[NewsPoster]

A new edition of Office for Mac will ship later this year, says Microsoft Business Group Lead Thorsten Hübschen. The executive made the comment at this week's CeBIT expo in Hannover, Germany. No details about planned upgrades are available, but development teams are said to be at work, and more news is due to be announced in the second quarter of the year. iOS and Android tablet versions of Office are described as possibilities; an Office for iPad has been rumored for years.

In April 2013 rumors emerged that Office for Mac would be updated this spring, but the company appears likely to miss that date. A Microsoft spokeswoman confirms that Office 365 subscribers will get the next Office for Mac automatically at no extra cost.

[pairof9s]

I know there's a new regime in place whose committed to making Microsoft great again, but this news just falls squarely in the "I really don't care until it's available." category...and even then, who knows!

[DiabloConQueso]

Yay. I can't wait until I get to subscribe to Office on a monthly fee basis instead of making a one-time purchase. Can't you just hear my excitement. Oh boy. Sooo excited. Lemme have it. Can't wait. Yay.

[Flying Meat]

Why? Is the old version broken?

[pastusza]

When it Microsoft Office finally going to become irrelevant? We maintain a ton of documentation at work as Word docs on SharePoint and I BEG them to set up a real wiki to store documentation in.

Instead of real HTML forms, we're using Infopath forms, which creates a document that needs to be stored on SharePoint.

The only piece of Office I see people still needing is Excel.

[The Vicar]

@pastusza:

They don't even REALLY need Excel. People who are using Excel as an actual spreadsheet could almost always switch to another spreadsheet with very little trouble. (Spreadsheet programs haven't changed much since Visicalc, the first one, written for the Apple II decades ago, and the ones in existence right now are about 99% interchangeable). And the people who are using Excel as something other than a spreadsheet — you know, making it an interface to a program or something — really shouldn't. It's a routine horror story in IT that "oh, god, they have millions of dollars of contractual obligations which are filled by a process that has a bottleneck at [pick one: an Excel spreadsheet or an Access database] which is so overstuffed it's already hitting errors because that program was never meant to handle that kind of data set".

[Arty50]

Ummmm...no. I work with Excel every day and cuss at it on a regular basis. That said, there's simply no substitute for it yet. I also use other solutions quite a bit out of necessity, and I can say unequivocally that they're not up to snuff. Excel is the gold standard for spreadsheets for a lot of reasons.

Also, I can't wait for the update for Mac Office provided they fix one thing. I've used Windows Office for years and was pleasantly surprised when I switched over to Mac Office for work recently. My number one complaint though is the fact that Mac Office isn't multi-processor aware. It's simply inexcusable that they left this out of 2011. If they don't fix this major oversight for 2014, I'll be really pissed. Excel chokes regularly on a Mac because of this.

[pairof9s]

Hear, hear, Arty50...it is a daily fume of mine in using Excel at work. It's incredibly slow!

[dwoodruff]

Wow... I can't wait for the newest version of Schiet... No, seriously... I can't wait...

Wow, I almost forgot that Microsoft is still making Office for Mac after I spent $10 on NeoOffice last year.

(Otherwise I too would be stuck with Excel at work... we have it here in a few labs, and even after months of practice I still cannot figure out how to use the cluster-disaster user interface in Word or Excel to save my life.)