As the name suggests, and as Pages users will recognise, this put focus solely on the pages youre currently editing, blacking out the background (by default; other colours are available) and auto-hiding the toolbar at the top of the screen.
Microsoft Office 2011 Oem Full Salvo Aimed
If iWork 09 was a shot across the bows of Office for Mac 2008, Office for Mac 2011 is a full salvo aimed right at the waterline of the USS iWork 09.
Its almost hard to believe just how much improvement Microsoft has made with the latest version of Office, bearing in mind that the previous version was a massive step forwards in and of itself.
Others are as significant as the finally realised dream of many an Office for Mac user: the death of Entourage and its replacement with a Mac version of Outlook.
Big and small alike, these changes all combine to create what is without a doubt the slickest version of Office weve ever had the pleasure of using.
Not only are there numerous improvements imported from Office 2010, but there are even some Mac-exclusive enhancements, not to mention some excellent integration with not only OS X itself but also a number of Apples own applications that give Office for Mac 2011 an appeal thats hard to resist.
Those able to get along without an extra email client on their Macs can grab Home and Student for 89.99 with Home and Business adding Outlook for a heftier 189.99.
Home and Student, and Home and Business also come in two-user and three-user versions, priced at 109.99 and 239.99 respectively.
So just whats so fantastic about this latest version of Office The following pages are the place to find out.
In a concession to the knowledge that some users cant or wont adjust to what is, to put it bluntly, a much easier and faster way of working with your documents, this can be turned off.
Left enabled as intended, however, the Ribbon does every bit as good a job of giving quick easy and context-sensitive access to the tools youre likely to need at any given moment.
The Ribbon also makes for an improved feeling of consistency across all the Office applications.
Whether youre in Word, Excel or PowerPoint youll find the options relating to inserting and formatting charts logically placed under the Charts tab, for example.
Its worth mentioning, too, that the Ribbons appearance of Office for Mac makes life easier if you transition between Windows and OS X frequently (as some of us blasphemously do).
Shown on start-up by default (but not if you tell it not to) this gives you not only a huge range of build-in template options, from calendars, to invoices, to curriculums vitae, but also provides an online portal where user-submitted templates can be found.
Some of these are very impressive; even this early into the suites lifetime (thanks to the prolonged Beta period no doubt).
If youve used iWork this will seem oddly familiar, but were not going to complain when Microsoft choses to take inspiration from good features of rival products.
On the subject of galleries, Office for Mac 2011 features a much improved media browser, which integrates much more fully with other OS X, most notably with iLife.
As well as browsing using folders, as previously, its now also possible to import media using Places, Faces and other tags provided by Apples applications.
These are pretty much limited to rotating, resizing and adjusting the colour cast of your pictures, but it should mean you wont have to jump into a dedicated program to tweak your photos quite as often, which is a useful time saver.
Nonetheless, applications definitely open faster and Excel in particular benefits from some much faster complex mathematical calculation speeds.
Unlike rivals, such as Google Docs, these online versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint arent intended to serve as full-fledged online alternatives to Microsofts desktop suite, but rather as a complement; while documents retain formatting applied on the desktop, there are fewer editing options on the web versions.
Sticking with the web theme is perhaps a more important addition to Office for Mac 2011: comprehensive web-based collaboration features.
Using either a SharePoint server, if your business has one, or simply a Live account and Microsofts SkyDrive, its possible to have multiple authors work on the same document at the same time.
Microsoft Office 2011 Oem Full Screen View
An interesting addition to Word pinched straight out of the Pages handbook is the Full Screen view.