elmernag01: Improved Lion compatibility coming to Office, but not for a few months

Friday, July 29, 2011

Improved Lion compatibility coming to Office, but not for a few months

Microsoft's iconic productivity suite Office for Mac will gain support for new Lion features, including auto save and fullscreen mode, in an upcoming update. But don't get excited just yet, as those features won't be available for the next few months.

As we noted in our visual look at Lion, the main Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 applications—Word, Excel, and PowerPoint—ran for us as expected. Files opened without issue, and we experienced no obvious bugs in functionality. Most of the suite works fine under Lion and doesn't necessarily need anything to continue functioning as usual.

However, Microsoft's Pat Fox noted last week that Communicator, a corporate-only version of Windows Live Messenger, had a serious crashing bug. That bug is being addressed by a fix being pushed out in the next day or so, according to Fox, so corporate users should be back to messaging in no time.

The other major bug is that Outlook 2011 can't import e-mail from Lion's version of Mail. If you are installing Office 2011 new, you won't be able to use the import function. If you have already been using Outlook, though, this won't be an issue. Beyond those two bugs, Fox noted that there are some little nagging issues like windows that don't align as they did under Snow Leopard.

On Thursday of this week, Fox further explained that a future update for Office 2011 will also add support for new Lion features. That includes Lion's new file management features including auto save and versions, as well as window management like fullscreen mode and auto resume. Unfortunately, adding support will be "measured in months not days—just to set expectations."

Such a wait may be vexing for users who are becoming used to such features in Lion, especially given that developers have had access to the OS for several months. Still, large applications like Office take quite a bit of time and effort to add new features, not the least of which because Office uses gobs of custom UI code that must be tested to prevent regressions.

Smaller bugs will be addressed by regular updates, and Office 2008 will also benefit from such fixes. However, Office 2004 is dead in the water—it's a PowerPC app and Lion doesn't offer Rosetta compatibility.

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