Microsoft has chosen Macworld as the venue to announce that Office for Mac 2011 is due to be available later this year.

"You, the Mac community, have a voice", says Microsoft, somewhat dramatically, in a press release. "And at the Microsoft Macintosh Business Unit, we listen. Our charter for more than two decades has been to use your feedback to build the best productivity suite on the Mac".

With a new user interface, Office for Mac 2011 will offer new co-authoring tools to let users work on Word, PowerPoint or Excel files from different locations with a "Presence Everywhere" feature that will give real-time status updates on who is working on the document directly in the application.

There's also a connection to Microsoft Office Web Apps from the application to access and share Office documents from any machine with an internet connection, while Outlook for Mac is coming to Office 2011, replacing Entourage and will import PST files from Outlook for Windows - apparently a top customer request.

Microsoft says Office 2011 will be the "best, most compatible productivity suite on the Mac", which it says is a real key to productivity as it gleefully highlights that "75% of Mac users also use a PC".

For updates on all things Office for Mac, Microsoft suggests following the team on Twitter over at @OfficeforMac and we'll also be sure to keep you posted on a launch date.