Any user of Office for Mac will know that the look and feel is distinctly different from the Windows version and that our PC cousins have more features but with the release of Office for Mac 2011 this October there promises to be more compatibility.
A recent announcement from the Office for Mac team detailed a cross-platform API (Application Programming Interface) for proofing tools so that any time a third party proofing tools companies updates the Windows version it should be no problem to reflect this change for Mac.
If APIs for other aspects of Office 2011 become cross-platform as they are opened up to the Mac OS then as Microsoft works on changes for the primary Windows Office software package the same updates to the Mac version should be as simple as porting over changes. Or at least when it comes to adding new languages to Office, two of which were added recently: Russian and Polish.
This is good for those that had to tweak settings every time they wanted to send a mail in a different language: “Since Outlook is using Webkit at its core, it benefited from Apple integrated proofing tools. Although more limited and with less languages available (“only” 12), it opened up new possibilities such as language detection which means, if you frequently send mails in different languages, you don’t have to go to your Tools menu to change the language option every time you write in a different language.”
