- Download Microsoft Office for Mac Update from Official Microsoft Download Center

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 , 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 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 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 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 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 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 may help to keep from losing your place. You can flip through slides on location using an Apple Remote. Entourage Although Mac users can rely upon the free Mail, Entourage offers more features fit for business. The upgrade offers more practical functions than its 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. 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.

Service and support Microsoft offers searchable inline and online help menus, which answered most of our questions, as well as Web-based community forums. Video support is not yet available. Conclusion Overall, we found ourselves wondering why someone would splurge for Office for Mac Sure, it's a step up from the 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. Office for Mac also skips some niceties that give its Windows counterpart 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 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 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 '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, iWork or ThinkFree Office , 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 IObit Uninstaller.

Internet Download Manager. Advanced SystemCare Free. WinRAR bit. VLC Media Player. MacX YouTube Downloader. Microsoft Office YTD Video Downloader. Adobe Photoshop CC. VirtualDJ Avast Free Security. WhatsApp Messenger. Talking Tom Cat.

Clash of Clans. Subway Surfers. Resume Assistant, powered by LinkedIn, helps you craft a more compelling resume. Customize your resume based on millions of LinkedIn job listings, then apply or contact recruiters on LinkedIn. See how task management in Microsoft works as an integrated experience that lets you assign, manage, and complete tasks across your favorite apps including Word.

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- Microsoft Office

How much more can Microsoft do to tweak its venerable word processor? Those changes include a new document format, a simplified toolbar, and a new toolbox that combines palettes for managing formatting, clip art, iPhoto images, research, and bibliographies.

But the biggest improvement is the addition of a new view option called Publishing Layout. In this new view, arranging text and graphics on the page is far simpler than it was in previous versions of Word.

Like Apple, Microsoft has apparently concluded that people use word processing programs for far more than just creating text-based documents. Creating complex, graphics-rich documents requires tools historically found in powerful page layout programs such as Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress.

That environment is Publishing Layout. The biggest downside in what would otherwise be an excellent upgrade: the elimination of Visual Basic for Applications VBA.

In its place, Word offers limited support for AppleScript and Automator. The first and most obvious interface change is the new toolbar. It sits at the top of your document window, rather than being tied to the menu bar. They were too easy to accidentally rearrange and contained way more buttons than most people used.

The Document Elements button, for example, lets you quickly add or modify cover pages, headers and footers, or a table of contents. By adding articles, Web sites, books, and other materials to this database, you can easily add them to your document.

Previous editions of Word had limited versions of this feature, but it was not this obvious or easy to use. For example, depending on what was selected in my document and which disclosure triangles were opened, the Formatting palette sometimes outgrew my screen—even when I was working on a inch iMac. Closing those disclosure triangles took care of this problem, but it would be nice if Word worked more like Pages, which uses a tabbed format for document options and which allows you to open more than one floating palette at a time.

Publishing Layout offers a bunch of tools for placing and manipulating text and graphics on the page. Like Pages, Word allows you to create template documents with image and text placeholders; you can drag and drop images and text into those placeholders, making it easy to turn those templates into new, fresh documents. You can also link text boxes so text overflows from one to another. While it is possible to add masks and transparency and make minor adjustments to images in your document, the program is nowhere near as adept at it as Pages.

Another thing I noticed: the longer I worked in Publishing Layout mode, the slower Word seemed to get when manipulating images or moving text boxes around on the page. Word adopts the new, XML-based. That format makes Word compatible with the latest version of Word for Windows.

To bypass this problem, Word does allow you to save documents in the older. More significantly, Office marks the demise of Visual Basic for Applications. In its stead, Word includes an AppleScript library.

Neither AppleScript nor Automator will let you record a string of events in Word and save them as a reusable script. As a word processor, Word is no better or worse than Word If you need automation, Word is not for you. As a word processor, little has changed in Word The elimination of VBA and weak support for AppleScript and Automator make the program far less versatile and valuable for users who really need automation.

You can read his blog at jeffbattersby. Pros Improved citation and bibliographic tools New Publishing Layout view Elements Gallery makes adding graphics, charts, and other elements easy Streamlined new interface Refined preferences tools.