top Office:Mac questions at Macworld Expo

I know, I know, Macworld Expo was last week, and I should have written this up earlier. I had every intent of taking a break on Thursday after my shift in the booth and my talk, but it just didn't end up happening that way. Forgive me: the show was awesome, and I'm only now recovered enough to be able to write complete sentences.

Now, on to the top Office:Mac questions that I fielded this week at Macworld Expo:

When is the next version of Office coming out? It's coming late this year, in time for your holiday shopping pleasure.

And what's it called? It's named Office for Mac 2011.

Office 2011? But I thought you said it's coming out this year ... Think of our naming kinda like how car models get named. If it comes out in the first half of the year, it gets labelled with that year; if it comes out in the second half of the year, then it gets labelled with the next year.

What's in it? We haven't announced all of the features in Office:Mac 2011 yet, but here's some of what we are sharing ...

  • Outlook is coming to the Mac.
  • Co-authoring allows you and your teammates to work on a file together.
  • You'll have access to the Office Web Applications from within Office:Mac 2011.
  • The Ribbon is coming to the Mac, in a fully native way.

Outlook on my Mac? Yes. We announced last year that we're bringing Outlook to your Mac, and we've added some details at Macworld Expo. Here's everything we're sharing so far about Outlook:

  • Outlook:Mac will support import data from your Outlook for Windows PST files.
  • In an Exchange environment, Outlook:Mac will support Information Rights Managed messages.
  • It will have a Cocoa user interface.
  • The database is file-based, thus supporting back-ups from Time Machine.
  • It connects to Exchange 2007 or later via Exchange Web Services.

When will you tell us more about Office 2011? Look for us to post more to our blog, Mac Mojo, in the upcoming months as we get closer to launch.

There's more details available in our press release, and there's a screenshot of Word 2011 in a blog post on Mac Mojo. Got more questions? Leave 'em in the comments!