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Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac

The entire suite gets a visual refresh with the new Ribbon interface and template gallery. All the apps in the package also gain new photo editing/retouching capabilities to speed up image work in your documents.After the launch of Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, it’s time to announce the latest edition, Alicia Trece onllyfansMicrosoft Office 2011. Enterprise and education customers were lucky enough to be using Office 2011 a few weeks early, but now Office 2011 is released to the general public. However, you will need at least Leopard 10.5.8 or above to run Office 2011.

You can purchase Microsoft Office 2011 now. One of the latest and greatest editions to the suite is the removal of Entourage and addition of Outlook. Outlook 2011 matches the Office 2010 Windows Edition. With Outlook 2011, more and more enterprise customers will be looking to use Macs in their environment instead of having to use the poorly coded Apple Mail or Microsoft Entourage.

Below are some of the latest improvements and additions:

  • The entire suite gets a visual refresh with the new Ribbon interface and template gallery. All the apps in the package also gain new photo editing/retouching capabilities to speed up image work in your documents.
  • On the cloud front, the Office 2011 license includes 25 GB of storage on Microsoft’s SkyDrive service, with the option to save your documents directly to SkyDrive or to corporate SharePoint installations for immediate shareability. Along with the online storage, the company has implemented lean versions of the entire suite as web apps — meaning you or your collaborators can make quick edits and changes on remote machines without even having Office installed. In Word or the other apps, you can leverage the sharing space to actually co-author a document; you and your collaborators can all edit inside the same file simultaneously, with section indicators showing where the other folk are hard at work. This was demoed at Microsoft’s launch event in NYC last night, and it’s going to be a great selling point for the suite; it’s also compatible with Office 2010 on Windows.
  • For macro-loving spreadsheet users, Excel (and the rest of the suite) are once again sporting full cross-platform support for Visual Basic scripting, allowing custom solutions built in VB to work once again. VB support was dropped in Office 2008 as the suite went Intel-native. Excel also improves performance on large datasets and adds Sparklines as a display format for quick visibility of data. According to members of the Office product team I spoke to last night, the Excel team worked hard to ensure cross-platform compatibility with Excel 2010 on the Windows side — going so far as to print copies of a screenshot of compatibility errors from Excel 2008 with a big ‘no’ symbol over it and put them up on office doors and cubicle walls as a reminder of the team’s goal.
  • Of course, Office 2010 says goodbye to Entourage and returns Outlook to the Mac, albeit with some strong Entourage-y streaks in its makeup. Outlook supports POP and IMAP accounts along with Exchange 2007 and higher; it includes a new unified inbox, new calendar viewing, coversation threading, .PST file import, a revamped and much more robust database structure (Time Machine-friendly for backups) and better performance than its purple predecessor. The new mail and PIM app is still working through some rough edges, although all the issues I mentioned to program manager Andy Ruff were already on his list to be fixed in the next update. Calendar sync to Sync Services isn’t included in this build; the development team wasn’t satisfied with how it worked in the code that was ported forward from Entourage, so they decided to rebuild it from the ground up, and it just wasn’t ready to roll when the current version was frozen. It’s expected to be available in an update soon.

What do you think of Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac?

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Weekly Apple Update 10/25/10

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Average Joe's Tips

Add Some Extra ‘Magic’ to Your Trackpad with BTT

Apple finally got the trackpad right when they made it glass, multi-touch, and entirely clickable; but it gets even magic-er with a little customization courtesy of Better Touch Tool.

Apple natively offers some (limited) customization of trackpad gestures, but the free application BetterTouchTool deserves credit for making the hardware as useful as it is. BTT allows you to assign commands to 50+ gestures – from ‘5 finger swipe down’ to ‘3 finger tip-tap left’ – and better yet, assign unique gestures to unique applications. BTT also implements the pretty useful ‘Snap’ feature found in Windows 7, used to view two windows side by side (which I find very useful when comparing or transcribing data).

My favorite implementation of BTT is in Chrome; where four finger swipes left and right move me between tabs and three finger swipes up and down create and close tabs. I also  use it to control Spaces (five finger tap to view all, ‘tip finger swipe’ to switch between) which allowed me to actually enjoy the benefits spaces without having to wait for OSX Lion. Other cool features are ‘Live View’; a window that shows you’re finger motions on a virtual trackpad and the command that is recognized (so you can practice your ‘tip-taps’ and ‘tip swipes’), and you can easily toggle BTT on and off from the taskbar in case you have to share your mac with your clumsy fingered roomate.

The trackpad has come quite a long way (and has definitely destroyed its portable-input-device competition) and while it may not yet be ideal for gaming, graphic design, and other involved processes, it adds significant value over the mouse in everyday tasks; like web, editing documents, and viewing media, and may even beat out the mouse and become the input method of choice for the everyday user. I mean IBM definitely never created a desktop version of their ThinkPad’s little red dot…

For more details head to the Better Touch Tool site, or if you’ve heard enough download it now.

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Top 10 Mac OS X 10.7 Rumors

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Ever since the announcement about the “Back to Mac” event, there have been rumors all around. Below are the top ten Mac OS X 10.7 rumors to date.
  1. FaceTime is not only for the iPhone 4, but also for the newest iPod touch. There are rumors that since the iPhone 4 and the iPod touch both have FaceTime, they will incorporate FaceTime into iChat in the new Mac OS X 10.7 Server. iChat is a built-in IM client that already has video calling, so FaceTime would make a great addition.
  2. Another rumor is that they will redesign the user interface. The new iTunes 10 has new graphical changes such as lack of color in the sidebar. Typically, the user interface of iTunes changes and the user interface of OS X also changes.
  3. One of the most common rumors is that the newest server will be named Mac OS X 10. 7 Lion. Apple sent out invites that read, “Back to Mac.” The invite also had a picture of Apple’s logo cut out of a sheet of metal and behind the cracks, there is a lion. The Lion most likely represents the big cat names they included with the OS X, such as Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
  4. Will Mac OS X 10.7 be spectacular? We will not know yet, but rumors out there say that Mac OS X 10.7 will include big changes because of the suspected “Lion” nickname. The Lion is the king of the jungle and can symbolize big changes coming to Mac OS X.
  5. Some might say that the new Mac OS X 10.7 will make it so there is multi-touch. Does that mean a touch screen like the iPhone 4, iPod touch, and iPad?
  6. The iOS App Store is such a great success. Will there be a Mac OS X App Store?
  7. Apple has already filed patents to incorporate iOS into Mac OS X in an iMac Touch and MacBook Touch. There are rumors that Dashboard will be replaced by an iOS layer.
  8. The upcoming Mac OS X may also have cloud computing and storage.
  9. The new Mac OS X 10.7 is likely to include NTFS support. The current Mac OS X can not support NTFS and relies on third party developers and the open source community to support NTFS.
  10. Last but not least, the Dock and Finder will probably be updated. There will probably be improvements and new features.

That concludes the top ten rumors. What do you think?

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Average Joe's Tips

How to: Download Free YouTube Videos in Safari

Don’t you want to watch your favorite YouTube videos on the go without having to wait for it to load the whole way? With a couple of easy steps and a few minutes you’ll have them on your iPhone in no time. The first step to this is launching Safari and opening up the YoutTube video that you want to download. Then (even if it is still loading) you go up to “Window” and scroll down to “Activity” and click on it. You will see a list of stuff that is helping to load the video, but the only one that you will need to click on is the largest file that should probably be in megabits you can select the file even if it is still loading, and to select the file press “alt” and left click. The video then will download into your “Downloads” and the last step is to drag bring it into iTunes. To do this you will need to download an application to convert the file to allow it to play on your iPhone or iPod. The application you will download is HandBrake. After you finish downloading HandBrake open it and select the “videoplayback” and click start. When the video is done converting name it and drag it into iTunes. The video should then be under “Movies” in iTunes and then after that just sync it up with your iPhone of iPod.