[MacTUG] Microsoft Office and lion

[Edward Chrzanowski CSCF]

Microsoft spells out Office for Mac bugs in Lion
No word when, or if, Microsoft will support new Lion features, 
like Auto Save and Versions. The most serious of the bugs crashes 
Communicator when Office for Mac 2011 users try to send an instant 
message or start an audio or video call
By: gregg keizer
Computerworld (U.S.) (25 Jul 2011)

Microsoft Corp. last week confirmed that customers running Office 
for Mac will experience problems with the suite on Apple's new Lion 
operating system.

The most serious of the bugs crashes Communicator when Office for 
Mac 2011 users try to send an instant message or start an audio or video call.

Communicator is the corporate version of Microsoft's consumer-grade 
Messenger chat client -- it's available only to volume licensing customers -- 
and is also the software Mac users run to connect to Microsoft's enterprise 
communications server software, Lync 2010.

"We will fix this issue in an upcoming update to Communicator for Mac," 
said Pat Fox, senior director of product development with Microsoft's Mac 
group, in a company blog Friday.

Fox did not specify a timetable for the Communicator fix, but said later 
in the blog that users can expect updates "in the near future."

A second major bug may not affect most users either.

"On Lion, Outlook can't import mail from Apple Mail," Fox acknowledged. 
"We're reviewing this and don't yet have a plan to fix it."

According to a Microsoft support document , neither Outlook, 
which is included with Office for Mac 2011, or Entourage, the 
email client bundled with Office for Mac 2008, will reliably 
import messages from Mail.

This bug impacts users who install Office only after upgrading to Lion: 
Those who had earlier imported messages from Mail to Outlook or 
Entourage on, say, a Mac powered by Snow Leopard, won't be affected.

Outlook is not included with the lowest-priced Office for Mac 
edition, Home & Student.

Other Lion issues range from crashes in certain situations while running 
Excel or PowerPoint to a date format glitch in Word, said Microsoft 
in its support document.

Also, MSQuery, the tool that business users run to pull data into Excel 
from their corporate database, works only in English on Office for Mac 2011, 
and not at all in Office for Mac 2008.

And Office for Mac 2004 won't run on Lion at all.

That suite, released over a year-and-a-half before Apple switched to Intel, 
was written solely for PowerPC Macs. But with Lion, Apple has dropped support 
for Rosetta , the emulator that allowed programs compiled for the PowerPC to 
run on Intel processor-equipped Macs.

Although Office for Mac 2004 doesn't work on Lion, Microsoft will not retire 
the aged application suite until early next year: It has promised to support 
Office 2004 with security updates until January 10, 2012.

Like many third-party programs, Office for Mac 2011 and Office for Mac 2008 
also lack support for many of the Lion-specific features that Apple introduced 
with Mac OS X 10.7, such as Auto Save and Versions.

Fox said nothing about when, or even if, Microsoft would add support for those 
features and others to Office for Mac.

Microsoft did, however, try to head off critics who may wonder why the company 
wasn't able to address Office's issues by the time Apple shipped Lion. In the 
support document, the company said it had been working with Apple "from the 
early days of Mac OS 10.7," and claimed "many issues were addressed leading 
up to the Lion release."

Office for Mac 2011 comes in two retail editions -- Home & Student and Home & 
Business -- priced at $149.99 and $279.99, respectively, and is available from 
Microsoft directly or through sellers like Amazon.com.

Microsoft does not sell Office through Apple's Mac App Store.