The bottom line is this: Microsoft Word for Mac no longer feels like a second-string word processing program in the Microsoft Office suite. It is an update that unifies a user’s experience across platforms, and it’s also a release that contains many valuable new features and improvements-more than 30 in all. The Intel-only Word 2011 is a significant and substantive update to Microsoft’s flagship Mac word processing and page-layout application. They were essentially two completely different products designed for what, in Microsoft’s mind, were two completely different sets of users. For as long as I’ve been reviewing Microsoft Word, it has been difficult to see any kind of relationship between Word for Mac and Word for Windows, beyond the name and file format.
