Full-screen support, document connection, more

Microsoft has updated Office for Mac 2011 to version 14.2.0 (SP2), a significant update with a number of changes and improvements, among them support for Lion's full-screen mode in PowerPoint, and the addition of a drag-and-drop feature in Document Connection for Lion. The update fixes numerous small issues, introduces a new sync model for Exchange e-mail, and improves the robustness and rebuild utility of the e-mail database.

The Document Connection feature also gets improved support for SkyDrive, particularly at the root level, and issues with SharePoint file uploading are resolved. For the entire suite of programs, the Italian and German grammar checker is improved to be able to check grammar even when a document only has some sentences in those languages.

Outlook for Mac's improved database should help prevent corruptions, instability and crashes by improving the ability to recover from certain kinds of errors. The program will automatically check, and rebuild if needed, the database using Database Utility. The update also adds the ability to cancel a database rebuild.

Outlook has also been tweaker to be more GMail-friendly, including improved IMAP account syncing and the ability to map some mail folders automatically. The program is now more responsive during syncing, deleting multiple records, sending and displaying messages. In addition, Outlook is now able to download an Exchange e-mail in parts, downloading text first and adding the option for the user to additionally download large images or attachments if needed.

Distribution list expansion functionality is now included by resting the mouse on a distribution list name, which will produce the option of expanding the list into individual names. Also improved the interaction with the calendar, particularly scheduling resources as well as the addition of a preference to show calendar week numbers.

In addition to Full Screen view support in Lion, PowerPoint also gains functionality for pasting special kinds of hyperlinks (such as App Store URLs and others), and fixes an issue where a list of co-authors of a presentation isn't properly seen. The update also fixes an issue in Microsoft Word in which the program couldn't send PDF files as faxes, and updates the user information display in a viewed template.

The 14.2.0 update requires an Intel Mac running OS X 10.5.8 or later that has already had Office 2011 SP1 applied.

by MacNN Staff