Microsoft Office For Mac Finally Embraces Platform Standards

Microsoft Office for Mac won't be here until next year, but the Office for Mac blog has been slowly revealing a few details about what to expect for the next version. One recent post reveals that the new version will finally, after all these years, abide by Apple's recommended installation guidelines.

Perhaps even better news for Mac users, you'll now have to option to stop Microsoft Office from dumping its ugly fonts willy-nilly all over your hard drive.

True to form, Microsoft isn't doing this to make Office for Mac more Mac-like, no, they're doing it to spare IT admins the pain of repackaging Office Install discs:

After talking about the issue in more depth, we discovered that in previous versions of Office for Mac, IT admins have needed to do all sorts of complex steps to get builds deployed out to their users. In fact, it was common for an IT admin to extract the bits from the installation cd, move things around, alter plist files, and more. Then they would roll it all back up into a .pkg format file before deploying it out to remote machines. Frankly, this is a lot of hoops to jump through and we want make the experience better.

Admittedly Vise installers are a pain for admins, largely because you can't install them via Apple Remote Desktop or other networking software, but there's something to be said for simply admitting that the way things are supposed to be done for the platform are better than Microsoft's own ideas. Even Apple's iTunes installer on Windows behaves like a Windows Installer, not a Mac one.

Of course, the important news is that Microsoft has at least changed, if not for the best of reasons.

One thing not addressed, which a number of commenters on the Office for Mac blog are asking about, is whether or not the 2008 edition will move the Microsoft User Data folder to the Apple recommended Library folder, or whether it will still live in username>>Documents as it has in previous versions.

See Also:

• Microsoft Office For Mac Delayed Until Next Year
• Apple Completes its Office Suite, Adds Spreadsheets to iWork
• Microsoft Updates OOXML Converters For Mac Office