Microsoft also made an announcement yesterday at MacWorld. They are going to release Mac Office 2008 later this year (here’s an informative interview with the Mac BU GM. I’ve been wondering for a while if this would happen and if I would get a copy for my Mac. I don’t think that I need to. I have Parallels, the awesome virtualization software that allows us to run Windows in a window on a Mac.
The Mac version of office will include Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Entourage (a Mac-specific Outlook clone that has calendaring, email, contact management, plus some in one product). All of these apps will have the the Ribbon (the new, very cool menu bar for Office apps). Compatability with the Windows Office Suite will be a big priority. It is also going to include some Mac only features such as a publishing layout feature, the inclusion of ledger sheets (for financial tasks) in Excel, and a new stand-alone for handling schedules and to-do lists without launching the all-in-one Entourage (sounds cool – will it work with Quicksilver?).
Office 2007 for Windows is a great improvement over the previous version. I’ve used the 2007 versions of what I consider the “core office” apps: Outlook, Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. The interface is much cleaner, the Ribbon menu bar neatly places everything at my mousetip (screenshots on Lifehacker), and it publishes to the new Office Open XML format as well as PDF. Another bonus is that they have added OneNote, the great notetaking program with a slew of improvements (though noteably it did not gain the Ribbon interface in this release), to the Office Suite. OneNote is the Windows application I miss most.
I’ve decided to not wait for Mac Office. I have Parallels. Parallels has coherence mode which allows me to run a Windows application in its own window. I plan on installing Windows Office 2007 on my XP virtual machine and then use coherence mode to launch various Office 2007 apps from OSX (I’m not the only one thinking this way, in fact it’s already been done). Sure it won’t have all of the mac trappings, but I will have the apps that I need and want now.
I’ll report back on the successes and failings of this endeavor. How well will it work with Spotlight? Will the apps be performant enough? Will the Shared Folders feature be flexible enough? If I (and others who try this) are successful I wonder if this is the way things will go in the future? Will Mac users buy Parallels, install an older, cheaper, but current version of Windows and run the necessary Windows apps. I think so, I wonder if Windows Office 2007 will be the app that gets people to notice this.
The OS doesn’t matter, only the individual applications and the Web do (with the web constantly swallowing up more of the application’s jobs).