Office365 and Mac Office 2011 - A little schizophrenic like WIndows 8

I've recently being doing some work for a client and have found myself using their Office365 and Office 2011 for the Mac tools. The experience has not been horrible for the most part, in fact for the majority of my work, writing policy documents, reports, etc. it has been very positive. But, and it's a big BUT for those of you looking to push out Office365 in a MacOS school or organisation in general, there are little things that will drive you MAD!!

A little like Windows 8, where the constant to'ing and fro'ing between Desktop and 'Metro' environments can cause even IT professionals to throw their hands up in exasperation, the combination of Office365 and Office 2011 for the Mac can be more than a little annoying.

Missing features
First, although Office365 has many of the 'core' features found in Office 2011 for the Mac there are some notable omissions. Examples include being able to merge cells in a table and selecting columns and rows in a table and there are others. The same kinds of omissions can be found in Excel online as well and I'm guessing it is the same for Powerpoint and Outlook. Now that's OK because if you have Office 2011 installed on you Mac then you can just choose to edit the document with this and it will sync changes to the document in OneDrive. Except that it's not quite that easy because ....

Different features
....... some of the styles and features in Office365 online are not there in Office 2011 for the Mac. Or  if they are then they are not obvious enough to be found quickly and easily, which is how your staff and students will expect them to be found. Things like Table Styles seem to be different and other features are just different enough to make the transition between online and client-based Office not easy for an average user.

OneDrive
.... and don't get me started on OneDrive which is not even working as an integration into the Business/Education version for the Mac. I just hope that when they unify the OneDrive code so it is not two products, that they can sort this out - very frustrating.

Office 'next' for the Mac
So I'm hoping that the much delayed 'next' version of Office for the Mac will help cure the issues and bring the Mac version back into line with the main Office suite on Windows and in the cloud, and I hope it comes soon .... real soon....... because otherwise using Office365 and Mac Office 2011 can't be recommended for a school.