Nik Rawlinson
Can the free rivals to Office 2011 offer as secure a future for compatibility?
This is the first chunk of MacUser to be written in Office 2011. You know what? I like it. I’m not going to spill the beans here – check back next issue for the full review – but there are some genuinely smart elements here that bring the suite up to the standard that it should really have hit in 2008.
Yes, VBA is back and, although it’s not as fully featured as the Windows edition, it should do much to tempt back some stray business users. The ribbon has finally appeared, making the suite more familiar to Windows users hopping over to the Mac (or, indeed, Mac users who find themselves periodically stranded on a PC at work). More to the point, though, the applications themselves launch so quickly. The glacial pace at which the Office 2008 apps launched on my year-old MacBook had been one of my biggest gripes and probably done more to push me towards Numbers and the excellent Bean (download it for free from bean-osx.com) than anything else.
And there’s the rub. Office 2011 is what Office 2008 should have been. In the intervening years, the range and choice of compatible rivals has grown exponentially. Microsoft has clearly noticed as much and it’s tagged Office 2011 at a fairly affordable price – certainly if you’re a home or student user and don’t want Outlook – but you’d have to make good use of a lot of the features that Word and Excel offer over the free and online equivalents to justify the not-insubstantial £89 to £239 (£75.74 to £203 ex VAT) asking price.
The frequency with which I’ve found myself writing opinions along these lines has increased in recent years. The need to pay for software while simultaneously not breaking the law or infringing copyright is diminishing by the day, but that’s not necessarily a good thing.
In a world where there’s no financial incentive to produce complex, involved suites like Office, iWork and CS5, the companies that produce them simply won’t. For a while, we’ll jog on with the free alternatives, but without a guiding hand overseeing the file formats and conventions that underpin a world in which we can create and share documents with reasonable certainty that they’ll be usable at the remote end, we’ll be taking an enormous step backwards.
Make no mistake: broad compatibility such as that offered by the .doc, .docx, .xls and .xlsx file formats is a luxury that’s all too easy to take for granted. Perhaps, then, when we’re next deciding whether or not to pay for commercial software when free alternatives will do the trick almost as well we should think of the greater good. That £89, £239 or however much you spend not only buys you an application bundle: it also buys compatible computing a future.
