Customer Reviews

Office Mac Home and Business 2011 - 2 License Pack

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Pros:
- Nice templates and some very nice time saving new features and excellent functionality (tables, themes etc.)
- Ribbon (I like the ribbon - contrary to many)
- Word is a pretty good product - but, its has several incompatibilities with Word 2010 (PC) and Office 365 versions. Its the only part of the suite that I still use daily.
- PowerPoint has caught up (sort of) with many of Keynote's features
- Excel seems to be compatible with colleagues using Excel 2010 (but I am not a big Excel user)
- Outlook runs and feels like Outlook 2003 - after a month of early use, I moved back to Apple Calendar (now using BusyCal) and Mail (now use Postbox). BTW, the service pack update #1 was a disaster for Outlook users, I am glad that I had abandoned Outlook by that time.
Cons:
- You need well above the minimum hardware requirements to run PowerPoint!
- PowerPoint is VERY glitchy and crashes frequently - I do presentations and meeting facilitation for a living and have been forced to move over to Keynote. While I love the new features in PPT, especially the animation, presenter view and video functions, its basically unusable due to stability problems (with very significant stuttering issues and voice-video synchronization issues when playing video - some are hardware related, some are MS bugs).
- Multiple crashes can occur - By crash, I mean black screen and full reboot of either your MacBook or MacPro (this is a very frequent error on both machines). PPT will crash even in the simplest of scenarios (note taking during a meeting using notebook screen and projector).
- Interestingly, these same videos never crash when using PPT 2008 (I resintalled 2008 and checked playback, no problems! - but PPT 2008 is a very poor cousin to Keynote) + when doing simple note taking for a group using PPT 2008, there are no problems. Its definitely PPT 2011 - my Mac Pro is state of the art (desktop) and I shouldn't be having these problems.
- My colleagues and clients using this suite on a Mac report the same issues with PowerPoint
- Several PPt incompatibilities with colleagues using PPT 2010 (when swapping files with our colleagues on PCs)
- Word is incompatible with Dragon software (I use Dragon now only in Pages). Too bad, but its a big bug and the fix lies with MS it appears.
- The support by MS is simply not there to fix major bugs - all you really get are some security updates and better compatibility with SkyDrive. Its as if they supported the 1st year of the Suite, but their team is now focused solely on the rumoured 2014 suite for Mac.

If I had to do it all over again, I think I probably would have skipped the the purchase of the business suite, concentrated on learning Keynote in depth and only purchased Word and Excel (I am not even sure if they are available as stand-alone packages). At the very least, I never would have installed PowerPoint or Outlook. The hours I put in to try an figure out what was happening, and the enormous frustation of having an unreliable PowerPoint product, and issues with Outlook from the beginning, killed any good feelings about this suite. It was such a bad experience that I am doubtful I will purchase additional Office products for the Mac in the future.

Installed software fine but my templates are french and I need them to be English? Everything else is English. Good price compared to other sources checked out.

I needed Office to transfer all files from PC to Mac.
Very easy to install since I had the trial version - I only entered the valid code.

This software is a 2 license pack, but unlike the Home & Student Family Pack (which gives 3 licenses for THREE USERS within a household to use on THREE computers) this version gives ONE product key for the use of ONE user on TWO Macs (i.e. a desktop Mac and a laptop Mac). If you intend to get TWO licenses for TWO users, this package will not meet your needs. Better to buy two Single License packs.