Weighing the Good and the Areas of Opportunity in Office 2011

There is a saying you don’t necessarily have to call something good or bad. But if you perceive that something is lacking, call it an area of opportunity. The same can definitely be said about Office Home and Business 2011 or just the Office 2011 suite in general.

If you’re using Mac, of course it will be undeniably advantageous for you to start using this productivity suite. But so that you will know the pluses in this software, it’s important to get a good overview of what they are:

a.       Better performance

Office 2011 starts up faster and it feels a lot more compact than Office 2008. It is also at a much more compatible state than its Windows counterpart. The Ribbon is now installed, what was first there in Office for Windows 2007 is now available in Office Mac 2011.

b.      Outlook

This email platform gives you the flexibility you need because you need only one inbox for different email accounts. And unique to Mac is that every message is stored separately so that you can work faster and have backups in real time.

c.       Professional Layout in Word

The publishing layout gives you a wide array of options that can easily rival Pages, which is iWork’s equivalent of the processor. You need not get Adobe Acrobat X if all your drafting and designing needs will be met with Word 2011.

Of course, you can’t go wrong when your documents can be saved to SkyDrive. This gives you the ability to work from different devices and store your documents online as you go along.

The areas of opportunity may or may not be significant for you, but Office 2011 could have done be tter in the following.

First, you cannot open Publisher in Word as you will need the Windows version. Second, you are not able to access Word Perfect documents from public offices if you do not have the Windows counterpart of Office. And of course, you may find Key Note more to your liking than what PowerPoint 2011 offers but this will vary from person to person.

Get Office 2011 Home and Business if you feel that it is the right one for you. There’s plenty to love about it but do not close your doors to running Windows and getting say Office 2013 instead. The 2010 version offers the lovely Backstage View that many people have come to appreciate. After you’ve tried it, tell us then what you feel are the areas of opportunity for Office 2011?