Office 2011 for Mac For Dummies

Part I

Introduction to the Microsoft Office 2011 Suite

In this part . . .

Wether you’re a longtime Office user or Office 2011 for Mac is your first experience with using an Office suite, you have to learn to crawl before you can walk (much less run).

In this part, you can start with a broad overview of the various versions of Office 2011 for Mac available for purchase and how to install and set them up. Then I briefly introduce you to the four major applications that comprise the Office suite. You can check out some features that are new or improved in the 2011 edition and take a quick look at how this quartet plays nicely together. Finally, you explore Office features that work the same way in all four applications, such as menus, toolbars, preferences, and help.

So get comfortable, roll up your sleeves, fire up your Mac if you like, and grab your Office 2011 for Mac install disc if you haven’t yet installed the software.

Chapter 1

Overview from 10,000 Feet

In This Chapter

arrow Deciding which of the three editions of Office for Mac 2011 to buy

arrow Installing Office 2011

arrow Getting set up using the Setup Assistant

arrow Removing Office 2011

Over the next several hundred pages, you can find out in detail about the applications that make up the Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 suite. But first you must decide which version of the suite you want or need (there are three of ’em), acquire a copy of it, and then install it and find out how to update it to ensure that you’re always running the latest and greatest (not to mention most stable) version.

So, without further ado, dig in!

The Three Faces of Office for Mac 2011

Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 comes in three tasty flavors:

check.png Office for Mac Home and Student 2011

check.png Office for Mac Home and Business 2011

check.png Office for Mac Academic 2011

The three editions have this in common: All three have the exact same versions of the big three applications — Word, Excel, and PowerPoint — plus a copy of Microsoft Messenger (an instant messaging, or IM, program that you can download from the Microsoft Web site for free). The differences between the editions lie in which features you get in addition to the big three:

check.png Microsoft Office for Mac Home and Student 2011: The retail price is $119 for a single install or $149 for a Family Pack with three installs. As the least expensive edition, it includes the big three applications and Messenger and nothing more. Of course, many (if not most) users need nothing more, so unless you can find a compelling reason to spend two or three times more money for the same three applications, this edition is the most affordable.

Note that this edition does not include Microsoft Outlook. Outlook, sometimes called the Swiss army knife of personal communications software, combines an e-mail client with an address book, a calendar, to-do lists, and searchable notes in a single application.

tip.eps Unless you dislike the Mail, Address Book, and iCal applications that are included with Mac OS X, you probably won’t miss Outlook much. And, if you’re a student or a staff or faculty member in higher education, you may qualify for the $99 single-install Academic edition, which does include Outlook. (See the third bullet1 in this list.)

check.png Microsoft Office for Mac Home and Business 2011: The retail price is $199 for a single install or $279 for a Multi-Pack with two installs. What do you get for the additional dough? In two words: Microsoft Outlook.

What’s that, you say? You don’t know whether you need Outlook? Well then, I suggest that you save yourself a bundle and start with the Home and Student Edition. If you later determine that you do need Microsoft Outlook, you can upgrade to the Home and Business edition online.

check.png Microsoft Office for Mac Academic 2011: The retail price is $99 but is available only to higher-education students, staff, and faculty. This edition includes everything in the Home and Business edition (including Microsoft Outlook) at half the price. But in this case you have to prove that you’re in the field of higher education.

So there you have it — three editions for three budgets.

By the way, you don’t have to prove you’re a student (or live in a home) to purchase the Home and Student edition for $119, but you have to prove that you’re in the field of higher education to get the Academic edition for $99. The bottom line: For most users, the Home and Student edition is the most cost-effective way to acquire the big three Office applications.

Installing Office 2011

When you insert the Office 2011 DVD, you launch the Office Installer by double-clicking it.

9780470878699-ma101.tif The first screen you see is Welcome to the Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 Installer, which informs you that in order to install Microsoft Office, you need the username and password for an Administrator account on this Mac. If you have no Administrator account and password handy, it would behoove you to get one now.

This screen also recommends that you temporarily disable any virus protection applications on this computer before you continue. That’s a good idea, so if you’re running any antivirus software, disable it before you proceed or else it can interfere with your installation.

When you have both of the aforementioned ducks in a row (you have an Administrator account name and password and have disabled all antivirus software), click the Continue button.

The second screen displays the license terms. Because you must accept these terms to use the software, you should read every word before you even think about clicking the Continue button.

technicalstuff.eps I’m only half kidding — I know that nobody reads the licensing information. But because you’re about to enter into a legally binding agreement, I would be remiss not to at least pretend to urge you to read every word.

When you’re done reading, click the Continue button. A sheet with three buttons — Agree, Disagree, and Read License — appears. Assuming that you’ve read the agreement already, I strongly suggest that you click Agree. If you haven’t read the agreement, click the Read License button to return to the second screen, where you can read the fine print. Or, if you read it and disagree, click the Disagree button and the Installer quits. In other words, unless you specify that you agree, you can’t install the software.

The next screen, labeled Select a Destination, lets you choose the destination disk for the software installation. Click the hard disk icon in the middle of the window to select the disk you want to install the software on, and then click Continue.

The next screen is labeled Standard Install on [your hard drive’s name] at the top. The Microsoft Office 2011 folder is installed in your Applications folder by default. If you want to install the Office folder elsewhere, click the Change Install Location button and select another destination.

Before you click the Install button, click the Customize button and deselect any items you don’t want to install.

tip.eps If you’re short on disk space, consider not installing some of the proofing tools. By default, all languages (including Catalan, Dutch, Finnish, German, two flavors of Portuguese, and more) are installed. To save some disk space, first click the little triangle to the left of the words Microsoft Office 2011 to reveal its contents, and then click the little triangle to the left of the words Proofing Tools. Finally, deselect the check boxes for the languages you don’t need. If you don’t install these languages, you don’t save a ton of disk space, but why install them if you’re never going to use them?

Now click the Install button to open an authentication window so that you can provide an administrator name and password. Do so and then click OK. Go get yourself some coffee or a soft drink — you have a bit of time.

When the installation is complete, the screen informs you that the installation was successful and the software was installed. D’oh. Click the Close button and the Office Setup Assistant launches itself.

Setting Up with Setup Assistant

The Welcome to Office for Mac 2011 screen appears with the following three options:

check.png Enter Your Product Key: Click this option and then type your product key, which you can find in the box with your installation disc. When you’re done, click the Continue button to see a screen acknowledging that your copy has been activated. Your product ID number also appears on this screen with the suggestion that you store it with your records because you’ll need it in order to register or obtain technical support.

tip.eps If you forget the product ID number or fail to write it down and keep it with your records, you can find it in the About dialog box for Excel, PowerPoint, or Word.

check.png Try Free for 30 Days: If you have a demo version of Office for Mac 2011, click this option to use the software without a product key for as long as 30 days.

check.png Purchase a Product Key Online: Click this option and follow the onscreen instructions to purchase a product key on the Web.

At this point, you may or may not see a screen congratulating you or encouraging you to enjoy the demo, or telling you something entirely different. Click Continue.

A screen offers to either use your existing settings (from an earlier version of Office for Mac) or create new settings. Click an option and then click Continue.

Next is the Keep Office Up to Date screen, which offers two simple yes-or-no options: Keep Office for Mac Up to Date and Join the Customer Experience Improvement Program. Respond to both and then click Continue.

Before you complete this action, though, read this tip:

tip.eps The DVD you just installed Office 2011 from was manufactured several months ago (or longer). In the meantime, Microsoft may have discovered bugs in the software and issued software updates to correct them. I recommend that you click Yes. Office then runs the AutoUpdate application periodically and updates your software when necessary. That way, you always receive the benefits of updated software, which generally increase reliability and enhance performance and even, occasionally, add a new feature or functionality. If you choose Yes, you can specify that Office should check for updates every day, week, or month.

warning_bomb.eps If you choose not to run AutoUpdate at this time or you click the Manually button, don’t forget to run the Microsoft AutoUpdate application manually every few weeks by choosing Help⇒Check for Updates in any of the Office applications.

The second option determines whether you want to participate in the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program. Office then occasionally sends information about your hardware and how you use Office (as well as information on crashes, freezes, and unexpected shutdowns) to Microsoft via the Internet. No personal information is sent; it’s totally anonymous. Click the radio button for Yes or No, and then click the Continue button.

Dealing with multiple versions of Office

If you have an earlier version of Office on your hard drive when you install Office 2011, the older version isn’t touched. You now have two (or possibly even three or more) Office folders in your Applications folder.

In a perfect world, all your Office documents, both new and old, would launch the 2011 versions of Word (or other Office apps) when you open them. But in the real world, this may or may not be your experience.

So, I offer you this little lesson in Mac OS X file opening mastery:

check.png To specify which version (Office for Mac 2011, 2008, 2004, or whatever) of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint opens when you double-click one of its document files, single-click that document file and choose File⇒Get Info. (The shortcut is Command+I.)

check.png If you don’t see a pop-up (or drop-down, if you prefer) Open With menu — the one that says Microsoft Word (default) (14.0.0) in the following figure — click the small, gray disclosure triangle next to the words Open With and the menu appears.

The Info window should look something like this figure:

Now click that pop-up (or drop-down) menu and select the version of the application you want to open when you double-click this document. In the figure, that version is Word 2011 (also known as Word 14.0.0), which is the default for .doc files. To open the document in Word 2008 or 2004, you choose Word 12 or Word 100702 (don’t ask) for them, respectively.

If you want all documents of this type — a .doc file in the example — to launch this version of Word, just click the Change All button.

Or, right-click the document and choose Open With from the contextual menu to select a different application to open it this time. Finally, right-click the document and then hold down the Option key — the menu changes from Open With to Always Open With — to launch a different application every time you open this document.

There you have it — if the wrong version of an Office application launches when you open a document, you now know how to fix it.

Chapter 2

A Sweet Suite: Introducing the Office 2011 Applications

In This Chapter

arrow Exploring new features

arrow Introducing the four main Office applications

arrow Examining how the applications work together

Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 isn’t a single, monolithic application that processes words and numbers, creates slide shows, manages your e-mail, calendar, and contact database, and more. No, Office is a suite of five (or more) programs that share numerous interface characteristics so that many functions are the same across all applications. Furthermore, the programs are designed to work together harmoniously, adding up to a sum that’s greater than its individual parts.

When you install the software, you don’t create a single application named Microsoft Office for Mac 2011; rather, you create a folder by that name, which contains eight items (more or less).

technicalstuff.eps You may have more or fewer than eight items in your Microsoft Office 2011 folder. The number depends on which edition of Office you purchased and which options you choose during installation.

The following list briefly describes the eight items that matter (in alphabetical order), focusing on what each one is or does:

check.png Additional Tools: This folder contains at least one ancillary application that you might someday need — namely, Microsoft Language Register, used for switching between English and Japanese editing environments, plus bookmarks for the Microsoft Silverlight and Windows Media components for QuickTime Web pages.

check.png newin2011.eps Microsoft Document Connection: Document Connection is a new (to the Office suite) application that lets you store and manage Office documents in the cloud (remote storage accessed via the Internet).

tip.eps You can find out more in Chapter 3 about using SkyDrive, Microsoft’s free, cloud-based file storage service, for collaboration, co-authoring, and backups.

check.png Microsoft Excel: Excel is the number-crunching member of the Office family. You use this program to create spreadsheet documents.

check.png Microsoft Messenger: Messenger is another application in the Office suite, but you won’t find it in the Microsoft Office 2011 folder with the others. Rather, it’s installed right in your Applications folder. Messenger is a minor player in the Office family that you use to chat with other Messenger users online; it’s kind of like iChat but not as pretty.

check.png Microsoft Outlook: Microsoft Outlook is the Swiss army knife of Microsoft Office applications — it includes not one, not two, but five separate functions. It’s

• An e-mail client

• An address book

• An appointment calendar

• A task and to-do list manager

• A repository for notes

check.png Microsoft PowerPoint: PowerPoint is the presentation-creating member of the Office family. You use it to create slide shows.

check.png Microsoft Word: Word is, of course, the Office word processing program. But it’s much more than that these days because you can use it to create almost any document that contains text or images or both.

check.png Office: This folder is filled with stuff you never need to touch but that Office needs in order to run properly. The only thing you need to know about the Office folder is that you ought to leave it alone: Don’t put anything into it, take anything out of it, move it out of the Microsoft Office 2011 folder, or (gasp) throw it in the Trash.

check.png Read Me: This document opens your default Web browser (such as Safari) and includes a link to the Microsoft Web site, where you can find information about system requirements, upgrade eligibility, and known issues, for example.

What’s New and Good

newin2011.eps Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 has many features that are new or improved, but perhaps the most important one is that the suite is now coded to run natively (and exclusively) on Macs that have Intel processors. The system requirements have changed, too, to Mac OS X Leopard version 10.5.8 and later (including version 10.6 Snow Leopard).

Put another way, if your Mac has a PowerPC processor, you’re totally out of luck. And, if your Mac runs Mac OS X Leopard version 10.5.7 or earlier, you need to update or upgrade to version 10.5.8 or later before you can install Office 2011 for Mac.

rantrave.eps I’ll stop calling the suite Office 2011 for Mac now and refer to it as just plain ol’ Office 2011. I mean, you are reading this book, which should mean that you’re using Office on a Mac. If you aren’t a Mac user, you’re reading the wrong book.

In addition to Office 2011 going Intel-native, many other facets have been added, changed around, or improved. For example, Entourage — the mail, address book, calendar, project management, and note-keeping program that came with previous versions of Office for Mac — has been replaced by Outlook, which is the program that the big dogs (Office for Windows users) have used for mail and everything else since time immemorial.

There’s a lot more to Office, so let’s get to it. I start by describing what’s new and good in Office 2011 and continue with major new features that are common to most or all of the programs that make up the suite. After that, I take a look at new features and improvements that are specific to Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook. The section concludes with a short rant on what’s bad or ugly in this release.

The suite life

All the Office applications have received facelifts and now look even less like Windows programs than ever. Yea!

Easily the most visible across-the-board change is a feature known as the Ribbon. It appears directly below the toolbar in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and provides fast, easy access to the features you use most.

Figure 2-1 shows the Home tab on the Word Ribbon.

Figure 2-1 shows the Ribbon in Word; the Ribbons in Excel and PowerPoint are almost identical.

tip.eps You can enable or disable certain Ribbon features or change the order of its tabs by choosing Ribbon Preferences or Customize Ribbon Tab Order, respectively, from the Ribbon menu, which is marked by a little gear in the upper right corner of the Ribbon. Click the little carat (^) to the left of the gear to show or hide the Ribbon itself (but not the tabs).

Figure 2-1: The new Ribbon is one of the best (in my humble opinion) new features in Office 2011.

If I’m a bit terse here, it’s because I spend quite a bit of time examining every single one of these new features. Despite that caveat, here are some more new features available throughout Office 2011:

check.png Co-authoring: Now multiple users can collaborate simultaneously on a single Word or PowerPoint document using different computers (Macs or PCs). Updates made by other people appear on your screen in near real time, and you can choose to be alerted whenever other document collaborators are present.

check.png SharePoint and SkyDrive: All Office 2011 apps support not just one but two Microsoft cloud storage services. You can open and save documents stored on either cloud from a Mac or PC or one of the Office Web Apps.

tip.eps Microsoft offers 25 gigabytes of free online storage space when you sign up for its free Windows Live SkyDrive service at explore.live.com/windows-live-skydrive. When you store documents on your free SkyDrive, you can not only open them using Office on a Mac or PC but also edit them in a Web browser using one of the Office Web Apps.

check.png Office 2011 Web Applications: Open an Office document without a copy of Office? You betcha. If the file is stored on your (free) SkyDrive, you can open and edit it in a Web browser, as shown in Figure 2-2.

check.png Visual Basic: Visual Basic is back after being left completely out of Office 2008 for Mac, much to the dismay of its devotees. Well, VB (as those in the know call it) is now completely cross-platform-compatible, and macros written in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint 2011 on the Mac run properly in Office for Windows 2010 — and vice versa.

warning_bomb.eps I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention that Visual Basic has often been the mechanism used to spread computer viruses.

Figure 2-2: The Excel Web App looks suspiciously like its Mac and PC brethren. . . .

technicalstuff.eps Many features mentioned in this section are available in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel but not in Outlook. That’s because Outlook is the only one of the four that doesn’t create its own documents and many of these new features are document oriented.

check.png Improved new document experience: The Excel Workbook Gallery, PowerPoint Presentation Gallery, and Word Document Gallery provide quick access to themes, templates, and recently used documents. Browse great-looking previews to see what your document will look like before you start working on it.

check.png Improved launch times: The Office apps have faster launch times.

rantrave.eps I’m dubious about the improved launch times. I have a very fast Mac (a Mac Pro with eight processors), and though the apps definitely launch faster, they don’t launch that much faster.

tip.eps The fewer fonts you have enabled on your Mac, the faster the Office apps launch. If you’ve loaded up your Mac with lots of third-party fonts, you might want to disable some of them using the Font Book utility that comes with Mac OS X.

check.png Improved Help: It still isn’t great, but it uses the standard Apple Help system and beats the heck out of Clippy the Paper Clip (the Help mascot in earlier versions of Office for Mac and Windows).

Office has hundreds of other tweaks, fixes, new features, and improvements, including many streamlined dialog boxes, toolboxes, toolbars, and palettes, better media integration (with your pictures, movies, and music), and much more. I could probably write a whole book about all the new and improved capabilities in Office 2011. But the boss says that I have to show you how to use everything, too, so I had best move along now.

The following sections provide overviews of new features specific to the big four Office 2011 applications — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook.

Word

Word has been the primary tool I use to make a living for more than 20 years. Word 2011 still feels like Word but offers several enticing new features, such as

check.png Visual Styles: These color-coded visual cues help you easily visualize the relationship between Word Styles and your document’s contents, as shown in Figure 2–3.

rantrave.eps I teach the Intro to Word class in the Informal Classes program at the University of Texas. I consider styles one of the best things about Word, but many students have trouble understanding the whole concept of styles. I think Word’s new Style and Direct Formatting Guides will make it much clearer.

check.png Full Screen View: Block out all other windows, palettes, and toolbars on the screen to let you focus on your Word document. Sweet!

check.png Document Gallery: It’s easier than ever to find and open templates to give you a head start on your document’s design and help you create beautiful posters, brochures, calendars, letters, and more.

check.png Document Elements: They were around in Office 2008, but now, rather than let them hog a bunch of screen space they didn’t need, you’ll find the new and improved 2011 version in the Ribbon’s Document Elements tab.

check.png Ligatures in fonts: If you’re a type-A personality and love typography and fonts, you already know what this means. If you’re not, you probably don’t care.

technicalstuff.eps Okay, for those who aren’t type hounds but do care, ligatures are font characters that combine two or more separate characters or include decorative swashes. They’re available only in Publishing Layout view in Word and then only for certain fonts (such as Apple Chancery or Zapfino) that were designed with ligatures built into them.

check.png Dynamic Reordering: A nifty new way to change the stacking order of layers in your documents. I’ll show you a picture of PowerPoint’s Dynamic Reordering in the next section.

Figure 2-3: The new Word 2011 Visual Styles let you easily discern the relationship between Word styles and Word content.

PowerPoint

Among the new features in PowerPoint 2011, a few stand apart from the rest:

check.png Web Broadcasting of Slide Shows: Broadcast your slide show to anyone, anywhere, over the Internet by sending them a link (a URL); your audience follows along in their browsers while you present the slide show in PowerPoint. Everyone you invited watches a synchronized view of your slide show in their Web browser.

To broadcast your slide show, you must use the PowerPoint Broadcast Service to host the slide show. It’s free, but you must have a Windows Live ID to use it.

tip.eps A Windows Live ID makes Office 2011 better by adding functionality such as PowerPoint Broadcast Service or SkyDrive. Because it’s free, you have no good reason not to get one.

check.png Improved Presenter view: With a slide control for resizing the text in your notes, myriad other easily resizable components, and narration recording, this isn’t your father’s Presenter view.

check.png Sections: Slides can be grouped into named sections for organization within PowerPoint, and ownership can then be assigned by section on multiuser presentation collaborations.

check.png Dynamic Reordering: Using this feature is more visually oriented and less tedious than guessing the effect of the Send Forward, Send to Front, Send to Back, and Send Backward commands. And yes, it’s quite cool, as you can see in Figure 2-4.

After you’ve used the new Dynamic Reordering interface, you’ll wish that every program in the world that has layers had Dynamic Reordering for them.

Figure 2-4: The duck is the top layer; I just drag him to the left and drop him between two layers or behind all the layers.

Excel

Excel users will be delighted by the following features, new to Excel 2011:

check.png Sparklines: These tiny charts are contained in a single cell, as shown in Figure 2-5.

Figure 2-5: Sparklines are thumbnail-size charts that fit in a single cell.

You can embed a sweet little bar, line, or column chart inline with the data it represents. Sparklines are particularly useful for evaluating time-based data (trendlines) and are a welcome addition to the ever expanding Excel toolset.

check.png Conditional formatting: Conditional formatting has been around but never has been so easy to use. Just select some data and choose from the Conditional Formatting menu on the Home tab on the Ribbon, as shown in Figure 2-6.

Excel has other new features, including Modern PivotTables.

rantrave.eps I’m betting that you likely don’t know, or care, what PivotTables are. Regardless, I’m allowed only a fixed number of pages in which to discuss Excel, so some of its more esoteric features, such as PivotTables, are beyond the purview of this book. New features such as sparklines and conditional formatting, on the other hand, should have wide-ranging appeal.

Figure 2-6: The cells with the lowest values are the bluest; the ones with the highest values are the reddest.

Outlook

Technically, because Outlook is new to the suite in 2011 (replacing Entourage), all of its features are new. It sports a redesigned user interface and probably some features that weren’t in Entourage, though the big news comes in the form of a pair of features that operate behind the scenes:

check.png Database: Perhaps the most important new Outlook feature is one that’s almost entirely invisible to the user: Outlook stores its data in a far different manner than its predecessor does. Entourage stored every bit of your e-mail, contacts, calendars, notes, and everything else in a single database file. The file could grow huge, be susceptible to damage or corruption, or need copious amounts of storage space for backups (or all three).

Outlook does away with the database, which couldn’t be better news. Because Outlook stores everything in individual files, corruption or file damage is rare, and, in a pinch, the files can even be opened and read by using other programs, including TextEdit. Not having a database also means that Outlook plays nice with Time Machine, something Entourage never did.

check.png Time Machine support: Entourage may not have played nicely with Time Machine, but Outlook does. It takes far less time and disk space to back up all of your Outlook data every day.

This list described what’s new and good. The following section looks at the one element that’s new and not so good.

What’s New but Bad

I wish I could tell you that everything new in Office 2011 is an improvement, but I’d be lying. The bad news is that each of the four main Office 2011 apps has at least a dozen known issues, even as I write these words.