While modern day smartphones and tablets are great devices to surf the web, consume media and communicate with they may not be the most productive devices on the market. To be fair, they do feature various productivity suites like iWork on the iPad and of course calendar applications, among other things, but such software tends to not be as feature intensive as their desktop counterparts.However, when it comes down to raw productivity, a traditional laptop or desktop computer is second to none. Just imagine sitting there typing out a 20 page report on a smartphone’s tiny QWERTY keyboard or worse, a touchscreen, and you’ll quickly see what I’m talking about.

In the business world, Microsoft’s Windows desktop
operating system has long been the favorite due to its extensive line up of productive software. Microsoft Office, for one, has always been leaps ahead on the Windows platform with the Mac OS X version tending to trail behind. Luckily, now that the OS X install base continues to grow more software developers are proceeding to release similar software on both platforms at the same time and Microsoft is no different.

Apple addicts may swear by the OS X-exclusive iWork productivity suite but in the work world, Microsoft Office is the standard. Released in 2008 for the Mac OS X platform was Microsoft Office 2008
which brought with it features normally only found on the Windows versions. However, like I said above, the Windows version
is years ahead currently resting at Office 2010. But that doesn’t mean OS X is going to be left in the dark as it’s been known that Apple’s platform will be getting Microsoft Office 2011 before year’s end complete with the new “ribbon” interface along side boat loads of pre-made document templates.

Early last month the pricing for Office 2011 had been announced ranging from $199 to $279 depending on if you wanted the Home and Student edition or the Home and Business edition. However, at the time, we had no official confirmation as to when Office 2011 for OS X would actually be out with Microsoft only saying ‘late October’.

Luckily, just recently it was noted that Amazon had put up a listing for Office 2011 that had the software package shipping on. As of now, the date has since been pulled but it does line up nicely with Microsoft’s late October release window. Too bad they didn’t push it out before the school year began as it surely would have sparked interest with returning students.

We’ll let you know if the release date changes, but for now expect Office 2011 to be out for Macs sometime around October 26th.