Office for Mac 2011 on Macbook Air

[Psyence]

Hi all,

I am about to purchase my FIRST ever Mac. I have zero issues with Windows based PC's other than notebooks have terrible battery life. This is the main and only reason at this time I'm looking at the Macbook Pro/Airs.

Anyways, the main use is for work, we use excel spreadsheets quite extensively and I wanted to know how Office for Mac 2011 ran on a fully loaded 2011 Macbook Air (Upgraded CPU and Memory)

Also I wanted to know from someone with first hand experience is there is anything that I may have issues with opening/editing/saving .xlsx files when using them between PC's and my new Mac? They were all created with Office 2007 for Windows.

Thanks all!

I'm excited to try the Mac, been curious for a while.

 

[Mello1me]

I got my MBA a few months ago 11in 2gb 64bg. Im using office for mac 11 and everything worked fine. I have not had any problems opening old documents either. BUT office for mac is a little different than the windows version, it will a take a little time to get used to but it is worth it.

 

[Beaverman3001]

I don't understand what you people think the MBA is, do you guys think this thing is a 386 from 20 years ago? Yes for christ sake it will run office just fine (no offense to the poster, just a lot of questions about simple things, yes your 1k$+ laptop will open a excel spreadsheet).

 

[bmat]

I use it all the time.

My problem is that word 11 isn't all that stable. And it is not my Air, it is on my Mac Pro as well. If you are a heavy editor with lots of styles and track changes you can get crashes. And that is with all the updates.

 

[Psyence]

I don't understand what you people think the MBA is, do you guys think this thing is a 386 from 20 years ago? Yes for christ sake it will run office just fine (no offense to the poster, just a lot of questions about simple things, yes your 1k$+ laptop will open a excel spreadsheet).

I was pretty sure it would run, my main concern is that I wont have any issues opening/editting/viewing excel files without losing functionality of formulas, etc...

 

[2IS]

You won't have a problem. I'm in the exact same boat you're in. Mainly a PC guy but got an air for it's excellent portability and battery life. I also wanted to try something new. I've got Office 2011 on it and have not had an issue opening documents created in the Windows versions.

 

[Psyence]

You won't have a problem. I'm in the exact same boat you're in. Mainly a PC guy but got an air for it's excellent portability and battery life. I also wanted to try something new. I've got Office 2011 on it and have not had an issue opening documents created in the Windows versions.

Thanks for the reply. I was wondering do you have the baseline MBA? Or did you upgrade the ram/cpu?

Thanks again.

 

[christophermdia]

I use Office 11 for Mac everyday....no compatibility issues. Even better is the fact that excel now has VBA thus able to open up macros. I do run Parallels with a copy of Office 12 on it just in case there is any issue I may run into but that has so far proven worthless over the last few years. You can save as .xls files instead of .xlsx and make that the default. I run this on a loaded 13" MBA.

 

[2IS]

Thanks for the reply. I was wondering do you have the baseline MBA? Or did you upgrade the ram/cpu?

Thanks again.

I've got a 13" with the base 1.86GHz processor, base 128GB SSD but I upped the ram to 4GB

 

[namtaB]

I had this concern as well going from PC user for years to a MAC user and wondering how the Office thing would work. I have not had a problem yet with Office 2011 on the Mac. You should be ok.

 

[Psyence]

I've got a 13" with the base 1.86GHz processor, base 128GB SSD but I upped the ram to 4GB

Great, that is what I was planning on doing to save $100.

Thanks for your help, have a great night!

 

[BornAgainMac]

Worst case you can run Parallels and use the Coherence mode with Office 2010 for Windows.

 

[alan111]

I use office 2011 also and have no issues with compatibly between this and my pc. Everything works fine. Try RDP on the MAC - it works phenomenally well.

 

[2IS]

RDP on mac is actually one aspect I was disappointed with. It works and performs well but in full screen, the resolution does not scale to actually take up the entire screen on my MBA.

 

[alan111]

RDP on mac is actually one aspect I was disappointed with. It works and performs well but in full screen, the resolution does not scale to actually take up the entire screen on my MBA.

that does not sound right. Press command+2. that should put you in full screen mode. It works for me, in full 1440x900 pixels (13" mba)

 

[2IS]

that does not sound right. Press command+2. that should put you in full screen mode. It works for me, in full 1440x900 pixels (13" mba)

No dice. Connecting to a 2008 Server and i have black bars on the left and right.

 

[jinxednuance]

I don't understand what you people think the MBA is, do you guys think this thing is a 386 from 20 years ago? Yes for christ sake it will run office just fine (no offense to the poster, just a lot of questions about simple things, yes your 1k$+ laptop will open a excel spreadsheet).

You know, instead of saying "no offence" you could have NOT SAID ANYTHING AT ALL.

It's like "YOU SUCK, BUT I'M SORRY".

The guy is having his FIRST experience with a Mac, so show some compassion. Ignorance has no limits with kids!

 

[2IS]

Well, he's kind of right actually. People see a lot of new laptops shipping with i3/i5/i7 then they see the MBA with a C2D and panic sets in as if for whatever reason, a C2D is going to have trouble running office apps that a much older Pentium 4 can and still do easily enough.

 

[Windowsrefugee]

Love the MBA, not so sure about Office for Mac 2011

I got my fully loaded MBA and ACD 4 months ago and LOVE IT. It is my only machine and it does everything I need (web, PDF, create & edit Power Point and Word documents). BUT, the MS Office is a headache. Outlook 2011 for the Mac does not synch well with anything, including Outlook for PC. Much more of a problem is that when I open and edit a 100-500 page Word document (<100MB on the disk), over a few hours, it continually balloons and swells up to 2GB of system memory for Word + more than 1-1.5G of "active memory" (I have 4GB) and ultimately crashes, losing some of my most recent work. This has happened on a number of documents, even smaller ones. I have spoken at length to Apple and Microsoft but I have gotten no satisfactory diagnosis or treatment for the problem. Microsoft just suggested that I turn off all of their useful features, like track changes, spell check, auto save, etc. I have worked on similar size documents in Windows on my PC and never had this problem. So, overall, the MBA has handled anything I can throw at it EXCEPT editing larger Word documents.

Any idea of what is going on here?

 

[uwetodd]

I don't understand what you people think the MBA is, do you guys think this thing is a 386 from 20 years ago? Yes for christ sake it will run office just fine (no offense to the poster, just a lot of questions about simple things, yes your 1k$+ laptop will open a excel spreadsheet).

Although I agree with you that many of these questions seem redundant/trivial, we were all green at some point or other.

I never started a thread, but perhaps MR could save face and institute a "Has your question/post already been answered on MRoogle" pop up window or something.

 

[frozen]

I got my fully loaded MBA and ACD 4 months ago and LOVE IT. It is my only machine and it does everything I need (web, PDF, create & edit Power Point and Word documents). BUT, the MS Office is a headache. Outlook 2011 for the Mac does not synch well with anything, including Outlook for PC. Much more of a problem is that when I open and edit a 100-500 page Word document (<100MB on the disk), over a few hours, it continually balloons and swells up to 2GB of system memory for Word + more than 1-1.5G of "active memory" (I have 4GB) and ultimately crashes, losing some of my most recent work. This has happened on a number of documents, even smaller ones. I have spoken at length to Apple and Microsoft but I have gotten no satisfactory diagnosis or treatment for the problem. Microsoft just suggested that I turn off all of their useful features, like track changes, spell check, auto save, etc. I have worked on similar size documents in Windows on my PC and never had this problem. So, overall, the MBA has handled anything I can throw at it EXCEPT editing larger Word documents.

Any idea of what is going on here?

Hmm... Frustrating, I have been contemplating buying a loaded MBA11 but if you are right, well, then MBA11 is not a computer for me. I have had several problems with word 2008 (https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/502753/). The issue was only solved in word 2011 so when working in word 2008 I turned off spell check and grammar check. Anyhow, the problem is MS rather than Apple's, right? And MS was not too fast to fix this bug in word 2008, actually they never did.

So, does this only happen in MBA? Have you tried to work on your document in an MB or MBP? My document which made word 2008 crash is now 1,3MB, but works fine on MBP with word 2011.

Do you believe your document to be corrupted, i.e. can you work on it in word 2008?

 

[ZipZap]

Download the free 30 day trial and try it for your self. There is an uninstaller that comes with it if you change your mind.

 

[Cheffy Dave]

Funny you should ask, just yesterday I was at the Apple Store in Tampa, looking at the MBP and MBA, both 11" and 13"
In the MBP upon clicking on the Office Icon, I had to wait about four bounces for it to begin to open, where as in the two MBA's in minimal configuration,base processors, 2 Gigs of RAM, Both opened within in seconds, and were ready for use.
To say I was stunned was an understatement. These are wicked fast machines, so pumping up the processor and Ram can only mean amazingly incredible machines, made even better. IMPRESSIVE!

 

[MacAlpha]

I use it all the time.

My problem is that word 11 isn't all that stable. And it is not my Air, it is on my Mac Pro as well. If you are a heavy editor with lots of styles and track changes you can get crashes. And that is with all the updates.

Did you have a the old version of office installed before you switched to 2011? I have found Word 2011 quite stable with only a few crashes (it is amazing what we learn to accept from MS). I installed 2011 directly onto a completely new, unboxed machine. I am heavy user (lawyer, so word is the most used program on my 11" MBA). Not a lot of graphics in files, but I deal with files, with lots of cross, referencing and section styles, track changes, and moving files back and forth through various versions of Word.

A colleague of mine was having many more crashes with Word than I had. He had Office 2008 on his 13" MBA before he installed Office 2011. He has recently done a completely clean install from the OS up to see if that would help. As you can guess, I place a premium on having a word processor that doesn't crash.

Just curious if you had 2008 on your computer at one time too as we are struggling to isolate the differences in our experiences given that we often end up working on a lot of the same documents.

 

[Angra-mainju]

honestly office for mac 2011 is ****. anybody knows if it is possible somehow to fix the smooth scrolling?