon and toolbars are now integrated in each Excel window, so there’s nothing floating around outside your workspace. A couple of optional floating windows remain, but they’re not required in most typical spreadsheet work.
The Ribbon’s tabs are compact, and the Ribbon itself can collapse to a single row of tabs when not in use. As a result, the new Excel’s work area doesn’t feel smaller than that of the older versions. With the interface now contained in a single window, working with multiple workbooks at once is simpler.
For example, you previously couldn’t compare formulas between workbooks, because the formula bar existed only once for every open workbook. Now each workbook has its own formula bar. Other minor touches abound. There’s a full 32-bit color palette instead of 40 colors. Drag-resizing a window now updates it in real time, instead of merely dragging an outline. SmartArt has over 150 pre-made templates (up from 80-ish), all of which you can customize.
A media browser provides fast access to photos, audio, movies, clip art, symbols, and shapes. For the most part these new features work quite well. There is some lag when you live-resize windows, even on current hardware, but the delay is bearable. UI overhaul: Excel’s new all-in-one-window interface with the Chart ribbon open. Working with spreadsheets Beyond the visual overhaul, Excel 2011 provides many new or improved ways of working with spreadsheets and the data they hold. Right up front, you’ll notice a new Workbook Gallery (similar to the Template Choose feature in ) that appears when you launch the application.
Although it doesn't contain a ton of stock templates, you can browse a huge online template collection directly from the gallery window. Tiny, yet helpful: The new sparklines provide useful insight in a single cell. One of Excel 2011’s innovative new features is sparklines, which are simply graphs of data values that appear within a single cell. Instead of building a full chart to look for a trend in your data, you can often use a sparkline to show what you need to see in a simpler and quicker manner. Creating sparklines is as easy as selecting some data, choosing a menu item, and clicking a destination cell. Conditional formatting, long one of my favorite ways of spotting key values in a large data stream, is greatly improved in Excel 2011. No longer are you restricted to three conditional formatting rules per cell; the limit now depends only on your available RAM.
The archaic editor in prior versions of Excel has been replaced with a larger and more intuitive interface. You can now pick from four predefined conditional formats (including data bars, color scales, and special icons), or set the format based on a formula (as before). You can also easily rearrange existing rules—a most welcome improvement. You can even include formulas based on data on other worksheets.
To help you format your data for presentation, Excel 2011 offers both themes (which apply rules to your entire spreadsheet) and cell styles (which apply styles to cell ranges). You can customize these as you wish, and save customized versions for easy reuse. Themes and cell styles are available from the Ribbon via resizable drop-down windows. Unfortunately, Excel doesn’t remember custom size/shape settings for any Ribbon-based windows, so you’ll have to resize them each time they’re activated. Improved filters: Excel 2011's filters are more in line with their Windows counterparts. People who rely on pivot tables will appreciate Excel 2011's automatic pivot table creation, a new PivotTable Builder to ease building and modification of pivot tables, and pivot table report designs, layouts, and styles.I found both building and manipulating pivot tables to be much simpler in Excel 2011 than in the 2008 version. Tables (previously known as lists) have similarly gotten a full makeover in Excel 2011.
Creating tables is as simple as selecting your data and choosing a layout from the Ribbon (or from the menus). Once you've done that, it’s easy to filter and sort your data. Sorting and filtering in general is better in Excel 2011 than in Excel 2007 and 2010 for Windows.
You can create multi-select filter conditions without using custom filters; sort or filter on a font color or cell color; see matches immediately as you create your filter; and utilize built-in filters (such as Above Average or Below Average) to speed your work. Macros are back Excel 2011 addresses about its predecessor: no support for macros. Macros (via Microsoft’s Visual Basic for Applications) are back in Excel 2011, which means I can finally retire my copy of Office 2004, the last version to support macros. Excel 2011 supports some new macro features, such as the ability to set watch points, and it handled all of my existing macro spreadsheets (including a complex model containing custom menus and input forms) just fine. In addition, Microsoft says that cross-platform macro compatibility with the Windows version of Excel has been improved, although I was unable to test this. While many Mac users may never use macros, their return is good news for power users and those who work in cross-platform environments.
Sharing and protecting spreadsheets If you share your Excel projects with others, Excel 2011 has more to offer than previous versions. In the past, you could protect a worksheet’s cells, contents, and scenarios, and lock or unlock a given cell for editing. Better protection: Excel 2011 offers greater flexibility in sheet protection.In Excel 2011, however, you can protect a cell’s contents while allowing changes to formatting.
You can also allow or prevent insertion and deletion of rows and columns, use of filters and sorting, and more. These features match the protection options available in Windows versions of Excel, making for better cross-platform compatibility.
Beyond enhanced worksheet protection, Excel 2011 offers full information rights management, which allows users in a corporate environment to specify users and groups of users with rights to a workbook, including restricting who can read, print, forward, edit, or copy its contents. If your sharing needs are simpler, you can save directly to (free; 25GB of storage) from within Excel 2011. Once you've saved your documents to SkyDrive, you can access and edit them online, from any browser, using the.
With the Web application, you can edit your worksheet, and open the modified copy in Excel on your Mac. Multiple people can even edit the spreadsheet at the same time, similar to the way you can collaboratively edit a Google Docs spreadsheet.
In my test of this feature, it worked well enough. The Web version's features are nowhere near as extensive as the desktop version's, but most of the basics are there. In addition, the sparklines in my test file updated when I changed their base values in the Web application, though you can’t actually create sparklines in the Web application. Some room for improvement While this release makes great progress with the user interface and feature set, there are still things that don’t work quite as you’d expect. Excel uses its own dictionary and thesaurus instead of the OS X-provided tools; Command-A won't select all the text in the formula bar; and, very annoyingly, OS X's Services are still not available.
The fact that these features don't work in Excel will be disappointing for those hoping for a fully 'Mac like' application. In addition to the lack of Mac-expected interface features, Excel 2011’s performance is a bit uneven. When you're scrolling large spreadsheets (either by clicking and holding on a thumb scroller or by drag-scrolling), the sheet feels like it's moving quite slowly, even on current hardware. In back-to-back comparisons between Excel 2004, 2008, and 2011, the 2011 release was easily the slowest of the three—it took over six times as long to scroll through my test document as did Excel 2004. (Microsoft has told us they slowed the scrolling down due to user complaints about it being too fast.
While it may have been too fast in Excel 2004, it's currently twice as slow as Excel 2008, which seems like an excessive slowdown to me.) When you add in the lag-on-window-resize, the Excel 2011 interface can feel slow at times. When put to a number-crunching test, however, Excel 2011 showed great results. Using a 15,000-row by 22-column worksheet containing a mix of slow-to-calculate formulas, Office 2004 and 2008 each took more than five seconds to recalculate. Excel 2011, on the other hand, didn’t even blink, recalculating the same test worksheet in well under a second. So while Excel 2011’s on-the-surface performance suffers compared to its predecessors, it’s clearly working much more efficiently under the hood.
To me, this is the stronger measure of performance, as it's the one that will most affect the ability to get things done with Excel—not waiting on calculations in large worksheets will be a huge timesaver. I saw similar results with all the workbooks I tested; they scrolled better in prior versions of Excel, but Excel 2011 easily trounced its predecessors in speed of calculation. In addition to my tests, Macworld Lab ran a series of benchmark tests. Overall, Excel 2011 performed faster than Excel 2008 in the Lab tests. We'll have more benchmarks result in an upcoming lab report.
Excel 2011 benchmarks Open Open with File Recalc Scroll Save File Excel 2011 2 7 0 95 3 Excel 2008 3 12 3 64 4 Results are in seconds. Lower results are better and are in bold.
How we tested. We opened a spreadsheet with 225,000 cells of data.
We recalculated the file, scrolled through the spreadsheet, and performed a Save As.—Macworld Lab testing performed by James Galbraith Macworld’s buying advice Should you upgrade to Excel 2011 if you’re using an older version? I definitely think so.
The new interface and improved functionality make short work of even large projects, while the protection and sharing features make it easier to work with others—both on the Mac and on that “other” platform. There are only a few negatives with Excel 2011. I feel scrolling has been overly slowed down, the live window resizing is jumpy, and the lack of support for Services is troubling, as that's an OS X feature that I rely on daily. However, these things are not big enough issues to really affect Excel's performance and features—the program just works, and has many new features and improvements that spreadsheet users have been asking for. Excel 2011 is a solid program for anyone whose work involves a heavy dose of spreadsheet duty.
Macworld senior contributor Rob Griffiths is Master of Ceremonies at.