Now with the SkyDrive for Mac OS X Lion* preview, SkyDrive for Windows, and the release of SkyDrive for iPad, you can save and store your important documents or other files in the SkyDrive folder in Finder and access them from anywhere.

Here is a short video showing what you can do with the new SkyDrive:

We also created a page to show how SkyDrive can help you access and share documents, photos, and notes across Apple devices and PCs. There are even a few tips for people switching from iDisk.

Please try out the SkyDrive preview and give us feedback on Twitter.

During the preview, the SkyDrive icon will appear in your dock. To hide it, follow these instructions.

Click here to download the new SkyDrive for Mac OS X Lion* preview.

This update is primarily preventative and targets those who have not yet installed SP2; however, whether you have or have not installed SP2, please run this update to bring your installation of Microsoft Office:Mac 2011 to the latest version.

Download the Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 14.2.1 update package now.

Thanks for your help and patience during these improvements!

Our goal is provide the simplest update experience for everyone – so we have temporarily stopped pushing out the SP2 update through Microsoft AutoUpdate while we investigate the issue. Customers are still able to obtain the SP2 update via the Microsoft Downloads site by clicking here. We encourage you to either wait for the AutoUpdate, or follow the directions in the above blog post before manually updating to ensure you don’t experience issues. We will provide an update once we have more information to share.

Before installing Office 2011 SP2, use the following article to rebuild your database in 14.1.4 to ensure that your database is in a good state for the upgrade to safely apply: Rebuild the Outlook for Mac 2011 database to resolve problems

If you’ve already installed Office 2011 SP2, and you receive the message ‘Please upgrade the Office database,’ please check out the following article for the workaround: Outlook 2011 start error: “Please upgrade the Office database”

We apologize to users who were affected by this issue. Users who successfully updated report very noticeable improvements including performance and a host of other fixes.

We appreciated your feedback! As the newest member of the Office for Mac family, Outlook 2011 continues to get the most requests from consumers and businesses alike; therefore, our top priority for this release was Outlook, and this service pack resolves many of the most common requests. The more notable Outlook enhancements include:
• Sync performance with Exchange server,
• Performance improvements while deleting multiple items,
• Displaying email message content, and sending email.

Outlook performance is also improved in IMAP account sync and the database rebuild utility. New capabilities include:
• Scheduling resources in the calendar,
• Distribution list expansion,
• Week number display in the calendar.

Word, Excel, and PowerPoint have improved performance with additional modest improvements. For example, we updated PowerPoint to take advantage of full screen view in Lion, and we improved grammar checkers for Italian and German languages. We also made it easier to work with Office documents on SkyDrive and addressed several smaller issues in response to your feedback.

If you’re interested in seeing the complete list of fixes and updates, you can find the Knowledge Base article here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2685940.

Thank you for your comments and feedback – keep them coming. And please enjoy SP2!

-Pat Fox

For example, turn a circle into an egg shape. Or rearrange the points in a freeform shape that you created with the drawing tool.

To see the points on the shape, right-click (or hold down CONTROL and click) the shape, and then click Edit Points. Then drag a point wherever you want.

Tips Zoom in 200% or 400% for more precision. To move the object with finer control, hold down COMMAND and press any arrow key.

For more information about changing shapes, read the following Office for Mac Help topic: Add or change a shape.

- Dawn, Office for Mac writer

I’ve also included the equivalents in Excel for
Windows in case you have to jump back and
forth between platforms like I do.

- All Excel for Mac 2011 keyboard shortcuts
- Common Office for Mac 2011 keyboard shortcuts
- Create or delete a keyboard shortcut
- Excel for Windows 2010 keyboard shortcuts

Whether you use the free Office Web Apps, Office for
Mac 2011, or Office for Windows 2010, you can save,
download, and collaborate in real-time on all of your
online documents.

The latest Windows Live blog post shares 7 great power tips for collaborating on Office documents in the cloud.

You’ll learn how to add a SkyDrive link to your desktop, create shared online workspaces, and more.

Also take a look at two other videos, specific to SkyDrive and online collaboration with Office for Mac 2011.
- Access and edit your files from anywhere
- Collaborate with online documents

Stephanie is a Microsoft Office MVP and professional
document consultant who built many of the templates
for Office for Mac 2011.

How did you come to build the templates for Office for Mac 2011?
My expertise is in creating great documents and templates for the Microsoft Office applications. For Office for Mac templates, the team engaged a wonderful graphic designer and brought me on to build the templates from his designs. Office 2011 is the second release of Office for Mac that I’ve worked on—I also built many of the templates and themes in Office 2008.

Which templates did you build? How many total templates are there in Office 2011?
I built most of the templates that come with Word 2011, several of the themes that you see in PowerPoint 2011 (and, of course, you can apply the same themes in Word and Excel as well), and—along with fellow Office MVP Beth Melton—some of the Excel 2011 templates.

There are more than 200 templates (including themes) built into Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, but when you search for templates in the Office 2011 template galleries, your results might also include templates from Office.com, giving you access to far more than just the ones I built.

Can you share some simple tips & tricks for customers who want to customize Office templates?
So many things come to mind, but maybe the most important one is to always consider a template before starting from scratch. A lot of people look at a template and think it won’t work for them because of the colors or placeholder photos, or even the template name. But customizing a template is much easier than you might realize. In fact, you can customize the colors and fonts of a template right in the template galleries in Word or PowerPoint, before you even create the document. Using themes, it’s so easy to change so much about the look at any time—fonts, colors, and graphic formatting effects—with just a click. And replacing placeholder images with your own is a breeze. For example, in Word, just drag photos from the Media Browser or Finder and drop them on a picture placeholder. Voila!

Even if the layout of a template isn’t exactly what you need, you can often save a lot of time by keeping just the parts you need. Say you need a custom template to fit your company branding. You can apply your custom colors and fonts to a built-in template you like, and then customize whatever elements you need—such as adding your company logo and appropriate images. Why reinvent the wheel when you have so many professionally designed, pre-built templates to help you get started?

Templates can also be a great way to learn about Office features. For example, if you need to create a newsletter, brochure, flyer, or other publication-styles document, you have many templates to choose from in Word 2011. But you can also use the wide variety of Publishing Layout templates for ideas on how to use Publishing Layout View in Word, to easily lay out professional-quality documents for yourself.

Do you have a favorite template?
Too many to pick just one, but here are a few of my favorites…
- For publication-style documents, I really love a lot of our newsletters and brochures, especially because of how customizable they are. For example, the seasonal family newsletters (named Fall, Spring, etc.) could so easily be used for either a business or a school … just replace the pictures and maybe add your own custom colors.

- Small businesses (like me, for example—I’m a one-person business) who want a visual brand identity but don’t have the budget to hire a designer, can use (and customize) one of several identity sets that provide templates across Word and PowerPoint for an instantly-branded look. What I refer to as an identity set is a coordinated set of templates that include a full batch of everyday Word document types (letterhead, memos, agendas, invoices, business reports, and more), and a theme for use with PowerPoint presentations. It’s a huge timesaver. You’ll find these for the Advantage, Capital, Plaza, Revolution, and Spectrum designs.

- I also really love the evergreen calendars in both Word and Excel. Office MVP Beth Melton worked on both of these with me. In fact, she wrote the code for both. In Word, we used VBA macros so you can pick a month and year for your calendar and have it update automatically. In Excel, we have calendars that update with your selected month and year, all generated by formulas.

NOTE: To view all templates, in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, click File > New from Template.

Besides templates, do you have a favorite Office for Mac feature?
Once again, there’s just no way I can pick only one! But here are a few of my favorites:
- Dynamic reordering in PowerPoint and in Word Publishing Layout view is so beautiful and so useful for people who create complex documents and presentations. When I first saw it, I loved how it looked, but didn’t think I’d really use it that often. In reality, I don’t think I’ve created many Word or PowerPoint documents, templates, or themes since, when it didn’t save me a lot of time.

- Publishing Layout view in Word is another amazing Office for Mac-exclusive that I just couldn’t do without. It is much more than just one feature – it’s essentially an easy-to-use desktop publishing tool built right into Word. It provides layout-specific features such as dynamic guides, and the ability to drag and drop pages right where you need them. (And, of course, the advanced picture editing tools that are available across Word, PowerPoint, and Excel—such as the improved cropping tool—are perfect for the content I create in Publishing Layout view.)

- SmartArt graphics! This diagramming tool was introduced in the previous version, and it’s available in Office for Windows as well. What I like is that I can create great looking, professional diagrams essentially by just typing a bulleted list. There are, I believe, over 130 different built-in diagram layouts across a number of diagram types such as organization charts, process diagrams, and list diagrams. And they all coordinate automatically with your document theme. So powerful and ridiculously easy to use.

Your website is named for Voltaire. Would he be a Windows or Mac Office user?
I’d like to think Voltaire would be a cross-platform user—but maybe that’s just because I am.

If you have any questions for Stephanie about Office, templates, or even Voltaire, feel free to contact her.

- The Office for Mac team

When you click a picture in a document, the Format Picture tab appears on the ribbon. From here, you can quickly apply the styles and formatting you want.

For example, I used the Format Picture options to crop, apply a filter, a border, and a reflection effect to this picture.

Now if I decide that I want a different picture, but still want to use the same styles and formatting, I can just right-click (or Control-click) the image, click Change Picture, and choose the one I want from my hard drive.

I’m going to go one step further and turn this picture into a “placeholder” (sometimes called a “drop zone”) so that I can see a preview of how different pictures will look in my document before committing — try before you buy, if you will.

1. Right-click the picture, and then click Format Picture.
2. In the left pane, click Layout, and then click the Advanced button.
3. Select the Placeholder check box.

Now when I drag a picture from the Media Browser or from my desktop over the placeholder, I see a preview of the image along with all of the applied styles and formatting, and can decide if I like the effects.

Picture placeholders are particularly useful in documents that you update regularly but want a consistent style and appearance from issue to issue, such as brochures or newsletters.

For more tips and information about working with pictures in Office, check out:
- Video: Edit pictures in Office
- Video: Create a custom flyer
- Video: Remove a picture background

- Lowell, Office for Mac writer