Microsoft confirms planned Lion features in Office for Mac 2011

If you’re a Communicator for Mac user, you no doubt were disappointed finding out that the software crashes a lot in Lion. Worry not, as Microsoft tells us via a blog post that an update is due via the Microsoft AutoUpdate mechanism “in the next day or so”. The team’s Pat Fox also revealed that some of the most exciting features in Lion are coming to Office for Mac 2011:

Yes, we are working hard with Apple to enable versioning, auto save, and full-screen for Office for Mac 2011. I know your next question will be “when?”, and unfortunately I can’t answer that – but it’s likely measured in months not days – just to set expectations.

And if your daily productivity involves Office for Mac 2004, Microsoft warned earlier, don’t upgrade to Lion because Office 2004 was a PowerPC-based product and Lion no longer includes Rosetta, a software emulator for the PowerPC instruction set. It’s nice that major software developers are adding Versions, Auto Save and Full Screen to their apps. Are you listening, Adobe?

Auto Save enables third-party apps to automatically save changes to documents as users create them, mimicking the software on iPad and iPhone that forgoes the Save command altogether in favor of the persistent state. The Full Screen feature transitions an app from a window to full screen and removes unnecessary user interface elements, which is cool for notebooks like the MacBook Air. Versioning is basically a Time Machine for documents, letting you browse changes and go back in time to restore the document up to the point when it was empty.