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Microsoft Touts Mac-Windows Compatibility in Office 2011

Sunday, August 22nd, 2010

Microsoft today announced that the next version of Office for the Mac will include a pair of key features that debuted in the Windows edition of Office 2010 earlier this year.

Office for Mac 2011, which is slated for an October launch, will offer “Sparklines,” cell-sized Excel charts, and in-app image editing tools, two features that first appeared in Office 2010, the more popular Windows edition that hit the retail market last May.

Microsoft touted the new features as part of its attempt to boost compatibility between the Mac and Windows versions of the suite.

“What we’ve been able to do in Office for Mac 2011 is to bring a lot of power to bear to produce a professional-looking document that’s still compatible with Office for Windows,” said Kurt Schmucker, an evangelist with Microsoft’s Mac team, in a video the group released Wednesday.

Sparklines, which Computerworld reviewer Preston Gralla called the ”most useful” among the changes to Excel 2010 on Windows, lets users drop in bite-sized charts or graphs into individual cells.

Microsoft pitched Sparklines and improvements to Excel’s PivotTables as compatibility wins for Mac users who need to share spreadsheet documents with co-workers running the Windows version of Office.

Previously, Microsoft has made much of the debut of a ribbon-style interfacein Office for Mac 2011, another feature borrowed from the Windows edition.

Office for Mac 2011 will go on sale at the end of October; Microsoft has not yet set a definite date. however. Customers who purchase Office for Mac 2008 through Nov. 30 will be able to download a free copy of 2011 when it’s available.

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Google’s Korea Office Raided

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

Police raided Google Inc.’s South Korean offices Tuesday to probe potential violations of the country’s telecommunication-privacy law, in the latest move by authorities around the world to ratchet up scrutiny of the Internet search giant’s privacy practices.

The National Police Agency said it is investigating whether the U.S. company collected and stored private information illegally while it prepared for the South Korean launch of its Street View mapping service, which provides panoramic views of streets for Internet search users.

The agency said Google collected information on unspecified users from Wi-Fi wireless network for about six months until May while sweeping through the streets in special vehicles used to assemble street photos for the service.

“We began the probe after having confirmed that the company seized and kept open data as well as unauthorized private communication data collected by its special data-collecting vehicles,” the police said in a statement. Open data refers to data such as businesses’ street addresses that can be kept and stored legally under Korean law.

“We can confirm that the police have visited Google Korea in conjunction with their investigation around data collection by Street View cars. We will cooperate with the investigation and answer any questions they have,” said Lois Kim, a Google spokeswoman.

The raid doesn’t necessarily mean the Internet search giant will face charges. Such raids are common in South Korea as part of initial investigations that often fail to go much further.

Still, the raid will likely keep a spotlight on Street View.

A number of U.S. states have joined in on an investigation of whether privacy laws were broken when Google’s Street View vehicles collected personal data of unsuspecting Internet users. Authorities in the Italy, Spain, Germany and Australia are investigating the service.

Also Tuesday, Google said it plans to introduce its Street View feature for 20 of Germany’s largest cities, including Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt, before the end of the year.

At the insistence of authorities, the faces of individuals and licenses plates will be blurred. People can also ask to have images of their homes removed from the database starting next week, a move aimed at dispelling privacy fears, the Associated Press reported.

“This tool available before the launch of the service is unique to Germany,” Google spokeswoman Lena Wagner said Tuesday, according to the AP.

Google said in May that the roving vehicles it uses to create its Street View program had for years inadvertently collected data over public, unsecured Wi-Fi networks. Google has said the collection was a “mistake” but that the company “did nothing illegal.”

Google has a weak presence in the South Korean market, where local search portal sites such as NHN’s Naver, Daum Communications and others enjoy a comfortable dominance near 90% of the market.

Privacy concerns have been also emerged around Daum’s Road View, which is similar to the Street View and started January 2009. The company has taken several steps to protect privacy such as blurring people’s faces on photos.

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Microsoft Office 2010 hits retail today

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

The latest installment of Office, Microsoft’s long-running productivity suite was slated for a June release, and today is the day it lands in retail.

Yesterday, popular office supply store Staples sent out a mass email saying “Microsoft Office 2010 is Here!” with a link to a pre-order site, but we checked three local Staples stores in the Baltimore metro area, and none of them had the software stocked on shelves yet.

This morning, however, Microsoft made the Office 2010 retail launch official, and the software is now available in more than 35,000 retail stores worldwide; including Best Buy, Office Depot, Fnac, Harvey Norman, and PC World.

Office 2010′s beta phase was dramatically larger than it had been with previous versions, with some 9 million downloads from MSDN and TechNet.

Some highlights of Office 2010:

  • All Office 2010 applications now use the “Ribbon” interface.
  • Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook and Publisher all have picture editing tools: crop, control brightness and contrast, sharpen or soften, and visual effects, and Powerpoint now has the ability to edit and embed videos.
  • PowerPoint Broadcast Slideshow: lets you deliver presentations over the Web to up to 100 people.
  • Increased synchronization with Office Live “cloud” tools such as SkyDrive, letting you collaborate and edit Office documents online with co-authoring functionality.
  • “Backstage View”: save, share, print and publish documents across different Office applications from a single interface, vastly improving printing functionality.
  • Improved Outlook interface and integration with third-party Web services such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

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