for the love of my Mac
I sometimes get questions from users, asking why we have Mac-only features in Office:Mac. Mac-only features are important to us. We're Mac users ourselves, so plugging into some of the technologies that make the Mac platform great is something that we want to do both for ourselves and for our users. They don't impact our file format at all. We want to be a great office suite and a great Mac citizen.
We have a lot in common with our Windows Office counterparts. We're trying to solve many of the same problems. But our users are different. Mac users have different expectations for interacting with software. To be a good Mac citizen, we honour those differences. Windows applications don't use Preferences, for example. (This always trips me up when I have to use a Windows computer!) We do a lot of research to ensure that what we provide is relevant to our Mac users, which means that there is some divergence between Windows Office and Mac Office.
Creating applications that are cross-platform poses some interesting challenges, most of which aren't obvious to the end-user. We take advantage of the technologies that are part of the Mac platform. Some of these are deeply integrated into OS X, such as Core Graphics. Not supporting these technologies would make for a pretty horrible user experience -- performance would suffer, and the pixels that we paint on your screen wouldn't look as good.
Spotlight and AppleScript are two more great examples of OS X technologies that we support. You can search all of your Office documents via the system Spotlight search. We had to do a lot of work to enable Spotlight searching in Entourage 2004, but this feature is one that is much appreciated by our Tiger users. We provide lots of AppleScript support across the suite, and have done so for several releases. The breadth and depth of third-party AppleScript solutions is almost beyond belief. I'm beginning to think that there isn't anything that a great AppleScripter can't do. It's just amazing.
We have new Mac-only features coming in Office 2008. We've improved our AppleScript support. As those of you who came by our booth at Macworld Expo earlier this year know, we're building on this AppleScript support to provide Automator actions. You'll be able to automate tasks that use all Office apps, as well as any other application that has Automator actions. We're going to build in some Automator workflows so that you can get an idea of what's possible. As with AppleScript, though, there's plenty of room for you to build all sorts of new workflows. I can't wait to see what they come up with using Automator.
Tomorrow, I'll post something over in Mac Mojo about the divergence of the Office:Mac user interface and the Windows Office user interface. I hope you enjoy it!
Comments
Anonymous
September 17, 2007
Agreed, in that scope I do support Mac only features. Thanks for the info, finally the MacBU is talking about the product... makes the pain a bit more bearable. BTW I followed your advise and talked to some friends at MS got a link and filled a survey... now I am waiting for a reply.Anonymous
September 22, 2007
You're right, the end-user doesn't care about the technical hurdles. They just want the product to work.