And because you’re able to hide the Ribbon, you can get it out of the way when all you want to work with are words. While initially the Ribbon may seem daunting to master, in practice I found that I wasn’t wasting time looking for the tools I needed to get my work done. If you’d rather not use the Ribbon, you can hide it.

Inserting an image into a document? The Ribbon contains everything you need to resize, color correct, wrap text around, or otherwise format that image. Adding a table or a chart? You’ll find a complete set of tools for editing and formatting the same. Working on a word processing document? The Ribbon displays a set of text formatting tools. Word 2011 has the Ribbon, an intelligent, customizable toolbar that provides you with a set of formatting tools suited to your current task. Word 2008 ( ) used the combination of a nearly useless Elements Gallery that appeared at the top of every document and a floating Toolbox to provide you with formatting tools for your document. Word 2011 has the same look and feel as Word for Windows, but is in many ways more refined and better organized than its Windows sibling. More importantly, Word 2011 now makes it possible to insert a Mac into nearly any business environment and offer Mac users the same set of features found in Word for Windows, without compromise. It is in fact a powerful tool for creating all your personal and business documents and for collaborating with others. The bottom line is this: Microsoft Word for Mac no longer feels like a second-string word processing program in the Microsoft Office suite. It is an update that unifies a user’s experience across platforms, and it’s also a release that contains many valuable new features and improvements-more than 30 in all.

The Intel-only Word 2011 is a significant and substantive update to Microsoft’s flagship Mac word processing and page-layout application. They were essentially two completely different products designed for what, in Microsoft’s mind, were two completely different sets of users. For as long as I’ve been reviewing Microsoft Word, it has been difficult to see any kind of relationship between Word for Mac and Word for Windows, beyond the name and file format.

Microsoft office 2011 for mac