Microsoft Highlights Compatibility, Graphing and Photo Editing in Office for Mac 2011

Microsoft has posted a new video clip highlighting some of the features of its Office for Mac 2011 suite due for release in late October. Among the features touched upon by Microsoft's Senior Evangelist for the Macintosh Business Unit Kurt Schmucker:

- Compatibility: Microsoft has focused on making Office for Mac 2011 more compatible with the Windows version than ever before, ensuring that users and documents can move seamlessly between platforms.

We'll take a document and print it out with Word for Windows and with Word for Macintosh. Take the two sheets of paper, overlay them...hold them up to the light. If we see any difference, we consider that a bug that we have to fix.

-Graphing: Office for Mac 2011 brings a number of new tools to help users display data in graphical formats, including the Sparklines feature that debuted in Office for Windows 2010. Sparklines allows users to display simple data in small graphs that fit right into the cells of Excel spreadsheets to provide a significant amount of information at just a quick glance.

- Photo Editing: Available throughout the suite, photo editing tools will allow users to perform a number of tasks such as filter application, background removal, and color correction without having to leave the document on which they are working.

The video is part of a continuing series of behind-the-scenes previews of Office for Mac 2011. The first video posted in late July discussed template galleries, Outlook features such as Conversation View, and the ribbon toolbar.