Office 2011 for Mac is so bad that I have a Parallels install of Windows on most of my Macs, just to run Office 2013 in a Windows virtual machine. Yesterday afternoon, I caved.

The new version of the worldwide successful Microsoft Office suite is not only available to Microsoft Windows users (the 2010 edition), but also for to the Mac OS X users (the 2011 edition). So did Microsoft succeed to improve their office suite for Apple fans? Definitely yes! Why is Microsoft trying so much to bring a perfect version of its Microsoft Office Suite to Mac OS?

Well there is many answers to that. The market share of Apple computers is significant, in Europe is no longer negligible. Apple started working on their office suite iWork and its pricing policy is so aggressive that Microsoft cannot afford to do possum. Microsoft Office Documents are still worldwide standards. Although iWork does promise 100% compatibility, its not the case for complex documents.

If it should be possible to flawlessly work with Office documents across both platforms, Microsoft has to offer a reliable office suite also for Mac OS X users. Polished suite No edition of Microsoft Office for Mac was so anticipated as this one. Microsoft Office users were more than happy since they got the 'near perfect' 2010 edition, but Office for Mac 2008 was not so awesome. With the latest 2011 edition the tables are turning. The core of the Office for Mac suite is made up from well known application. The word processing program Word, spreadsheet database program Excel, PowerPoint for presentation and for e-mail communication a proper Outlook (no misshapen Entourage). Outlook is only available in the Home & Business edition.

The edition with just Excel,Word and PowerPoint is called Home & Student and it's meant for non-commercial use only. In short, the Mac OS version of Microsoft Office is pretty close to what we know from Windows platform. With the exception of Outlook, the buttons and other elements are pretty identical in both editions. Even complex documents created on one platform are flawlessly opened on the other and there are no problems with spreadsheets or presentations.

The compatibility is simply perfect. Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac vs. 2008 The new main features of Office for Mac 2010 are full integration with Office Web Apps, which offers the possibility of work on one document for more Office users and the support of new Office formats ( DOCX, XLSX, PPTX etc.) or a great multimedia gallery with a number of pre-designed templates. A preview feature, which will show the final look of the document for printing/publishing, a full-screen option of work in Word, support of VBA maker for Excel, creating of own functions and formulas and conditional formatting in Excel, or SmartArts and graphs in PowerPoint.

Word 2011 for Mac One of the most used word processor is really a success in the 2011 edition and allows you to easily create new documents from scratch or with the use of one of the pre-designed templates, which come as part of the installation and are saved on the hard disk. There is also option to get more templates from Internet with the help of the in-build search function.

Another great addition in Word 2011 is the toolbox, a floating panel, which offers quick access to styles, references or other document settings, such as the compatibility or customization for a certain version of Microsoft Word for either Windows or Mac. Another panel, called Media Browser, offers a quick look on multimedia files in the computer and an easy way to drag photographs, graphics, music or other files directly to the created document.