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• Purchase Ms Office 2011 For Mac

Microsoft Office 2016 for the Mac is the kind of upgrade I hope for but rarely get. It took five years from Office 2011's release to get this latest Mac office suite, but it was well worth the wait.

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Collaborate for free with online versions of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote. Save documents, spreadsheets, and presentations online, in OneDrive. Jun 03, 2011  A friend has switched to Mac and does not need his Windows version of Office 2010 Home & Business. He has the full package (COA, product key, DVD and receipt from Comet). Can I buy Office 2010 second hand? A friend has switched to Mac and does not need his Windows version of Office 2010 Home & Business. He has the full package.

After the report of pirated / illegal Microsoft Office from an Amazon retailer (and Amazon’s initial refusal to act) how can you protect yourself from a similar problem on Amazon or other sites?

Your entitlement to a refund or redress for a illegal product is different depending on whether you buy from Amazon itself or a third-party seller working with Amazon.

Protect yourself

Only buy from reputable retailers. Use outlets that have a good online reputation and have been trading for some time. Ebay and Amazon merchants show their star rating, customer feedback and how long they have been operating on that site.

Microsoft wants people to buy direct from their web site but that’s not a smart move. The Microsoft Store charges the highest price for their products. You don’t get anything better or faster buying direct from Microsoft, just less money in your pocket.

Most retailers sell the main Office products at a discount from the Microsoft Store price. As we type this Amazon US is selling a year of Office 365 Home for $85 instead of Microsoft’s $100 for the same thing. That 10-15% discount is typical.

Microsoft Office Business For Mac

Amazon not only sells products directly, there’s also an option for other sellers to offer the same product. You pay Amazon, but the other company supplies the goods. That company is responsible for any complaint, refund or warranty dispute – not Amazon.

It’s not always clear that Amazon isn’t suppling the goods. Just because the product is being sold on a ‘main’ product page doesn’t mean it’s coming from Amazon themselves. This Office 2013 Professional is sold by another company with the keycard shipped from an Amazon warehouse.

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There’s a line on the page ‘Sold by …. and fulfilled by Amazon’. The retailer has sent their goods in bulk to Amazon’s warehouse for shipping to individual customers (‘fulfilled by Amazon’).

On the right column is a link to ‘Other sellers’. If you choose one of these retailers, check their overall rating and number of ratings. Rating over 95% over a year should be OK.

Avoid third-party sellers

For software like Microsoft Office, we generally avoid third-party sellers on Amazon or Ebay. Mostly because of concerns about pirated software but also because the price saving isn’t that great.

Usually the Amazon direct price for Office bundles is pretty good so we don’t need to use third-party alternatives. Amazon’s direct MS Office prices are usually among the cheapest around anyway.

It’s a different story for older versions of Office which sometimes are only available from smaller retailers. Microsoft and major stores focus on the latest version of Office and Windows.

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The Microsoft Office suites: Office for Windows, Office for Mac, and Office for iPad provide the greatest level of compatibility between any disparate suites, but there can never be complete compatibility between different apps, except for the most trivial of apps. And, like them or hate them, no one can ever call the Office apps “‘trivial”.

Comparing the feature set of these three suites, I think everyone can agree that Office for Windows is on top, Office for iPad is at the bottom, with Office for Mac squarely in the middle. (See a detailed comparison here.)

Win Office > Mac Office > iPad Office

Don’t get me wrong – I have all three suites, and I use and like them all, but that doesn’t mean I am blind to their differences. (And that doesn’t mean I have given Microsoft a boatload of cash — I got all three suites as part of my $100/year Office 365 subscription — a bargain at twice the price, IMHO.)

A Windows user has only one choice: Office for Windows. Similarly, an iPad user can only choose iPad Office. But a Mac user can choose to run Office for Mac natively or Office for Windows in Parallels Desktop in a Windows virtual machine. Which one to choose? Any performance or usability differences? What about feature differences?

First, let’s dispel any talk of performance differences. Macs today have an over-abundance of processing power and Parallels Desktop for Mac runs so efficiently that there is no perceptible performance difference between Office for Mac running natively and Office for Windows running in a virtual machine. Perhaps, with a stopwatch and a really quick trigger finger you could measure some sub-second differences, but you would never notice these differences in actual use.

Usability differences between these two suites have gone by the wayside in the 2016 suites, with MacOffice largely adopting the WinOffice user interface (UI), and losing most of its unique Mac UI advantages that made it so distinctive in past years.

Office suite on Mac

So, what about feature differences, since as stated above Win Office > Mac Office. What does a Mac user lose if they pick MacOffice over WinOffice to use on their Mac? There are a bunch, and here is a list, which I have divided into major and minor differences:

Major differences:

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• Ink

There have been several truly important additions to Office in the last five or six years — Office Open XML-based document file formats, the Ribbon, and SmartArt, to name a few — and these have appeared in both WinOffice and MacOffice. The latest important addition to Office, however, is only in WinOffice, and that is Ink. Ink is the ability to annotate or add content to an Office document with a stylus or finger on a touch screen in an extraordinarily natural way. There is no stylus or touch screen on the Mac, so naturally Microsoft has not brought Ink to MacOffice.

Buying Ms Office Online

But, if there is no stylus or touch screen on the Mac, how does WinOffice in a virtual machine provide any differences? Parallels Desktop 12 for Mac, when running WinOffice 2016 in a Windows 10 virtual machine does give the user the capability to use Ink on the Mac.

See this blog post (and others in the near future) for all the details and lots more examples.

• A slew of features in Outlook

There are more feature differences between WinOutlook and MacOutlook than there are between any other pairs of apps in the two suites. Some of these differences are support for older Exchange versions, voting buttons, Visual Basic support, conversation clean up, and many, many more, but see this blog post for a much longer, but non-exhaustive list.

Minor differences:

• Pivot charts + other features in Excel

Despite an immense amount of excellent work by the MacExcel team in recent years, there are still some WinExcel features that are not supported in MacExcel. Opening a spreadsheet containing one of these missing features results in the dialog you see in figure 3.

• PowerPoint add-ins

Among my many character flaws, I am a font addict. (My t-shirt that states “Who ever dies with the most fonts wins.” kind of gives this away.) Often, just the right font will convey exactly the feeling I want in a presentation. But, if I show this presentation on another computer, or email it to someone, that font will not show up. So, a PowerPoint add-in like Convert Text to Outlinesis a godsend, enabling me to make sure that font will always show correctly, and Convert Text to Outlines, like almost all other add-ins, is only available in WinPowerPoint. However, once converted to outlines in WinPowerPoint, the slide will render correctly in WinPowerPoint or MacPowerPoint on any computer, even if that special font is not available there.

Ms Office Mac

To be fair, in choosing WinOffice over MacOffice for use on the Mac, you do lose the fantastic Reorder Objects feature in PowerPoint, and that is a significant loss. It used to be the case that choosing Word in MacOffice gave you Publishing Layout View, but, alas, Microsoft removed this powerful, groundbreaking feature from Word in MacOffice 2016. A real pity.

Purchase Ms Office 2011 For Mac

So, for me, WinOffice is the clear best Office to use on my Mac. What’s your clear best choice? Leave your answer in the comments.

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