Microsoft Confirms Office 2011 to Work With OS X Mountain Lion

[Akshay Masand]

As many Mac consumers continue to upgrade to the recently released OS X Mountain Lion and while others are already updated, app and software compatibility is becoming increasingly important. We previously reported about a site named RoaringApps which will help you determine whether your Mac apps are compatible with OS X Mountain Lion or not but the site only covers apps. There is still software that is equally as important to many but not considered an app, one such example is Microsoft’s office productivity suite.

Fortunately, Microsoft confirmed that the two most recent versions of its flagship Office suite for Mac are fully compatible with OS X Mountain Lion. Office users are advised to ensure that Microsoft AutoUpdate is enabled so that their installations can be updated as needed to take full advantage of the new operating system. Microsoft made the following statements earlier today:

- Make sure you have Office for Mac’s AutoUpdate enabled – some updates will be needed to make the most of the upgrade to Mountain Lion. Initiate AutoUpdate in any Office for Mac application by going to your toolbar, then selecting “Help” and then “Check for Updates.”

- Mountain Lion ships with a new feature called Gatekeeper. Gatekeeper helps protect users by allowing you to choose to only download and install software from known developers, like Microsoft. Please note that due to the Gatekeeper architecture, updates will not run when you download and initiate them on your desktop; instead please use Microsoft AutoUpdate to keep your copies of Office for Mac current.

Comparatively, Apple also updated their iWork productivity suite, which is the Mac equivalent to Office. The update includes support for the new Documents in the Cloud feature in OS X Mountain Lion. This feature keeps documents in-sync across both Mac and iOS versions of the apps in the iWork suite, automatically keeping them up to date with the latest changes. From the Pages’ change log:

Pages 1.6.1 works with iCloud to make documents automatically available between your iOS device and Pages on your Mac. Changes made to a document on one device are instantly available on the other. Requires Pages 4.2 or later installed on OS X Mountain Lion.

As time goes on, more and more software is likely to update and support OS X Mountain Lion but in the meantime, at least your productivity won’t be taking a hit.

Source: Apple, Microsoft

[Colby21]

Alright!

[exNavy]

Don't care switched to Pages more than a year ago. Tired of MS over priced software and 500mb service packs every quarter.

[bigboyz]

Good to know..thought we may have to wait for a patch/update.

[Memo2001]

This is cool but i wish microsoft office would work on the other apple devices

[Alastairbrown51]

Thanks for sharing interesting news.