One of the major new changes to the suite (on the Windows side, too) is the ability to collaborate and share your work using Web apps.

Add the ease of compatibility with a strong feature set across the entire suite and you have a desktop office package that's almost a must-have in both large and small businesses, and even home productivity settings. But if you work with primarily Windows users who use Office, it's tough to beat the automatic compatibility of using the same programs.

Certainly many Mac users will look first at Apple's iWork for a productivity suite, and it is a great office suite in its own right. Once we dug deep into the feature set of Office 2011 for Mac, we saw there were several enhancements that made the whole suite better, and some of the niftier tweaks are even Mac-exclusive. Not only has it nearly reached feature parity (and cross compatibility) with the Mac counterparts to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, but it has finally added Outlook, the e-mail and scheduling client Mac business fans have been clamoring for for years. Though the latest package is still not on par with the Windows version (you get only the four main programs-a big difference when you consider the Windows version has 10), Microsoft made a big leap with this latest version for the Mac in several other ways. Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 offers a solid update to the Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and the other members of the productivity suite.

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