Office for Mac 2011: beta versions / historical Office for Mac trends?

Okay, so I use Office:Mac 2008, and I'm not a fan. But it's better than OpenOffice/NeoOffice (imo), and while I like a lot about iWork, the occasional small incompatibility -- and the fact that saving as .docx as default is troublesome -- is irritating.

For those of you who have been Mac users since Office '08 was released, I'm just curious as to whether there's a reason to expect that we might see a public beta put out by Microsoft in the coming few months -- long before this Fall/Winter 2010 release or whenever it's supposed to be -- so we can get cracking on that.

 

You could always just use parallels to run Word 07. I'm disappointed in the fact that Excel 08 for Mac doesn't have VBA macro support.

 

im disappointed it doesnt have the ribbon feature like the regular windows, that was immensely convenient for me

 

Yeah, but I was trying to shy away from an honest-to-goodness VM.

Although, thinking about it... what about using WineBottler and a copy of Office 2010 Beta.exe? Problem is, I haven't the first idea what prefixes to use; tried a couple of things that haven't worked already.

 

Office 2010 is supposed to be released in june. I'm not too sure we'll see the mac version on the same day because apple vs pc...You know the trend. However we'll definitely see it this year. I've used open office and i must say it's quite nice. It's very easy to use. You could give it the chance to prove itself.

 

And hopefully outlook is going to be coming with office 2010

 

It will.

And to whoever mentioned ribbons, 2010 For Mac will use the Ribbons. To be quite honest I absolutely loathed the ribbons at first, but nowadays I think they are quite useful and not the UI gimmick they appear to be.

Here's hoping for RTL support like Microsoft promised (seriously, it's 2010! Friggin MAKE UNICODE SUPPORT WORK FLAWLESSLY!)

 

And hopefully MSN with Webcam capability!

 

Hopefully it has one note. I run bootcamp and windows because of one note.

 

For anyone who may have also been wondering: I found this thread over on the MBU forum which suggests that we're out of luck as far as a public beta of Office 2011 is concerned.

I realize it's not an official statement, but it definitely answers my question in this thread from a month ago. Guess we'll just have to wait until late this year -- too bad, because I'm not at all a fan of OpenOffice / NeoOffice, and Office 2008 is a little irritating.

 

I love the Office 2007 ribbon, great idea that I think really improved functionality for me. As for Office 2011, definitely won't be before Christmas 2010 if not even later. Office 2010 for Windows is coming but the Mac versions come quite a bit later, usually a year later. In other news, MSN Messenger for Mac finally supports video chat in its Beta form .

 

OMG! Best news ever!!! WOOO!!! I actually find the ribbon a bit confusing still after using it for like 3 years.

 

you can try it... but If you want to use Wine to run Office, your better off sticking with Office 2007 for now... it doesn't run too bad in Wine.

 

I actually like the mix of the ribbon and traditional toolbars (although you have to activate them yourself) in the Mac version of Office. It sucks that you guy's won't get to try Office 2011 in a beta form...hopefully that's just rumor.

 

I'd like to hope so, but apparently, the whole "no betas for Office:Mac" is a historical thing up to now -- which doesn't bode well.

Thinking about trying to get Wine + WineBottler to get Office 2007 up and running nicely -- Office '08 has several little niggles that bug the hell out of me. Anyone doing that successfully?

 

I've done it in Linux with no problems, but haven't in OS X.

 

Hmm. I just tried to get it going in OS X -- fired up, accepted my key, appeared to install, and ultimately ended with a nonspecific error message about how there were, well, errors during installation.

I'm completely inexperienced with Wine usage, so I really don't know what happened.

 

when i switched to mac i was very disappointed that the Ribbon wasnt implemented and live preview, it looks the same as office 03 for mac! but anyway i do hope for 2010 they implement the ribbon and live preview and new transitions on powerpoint for slides

 

They are, I don't know, and they probably will -- in that order.

 

As it turns out... does anyone have Office 2007 (or Office 2010) running well in OS X under Wine? I can't get it to work, and the error message returned by the Office 2007 installer (which runs to completion) doesn't actually give any pertinent information.

I've tried finding some guides and the like, but I haven't come across much that wasn't about Linux.

 

using actual Wine built from source? Macports? Crossover? Wineskin? WineBottler? Darwine? what version of OSX? what X11 installed?

The easiest way to get it to work would be to buy Crossover Mac, since its a supported app. But there are other ways to get it to work, it can just take a bit more troubleshooting.

 

Wow, I wish I had a Mac. I love testing out new stuff. Anyway, maybe I'll buy a Mac Mini. Hmm. From videos and pictures, I feel Mac 2008 was not as good looking as M/Soft 2007.

 

Wine with WineBottler, 10.6.2, X 2.3.4.

 

I would agree with that, I think Microsoft still does better versions of Office for Windows (not that I blame them, it is their home platform). Office 2007 for Windows (which I use for all my productivity needs) is fantastic in my opinion. I'm hoping they make it real great in Office 2011 for Mac!

 

I don't know hardly anything about WineBottler, but I have installed Office 2007 in Wine (and a very early version of Wineskin when i started making it last year) and had no errors... I only ever ran Word through it which most of its functions ran fine.

You have to install a few other packages it needs, which is easiest to do with Winetricks.... I think WineBottler had some way to run Winetricks in it...?
heres a list of things I'd think you'd probably need to install in Winetricks, there may be more, you can probably find a list somewhere, whatever they say is needed on Linux, would be the same as Mac OS X.
allfonts
msxml3
gdiplus
riched30
.... and uhhh.. theres probably more, but some Office 2007 guide for Wine should list these somewhere... but once you have all the extras you need installed from Winetricks, then the Office Installer should work without failing.

 

Thanks for the info. This is no doubt a stupid question, but from googling around a bit about WineTricks, I'm finding some scripts and the like (and a DarwinPorts link that seems to be gone, at least there). I'm pretty much crap at the OS X Terminal, and I'm definitely a Wine virgin thus far. Where might I start to get going?

I did try to find some guides for such things -- Wine/WineBottler are straightforward enough, and I have found a link or two (and a video over at the Wine blogspot), but they're generally for Linux.

 

winetricks is just a script... but I thought WineBottler had something built in to run Winetricks.

You could try doing it all in Wineskin if you wanted... I work on making it user friendly, but it still takes some learning... I don't have a copy of Office 2007, but I could probably tell you step by step what to try... I mainly only focus on games, but its still Wine it could run Office just fine.

basically you'd want to install Wineskin, then run the Wineskin.app in your Applications folder.
It should start out on the "Engines" tab.. where you'd want to get the latest version for Office (WS1Wine1.1.41, previous versions are very useful for gaming, but 1.1.41 should be fine for Office) download and install that Engine.
Then you could create a wrapper called MSOffice2007 using that engine in the Wrappers tab.
then back on the Basic Usage tab, you'd want to Select the wrapper you just made, and push the run WineskinSettings.app button (this is a program bundled inside every wrapper).
In WineskinSettings.app Advanced Menu under Tools is Winetricks, which just is a very simple GUI front end I made for using a basic unaltered Winetricks script (latest version already is in it).
use it to select and install the following packages...
gecko
msxml3
allfonts
gdiplus
dotnet20
riched20
riched30
vcrun2005

After all those are installed in the wrapper, you may want to exit out of WineskinSettings.app and back in Wineskin.app in the Wrappers tab, make a copy of the current wrapper, for a backup... since installing all of those can be time consuming and you don't want to have to do it over if something messes up.

Back in Basic Usage, run WineskinSettings.app again, and select Install Windows Software, and select the install program for Windows wherever you have it.... and go through a normal install. At the end you get to choose what .exe installed you want the wrapper to run when double clicked.

the wrapper (located in your home folder under a Wineskin folder) should look like a normal Mac .app, and when you double click it, should run whatever .exe you chose.

thats some very basic directions that might need to be altered here and there... and you can do much more like custom icons or making it totally self contained to move between computers and such... I wrote up a whole manual and a usage FAQ on the website, cuz things can end up getting very complicated, especially with MSOffice having multiple exe files, which you could set up a little differently.

If you want just an easy way to run Office though, I still suggest buying Crossover Mac. Its a supported app and they take care of all the hard work for you, you can just go in their menu and say you want to install Office 2007 and it will lead you through and do everything step by step. Office is probably one of the harder programs to get working in Wine, not really a learner type program.

 

Thank you for this. Will sit down and try to get it working / post back as soon as I get a chance.

 

Well, turns out I "got a chance" sooner than expected. You're right -- I didn't realize that the scripts you're talking about are the WineTricks embedded in WineBottler.

I tried to install my Office 2007 .exe using the scripts you mentioned; it still errors out on me, saying simply that an error was encountered. The console pop-up after I manually stopped the creation when that happened was "status 15". What might I be missing?

(eta: trying components listed here next... ... and that didn't fare any better.)

 

not sure what else to try... i don't have any Officer 2007 discs to test with, I only did it before using someone else... you could try installing a full IE6 or IE7 in it first. Other than that, it can take a lot of time and troubleshooting to figure out whats going on. I don't know where WineBottler makes any log files to look at to see what Wine is saying... its what we really need to look at. If you can find where it makes log files you can see, it would help.

No matter how you go about using Wine right now, it can get confusing and not work the same on all machines. Maybe download a free trial of Crossover and see if it works good, then it might be worth spending the $40 for it... free isn't always the best value, Crossover is a very good product, and since they are the major contributors to Wine as well, the money helps make Wine better.

 

About time. Downloading it now. Let's see if it's buggy.

 

Leaked Screenshots: http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2010/03/29/microsoft-office-2011-for-mac-gets-undressed/

It looks good, maybe not as flashy as Office 2010 on Windows, but hey that can a good thing.

Too bad that damm "Formatting Palette" mess of a toolbox is still around...even with the Ribbon fully present and accounted for. (see photo 6 in the gallery)

I hope they kill that thing with fire. I never understood it and it's always the first thing I disable when I'm on a school Mac (second thing is activating the Standard and Formatting toolbars )