Microsoft Office - page 11

The worst thing about having a MacBook Pro with Retina display is having to constantly use apps that don’t support retina display. It’s like looking at a computer screen covered in vaseline. Most apps have already added retina display support, while others have been slower.

Microsoft Office has been in that “slower” category, which has forced users to use some trickery to get Office to display properly on a retina display. Thankfully, users won’t have to jump through hoops any longer as Microsoft just announced that Office for Mac 2011 now supports Retina display for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook.

I like the Apple Store as much as any Apple fan, but I wouldn’t want to live and work there.

You can’t say the same thing for David Wu, though. “Call me mad. Call me crazy. But I woke up one day around three months or more ago and decided to completely renovate my home study.”

So what’d he do? He made his home office a virtual recreation of an Apple Store, not only including a replica of Apple’s distinctive Fetzer Wooden Maple desks (with working drawers), a replica Apple Store sign with built-in, Apple TV-driven LED display and even a couple shelves full of boxed Apple products.

I’ll go ahead and call David Wu crazy. Here’s to the crazy ones. Read more about how he did it at his blog. More pictures of David’s sick set-up below, but make sure to go to Wu’s personal site for the rest.

The iPhone has been an incredible success for Apple. So much more of a success than we all predicted when it was unveiled back in 2007. It’s the hottest smartphone on the planet, and at five years old, it’s now bigger than Microsoft’s entire business put together. With $22.7 billion in sales last quarter, the smartphone outsold everything Apple’s biggest rival has to offer.

Microsoft Office 2011 looks awful on the new MacBook Pro’s Retina display. But unfortunately for its customers, it seems Microsoft has no plans to add high-resolution graphics. While Outlook 2011 does have Retina graphics, the company has confirmed that the rest of the suite will have “the same viewing quality as on any non-Retina device.”

Jumsoft has announced its first pack of Word for Mac templates. Named the Inspiration Set for Word, the pack contains 169 templates for almost any document or project from business stationary to canning jar labels – of them beautifully designed by Jumsoft’s team of professional graphic designers.

Jumsoft has made a name for itself with a range of template collections for iWork and other Apple apps including a collection of templates/themes for iBooks Author and two collections for spicing up emails composed using OS X’s Mail app. The company has also produced two packs of clipart that can be used in virtually application.

Microsoft announced Office 2013 earlier this week and issued a consumer preview of the software to users running Windows 7 or Windows 8. If you were wondering why there was no preview for Mac OS X, it’s because Office 2013 isn’t coming to the Mac. Microsoft will, however, be adding SkyDrive integration to Office 2011. Great.

Much of the discussion about the iPhone and iPad in business focuses on larger enterprise companies and organizations. While the devices are clearly have a lot to offer in the big business arena, the iPhone and iPad are also excellent tools for smaller companies. The versatility of iOS devices, the iPad in particular, lets small business owners perform many crucial tasks like tracking expenses, generating invoices, and planning new projects quickly and easily from a single device.

The App Store is full of apps that can help launch, manage, and grow a business of any size. Many business apps useful to small business are fairly well-known. Square’s mobile payment system (and PayPal’s competing solutions) get a fair amount of coverage in mainstream and tech media stories, for example. There are, however, many great apps for small business users in the App Store that don’t get that kind of publicity.

If you’re a small business owner (or employee), here are ten amazing apps that you may not know about which can help you run your business more easily and efficiently.

CloudOn is one of the more interesting options for working with Office documents on the iPad. The company offers a cloud-based version of the core Microsoft Office apps plus Adobe Reader. Unlike a virtual desktop solution, CloudOn provides just the applications and not a full Windows desktop. When it comes to creating and editing documents, CloudOn’s app relies on popular cloud storage options: Box, Dropbox, and Google Drive.

As a startup, CloudOn has seen strong growth since it launched its service earlier this year. The company announced a new round of funding this week ($16 million) and used the opportunity to tease users with details of its upcoming plans, most notably support for group editing and collaboration as well as expansion beyond the iPad and Android tablets. 

There are a lot of iOS users who are waiting patiently for Microsoft’s Office productivity suite to finally make its App Store debut. Although Microsoft is maintaining its silence on the subject, recent reports have claimed that Office for iOS will arrive this year. Some developers have taken advantage of that speculation and begun making their own “Office” products.

No, I don’t mean the genuine productivity suites that have been available for some time — many of which are very good. I mean the knockoff apps that try their hardest to look like Microsoft’s own Office products just to trick you into handing over your cash. The latest is called “Microsoft Word 2012” by Super Racing Real Games.

Google shook up the mobile business landscape by announcing its acquisition of mobile office powerhouse Quickoffice. That move might not seem terribly large, but it creates a very different and unexpected dynamic in the business mobility world. It also sets up a showdown over business capabilities that could have lasting ramifications.

Why is this move significant? It means that every company that produces a major mobile platform now also owns a serious office and productivity solution. Microsoft has Office, Apple has iWork, RIM has Documents To Go (which it acquired nearly two years ago), and Google now has Quickoffice as well as Google Docs. Each company can now ensure that its mobile business customers will have at least one solid option for working with Office files on their smartphones or tablets.

Many of you will have read the above headline and thought “Meh. Whatever.” And yet here you are, still reading. Well, if you got this far, here’s the reward. Office2 HD, the MS Office-compatible suite for the iPad, has just gotten support for Track Changes and comments. This is big because there is no other software on the iPad that does this. Not even Apple’s own Pages.

Echoing a report from last week, the The Daily has followed up its original scoop by saying that Microsoft will launch Office for iPad on November 10th, 2012. The Daily originally leaked images of the iPad app, but Microsoft denied the report by saying that it was “based on inaccurate rumors and speculation.”

Today The Daily gives a specific launch date for Office on the iPad. According to the report, the app is in the “hands of a usability team” at Microsoft and will be submitted to the App Store soon.

One of the hallmarks of Google Docs (and now Google Drive) is that you can use it anywhere. Within reason, any device with a modern web browser can deliver some level of viewing, editing, and collaboration. On iOS devices, however, native Office-style apps like Quickoffice tend to deliver a somewhat better user experience and are capable of opening, editing, and syncing documents with your Google.

There’s a clear value for such capability on an iOS device in that most apps deliver a better experience than Google Docs running in mobile Safari. Is there a similar need on the desktop? Would a native app a better solution than using Chrome or Safari on your Mac? According to Mac/iOS developer Tricky Duck, the answer is yes.

Following an earlier report from The Daily that Microsoft was working on an iPad version of its Office suite, a new report today claims that Microsoft will launch Office for iPad in November of 2012.

One of the standout features of Apple’s iWork suite is how easy it is to make really standout documents and presentations. Compared to the basic and often drab files that Word, Excel, and PowerPoint produce, iWork-created files look bright, polished, and offer a sense of personality and style. While Office for Mac comes with a set of templates and design functions, they seem bland next to iWork and they aren’t anywhere near as easy to use.

Only Microsoft has the ability to make its tools less clunky and more intuitive, but other companies can spice things up with additional themes and templates. This week Theme Inn took up that challenge and succeeded rather spectacularly.

There are plenty of iOS apps that deliver the core functions of Microsoft Office – Apple’s iWork, Quickoffice, Documents 2 Go, and Office2 being the most common selections. There are, however, gaps in what all these products deliver.

From a business and collaboration standpoint, the biggest missing features are integration with Microsoft’s Track Changes feature and the ability to access Sharepoint. While there hasn’t been any progress on the Track Changes front (OnLive Desktop and CloudOn are still the only real options), there are options for Sharepoint – the most recent being harmon.ie Mobile.

Yesterday, in a somewhat surprising announcement, Microsoft and Barnes & Noble agreed to a deal that resolved their ongoing patent dispute, spun off the bookstore’s Nook business as a subsidiary into which Microsoft invested $300 million, and ensured that a Nook app will be available for Windows 8 when it launches later this year.

Although rumors have been floating around for months that Barnes & Noble was planning to spin of the Nook as a separate company or subsidiary, Microsoft’s involvement came as a surprise – one that raises interesting questions about what the two companies have in mind for their new joint business.

Last week, Microsoft pulled its Service Pack 2 update for Office for Mac 2011. As we reported earlier in the week, the update could result in the corruption of the Office database and issues with Office identity files could make resolving the problem difficult. After initially posting advice about the update and its potential problems, Microsoft pulled it from the company’s update servers.

Microsoft has now re-released the update. In addition to not creating the problems that plagued the original update, the new version will also correct problems for users that had downloaded the initial.

The entire situation illustrates why most tech companies, including Apple, advise business customers to wait before rolling out any new updates.

Late last week, Microsoft pulled the Service Pack 2 update to Office for Mac 2011 from its upgrade servers after users complained that the update created problems with the Outlook email and calendar application. The move also coincided with reports that Office vulnerabilities could lead to additional malware infection risks.

Microsoft had released the update the previous week (April 12). After initial reports that users were getting an error messages related to Office 2011 database, the company posted advice for users to follow before attempting to install the update and a work around for some of the problems that users experienced. A few days lated Microsoft pulled the update completely.

Recosoft announced today the latest version of its PDF2Office Professional tool. The software, which allows users to convert PDF files into Microsoft Office documents while maintaining the layout and formatting or the original non-editable file.

PDF2Office Professional is one of several file conversion tools that the company offers. The lineup also includes tools for converting PDF files into iWork documents or Adobe In Design files as well as a tool for converting In Design projects into Office documents.

Quickoffice announced its new cloud service known as Connect at the end of last month. The service is designed to sync Microsoft Office documents between your iOS devices, Android devices, Macs, and PCs. It’s an extension to the Quickoffice apps for iOS and other mobile platforms that offer the ability to create, edit, and view Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files on the go.

Connect by Quickoffice is now available from the App Store and it’s a very slick app and a great addition for any iOS user or mobile professional.

With the Flashback trojan now threatened by extinction thanks to Apple’s new removal tool, it’s time to turn our attention to another threat. A vulnerability in Microsoft Office is allowing the “Backdoor.OSX.SabPub.a” trojan to infect systems running Mac OS X and use a Java exploit to avoid detection from anti-malware products

Once on your system, the trojan can feed back screenshots of your system and execute commands.

It seems that every week for the past few months, there’s been at least one or two announcements of app developers, cloud service providers, and mobile management vendors developing strategic partnerships to create or integrate their products into a single unified workflow.

Box’s OneCloud initiative, in which the storage provider teamed up with more than two dozen app developers to create seamless workflows for several different business and productivity tasks, is probably the biggest example of this trend. Others include Quickoffice launching its own cloud service as well as integrating with Accellion’s kitedrive, LogMeIn’s new Cubby service, and CloudOn’s virtualized version of Microsoft Office that integrates with Box and Dropbox for storage.

Quickoffice Pro HD is one of the App Store’s best third-party office suites, and until Microsoft Office hits the iPad, it’s the best way to view and edit Word and Excel documents on the go. Its latest update adds Powerpoint editing to that, in addition to native email support, an enhanced visual interface, and more.

Today CloudOn released the first major update to its cloud-based Microsoft Office solution. Like OnLive Desktop, which recently made changes to comply with Microsoft’s Windows licensing model, CloudOn delivers virtual copies of Windows versions the three core Office tools. Unlike OnLive, however, CloudOn doesn’t provide a virtual Windows desktop and the company doesn’t provide its own cloud storage for user documents.

Instead, CloudOn integrates with Box and Dropbox to provide document storage and sharing. The interface of the company’s iPad app provides a simple launcher and file browser. When one of the Office apps (or the newly added Adobe Reader app and File Viewer) is launched a virtual instance of that app is provided from the CloudOn servers.