Mac Office 2011 + Mac OS X "Lion": Issues Remain

Microsoft on Friday issued a blog post describing how well it's Office for Mac 2011 productivity suite works with the recently released Mac OS X "Lion." Suffice to say, there are a few issues.

We’ve been working with Apple from the early days of Lion, and collectively have been able to address many issues leading up to the Lion release. Many of our Office for Mac engineers have been running Lion for months, and are generally having no problems running Office 2011 on it.

There are two large- and several smaller Office for Mac 2011 issues (on Lion) that we want to highlight. First, Communicator for Mac crashes when you send an instant message or start an audio/visual call. We will fix this issue in an upcoming update to Communicator for Mac. (Note that many users may never use Communicator, because it’s a corporate product, and not included with the mainline Office products.)

Second, on Lion, Outlook can’t import mail from Apple Mail. We’re reviewing this and don’t yet have a plan to fix it. However, if your mail is already in Outlook, then this issue won’t affect you.

The smaller Office issues are fairly minor or cosmetic, things like windows that might not align as they did in Snow Leopard, and we will continue to work together with Apple to fix these in our next regular updates.

There are apparently some issues with Office 2008 (the previous Mac version of Office) as well, but Microsoft says those will be addressed in the future, after the latest version has been updated. Anyone who's used Mac Office is no doubt familiar with the never-ending drone of Automatic Updates, so this situation will likely be more of the same.