[PeterParker]

Hello!

My mum thinks about upgrading from Office 2004 to Office 2011. She is wondering about compatibility, can you help? She is mainly using Word, but ocasionally Excel and PowerPoint as well; and she receives Word, Excel and PowerPoint files from various Mac and PC versions.
It would be great to get an honest understanding of any compatibility issues, as this is so important (including broken formatting etc.).

Hope you can help!
Pete

[EGM]

I use all three regularly, used Office 2004 in the past, now have Office 2008 and 2011 installed on my MacBook Pro as well as Office 2010 for Windows under Parallels Desktop and Windows XP. I do not recall any compatibility issues with any documents in any of the three applications. (I know that's a broad statement. I think it's true. Nothing broke.)

One big change, which is not a compatibility issue, is that Office 2011 supports the newer .docx/.xlsx/.pptx file format that came in with Office 2007(W)/2008(M). That will help with documents she receives from other people. It will save documents in the older format if she ever wants to open them with her older version. She can set that as the default format for saving new documents if she wants.

She'll also have to get used to a totally different user interface. Office 2004 used menus in much the same way as other Mac apps, plus toolbars. Windows 2011 has pumped up the toolbars into ribbons, with tabs to select the ribbon you want to use and a certain amount of intelligent modifications to the ribbons depending on what you're doing. Lots of other things, like Find and Replace in Word, also behave differently, but that's not a compatibility problem - just a learning curve.

There are, of course, a lot of new features in Office 2011. Excel formatting, for instance, is much more capable. Depending on exactly what she does the new features may be anywhere from vital to irrelevant, but in any case they are not compatibility issues.