Microsoft® Office MAC 2011 HOME & STUDENT 3PC Family Pack Tax Invoice

The biggest introduction to the new suite is the Ribbon – essentially a tabbed series of toolbars – which brings together the bits and pieces that were spread between the toolbars, formatting palette and Elements gallery in previous versions of Office. The ribbon was introduced in the Windows version in 2007, and in Office 2011 it breaks up almost everything you need for document editing into Home, Layout, Document Elements, Tables, Charts, SmartArt and Review (plus a few context-aware tabs when they’re needed).

 It’s a really intuitive, neat way to have everything in one space, and its design fits pretty well with your Mac experience. But if you decide you hate it, it’s simple to go Ribbon-less and use the regular old formatting bar that you know from Office 2008 – just click the name of the active tab, and the whole thing will minimise.

Beyond the Ribbon, Microsoft has generally cleaned up the design of Office for Mac in this new version. . There’s a Template Gallery to open up particular Print, Publishing or Notebook themes; plus, all your recent documents are there in All, Today, Yesterday, Past Week, Past Month smart folders. There are sleek new icons, and all sorts of nice effects you’ll notice if you decide to get familiar with the suite.

Along with Publishing Layout in Word, Office 2011 is looking to compete further with iWork by adding a Media Browser – with all the photos (from iPhoto), audio (from iTunes), movies (from iMovie and elsewhere) clip art, symbols (oddly) and shapes that you could possibly want to cram into your document. All you have to do is drag and drop the media where you want it. When selected, the media adds a Format tab to the Ribbon – it even slides in with a very Mac-like animation. If you embed a lot of photos or videos into documents and presentations, it makes it quicker than ever.

With the new Office, Microsoft has also acknowledged that a lot of people are collaborating on documents nowadays, and 2011 makes it easier than ever.  Collaboration can now be done via Windows Live’s SkyDrive feature (all you need is a Hotmail account, and you can access 25GB of online storage) or SharePoint (which you have to pay for – and is aimed at businesses). To upload a document to the cloud, you just choose File > Share > Save to SkyDrive and enter your hotmail account details. Then within Hotmail (or Windows Live Mail), you can edit the document in a browser, or download it to work on locally.

As well as the changes across the board, there are a few new features that are worth pointing out. There are actually plenty more than outlined below, but these are the most important changes, or things that are particularly useful.

Word 2011

One interesting new feature in Word 2011 is Fullscreen view – and it’s pretty self-explanatory. Go into Fullscreen mode, and you’re faced with just your document on a black background. Move your mouse up to the top of the screen, and a partial formatting toolbar appears.

Also new is an integrated equation editor – Office 2008 featured equations via a separate Equation Editor application, that was clunky to use. Now, just go to Insert > Equation, and you’ll see a new tab in the Ribbon with everything you need to figure out string theory. Well, almost. Here Microsoft one-ups Pages, as Apple’s word processor requires you purchase MathType for any decent equation editing.

PowerPoint 2011

With PowerPoint 2011, there's a fancy new 3D tool to get everything where you want it. Click Arrange Reorder, and a black screen appears with each of your layers represented in three dimensions. Just drag them around until you’re happy. It almost feels like going through backups in Time Machine, and feels right at home on the Mac.

Another feature billed at collaboration is the Broadcast slideshow option in PowerPoint 2011. With PowerPoint 2011, that functionality is built in; you just have to connect with your Windows Live ID  and you get a link that can be emailed to all and sundry to see your work. Once the presentation’s over, they can’t access any of the information – so it’s great if you want to share confidential material that you don’t want to give full access to.

One of the most interesting features –  is the ability to embed movies in PowerPoint 2011.

Excel 2011

 Microsoft has brought back the much-loved macro, and Office for Mac can once again be happily used in a business context.

Excel 2011 also introduces Sparklines – tiny graphs within single cells. They’re handy for quickly illustrating and interpreting trends in data; they don't replace proper charts, but if you want to see at a glance what’s changed in a column or row of numbers, it’s as simple as clicking a couple of buttons.