Nuke and Burn? Probably not...
Thursday, November 25, 2010 at 12:45PM 
I''ve had Microsoft Office Mac:2011 on my desk for the best part of two weeks now, still wrapped in its shrinkwrap.
The problem has been I've just been crazy busy trying to prepare for next year's MacWorld and MacMania cruise.
Along with all the prep for the presentations, I need to organise and prepare for the shows to deliver whilst I'm away.
However, this morning I needed to do some heavy number crunching on some huge spreadsheets and unfortunately, Numbers just wasn't cutting the mustard.
The version of Office 2011 I have includes Word, PowerPoint and Excel, and to be honest, it was only Excel I was interested in.
So I rip open the shrinkwrap and pop the disk into the drive, expecting to be presented with a selection menu to just install Excel.
Unfortunately this wasn't the case and the installer ended up installing all three applications, and even some apps I wasn't I wasn't even aware about. Seriously Microsoft, Remote Desktop Connection?
I have to admit, I was even more miffed on discovering that Microsoft Office installs itself automatically into my dock without asking - bad show!
Update: My bad! There is a customise button on the installer as pointed out in the comments. Don't know why I never noticed that! Apologies Microsoft ;-)
But anyway Excel was now installed, along with Word but also Powerpoint.
Excel I wanted, Word is probably worth me taking a look, but as a hardened Keynote user, PowerPoint was really wasn't on the radar and surplus to requirements.
Couldn't find an uninstall option, so I sent out a tweet to find out how to install it.
As you might expect, I received a mixture of responses, from nuking or burning the machine (a bit drastic there chaps!) but also the advice to just drag PowerPoint to the trash. It looks as though there's no uninstall in this latest version of Microsoft Office.
I was just about to trash Powerpoint when I received a solitary direct message from someone suggesting
...you should give PowerPoint a fair chance. In many ways it is better than Keynote, especially when it comes to diagrams.
I have to say that I wasn't expecting that!
My knee jerk reaction was just to get rid of the app and stick with Keynote. In retrospect, this perhaps was a bit blinkered of me.
Powerpoint 2011 is obviously the result of many months of work by teams of people and it's very dismissive of me to just delete without even trying it out.
So although I haven't got a chance at a moment to try it out, I'll leave PowerPoint on my hard drive and when I do get a minute, I'll will give it a spin.
As I expected, Excel is much more suited to handling the large spreadsheets, so I'm happy for now and can get on with all this number crunching. I'd forgotten just how powerful Excel is and I look forward to being re-united with Pivot Tables again.
I'll check out Word and Powerpoint soon, but wouldn't it be funny if I ended up using PowerPoint for my MacWorld and MacMania presentations after all!
Reader Comments (5)
Is the problem that the option to customise the install wasn't made obvious enough?
The Office installer follows the same format as the Mac OS installer - so there is a Customise button on the left before the installation starts which allows you to choose which elements to install.
Great post as usual, love your attitude.
As an aside, you know iWork installs itself in the dock? Just as annoying :)
Keep it up, love the show and blog,
Paul,
At work I switched from PC to Mac a year ago but still run Parallels for many PC only tools.
I tried Office 2008 but it was horrendously slow and awkward - I kept with PC Office opening in Parallels.
But this new Office 2011 for Mac is massively faster and more usable - already now I am starting to use it in preference to the Office 2003 PC programs, it's nice to see Microsoft finally do something well for Mac Office.
As for install, I'd already seen others have the issue of not noticing how to customize the install, so I was prepared and installed only Word and Excel. Maybe Don you should simply uninstall and start again to get control of your machine?
I was more concerned with the silent Outlook install. I tried trashing the files but was then blocked from running the updater. I had to reinstall the whole "works", then the update worked. Outlook requires an upcharge to use in my version.
Remote Desktop Connection. Don't knock it - as it has for some time it continues to work better than its Windows sibling. And it's invaluable for those of us who spend much of our time working on clients' systems.
But yes, it should really be an optional install. And what have they done to Messenger? Split off Communicator and now neither will connect to my client's Office Communicator.
Meanwhile Excel is indeed looking very good, albeit missing some of the Office 2007/2010 functionality (like a count of filtered rows).