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Comment by hackuser | Hacker News Reader

Office for the Mac was hamstrung in a way that made it usable for home users, but difficult for businesses. There was no Outlook, no Visual Basic, and IIRC: No pivot tables in Excel, no OOXML until 2011 (4 years after Office for Windows), less integration with Microsoft's backend servers (Sharepoint, etc.), and some other missing features. I'm also thinking that Group Policy management didn't work or not as well.

Much of that was later fixed, but for a long time it was another powerful reason for businesses to use Windows.

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As a home user of Office on Mac (and therefore didn't bother with these things), I have to ask: What has been fixed, and what hasn't?

Try the Office 2016 Beta for OSX. Its going to be a launch day first class citizen of the Office family, and is a complete UI/UX rewrite to match what Windows does now.

I'm using it, it's ahead of the non-Beta Office that Office 365 currently ships for Windows.

Any word on when that's gonna launch?

My mac users are freaking out because we just switched from gApps to Exchange (I know, don't even) and Outlook 2011 is a joke compared to what my windows peeps are getting. (not to mention the fact that I have to create a second set of instructions just for them)

> we just switched from gApps to Exchange (I know, don't even)

I don't know: Why not switch from Google Apps to Exchange?

Office365 and Office365 for Business's OSX installer already ships the new Outlook by default, Excel and Word and the rest are available as optional downloads, and will ship in the main installer, from what I've heard, early next year.

Compared against Windows' current version of Office, it is a refinement. Compared against Office 2011 for Mac, it is a massive upgrade, like day and night.

We're part of a university and are bound by their license agreements which until July 1st are just for Office 2013 and Office 2011, in a week from today that mercifully changes to Office 365 and a much tighter integration with onedrive for business support and larger mailboxes (until now it's been 8gb a piece) + an easier overall installation process.

With Outlook 2011 for Mac being little more than a rebranded Entourage, long recognized even by Microsoft as not equivalent to Outlook for Windows, it's no wonder your folks are having problems. I've pushed my Mac users to use Apple's Mail.app instead- much less friction than using a program that is Outlook in name only.

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