Significant improvement over 2008, 2004 editions

MacTech Magazine has written up a thorough review of their benchmark tests of Microsoft Office 2011 versus its own predecessors on a variety of current Macs, including a head-to-head comparison of Entourage against its successor, Office 2011's Outlook. The results show significant speed gains all around, particularly in general app launching times, and in Excel and Powerpoint operation.

For testing purposes, the tests were performed on a set of current-model Intel Macs -- including a MacBook, MacBook Pro and iMac. This naturally gave an advantage to both MS Office 2008 and the 2011 editions over the older, PPC-centric Office 2004, which requires Rosetta to run on Intel machines.

Overall, Office 2011 was on average 50 percent faster -- or more -- than Office 2008 at nearly everything, though there were a few selected places where the older version kept or or beat the new one. Some areas featured remarkable improvement -- successive app launches, WordArt searches and overall Excel performance were at least doubled in some cases becoming to rapid to accurately measure -- while Outlook, the newest component, provided very modest gains over Entourage and struggled to keep up in many areas.

Compared to Office 2004 on an Intel Mac, the general conclusion was the 2011 edition was from a user's perspective "infinitely" faster, doing most tasks instantaneously by comparison. In almost every test, Office 2011 was two to three times faster overall.

The MacTech benchmarks set out to measure speed only, both actual timings and real-world "user perceptions" of both processing tasks and user interaction features. The full test results are available now online, and will be the subject of a future article in the printed version of the magazine.

by MacNN Staff