Customer Reviews

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac [Old Version]

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(31)
3 star:		(28)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(43)

 

 

I've been a heavy Office 2004 Excel user for the past two+ years. I was severely disappointed when I installed Office 2008. Microsoft elected to omit functionality that is core to being productive in Excel - solver support, data analysis, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), and more. If you rely on Excel to do any type of business analysis or are a student that will require access to data analysis tools (regression, histograms, distributions, etc.), you will be SOL with 2008. I highly recommend that you avoid Office 2008.

Office 2008 is so incomplete and unsuited for professional work that it prompted me to write this review, which is my first.

As a big Excel user, I eagerly preordered and purchased this program, anticipating faster speed since it would run natively on my intel mac, and looking forward to being able to handle spread sheets with more than 65000 rows of data. Well I got one thing. What I didn't know was that I would be trading Visual basic support for this.
Not only have I lost all of my macros that I have written over the years, but it still runs as slow if not slower than Excel 2004, IT hangs, crashes, and corrupts files. I had to place a support call to identify a bug in the text import wizard, which is costing me 1 of my two free support calls. The icon buttons have been moved from the floating toolbars to the top of the spreadsheet window, so that unless you leave the window wide enough to stretch across you your screen you can't access them except through a drop down menu. Need I go on? The only reason I gave it a second star is for the increased number of rows.

I had been putting off a new macbook purchase until office 2008 came out. I am a power Excel user and was looking forward to the performance increase. Hardly. I have 10MB Excel files that take 5 minutes to open. A simple cut and paste of two continguous cells causes a 5 minute hang up. Some files won't even open, or if they do open, won't run. Just an absolute disaster. If you need any kind of advanced Excel functionality, avoid this product.

I was so eager to have a version of Office running in Universal Binary. I had imagined it would be fast, at least compared to the dinosaur that is Office 2004. Boy, was I wrong! I've got a brand-new MacBook Pro, but Word and Excel are slow as molasses; the launch times are especially appalling. Word can easily take up to 25 seconds (!) to open up a new blank document. Various internet forums describe launch times that are even longer than this. Word 2003 on my XP machine launches almost instantaneously.

Cursor movement and text selection are also very sluggish.

The programs are buggy, too. I've already had numerous crashes, and have lost some data.

One final note: it's impossible to track changes in Word in-line (i.e. without the annotation bubbles) but to keep the bubbles for comments. (This was possible is Word 2003 for XP.) In other words, if you write a comment while tracking changes in-line, the comment can only be viewed in the bizarre Review Pane, buried among dozens of marked changes. It's completely maddening and a big minus for anyone who does serious editing work.

A big thumbs down on this one, M$. I wish I could get my money back. DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY ON THIS PRODUCT.

If you need Office for any current Mac, get Office 2004 instead while you can, or see if iWorks is sufficient.
Excel 2008 is substantially slower than 2004 (on a MacBook/2GHz C2D/2GB/ample HD space), not able to fully read 2004 documents (even without VBA), and mainly useful to get a long and detailed look at the spinning beachball (minutes to open an Excel document that 2004 opens in seconds, all while the cpu load is at 100%).
If it was free and a beta release, it might be acceptable. But given the price tag and based on the anticipated speed increase (native on Intel, as compared to Rosetta), it is utterly disappointing.

I have a MacBook 2.2 core 2 duo. Guess what? I can open a windows Excel spreadsheet faster with iWork (Numbers) than I can with MS Excel 2008 for the mac. Also, I can open a word document faster with iwork (pages) than I can with this version of Word. And I am not just talking a tiny bit faster. A Lot faster. Don't waste your time. Its functionality is also severely crippled in that the data Analysis Toolpak that is at the core of Excel's functionality is NOT INCLUDED in this expensive doorstop. If you must use excel on a mac, better to get windows xp and run it on parallels for the os x and just use a pirated copy of the best excel to date, Excel 2003. Peace.

I have a dual PPC G5 and have never had any issues running the Office v. X that I bought with my mac. Last week I decided it was time to update everything since I never even moved up to Office 2004. I was working on an important project for grad school and thought that I might find new features that would help with the multimedia aspects - that was a big mistake!

Powerpoint is absolutely terrible and crashes all the time. The notes section cannot even handle copy and paste operations or exporting to a Quicktime movie without crashing. Many features are gone or replaced with different ones that are overkill. For example, you cannot shape text in word art anymore. Instead they give you many different quick color and shadow options - which could be accomplished another way anyway. It seems to me that what they think is more useful is just a way of telling me how my output will look. I want complete control back!

Also, Word and Powerpoint run much slower for me now. Have not explored Excel yet, but have read that they have removed scripting and data analysis. I really need the data analysis for school.

I cannot even go back now and install my old v. X, because the updates do not go back that far!

Really unhappy that Microsoft released this product when it is still so unstable and that they decided the features I used more than any others were not important.

I was happy to upgrade to Office 2008 for Mac (I have a new macbook with Leopard) but its so bad I am going to reinstall the old office. Never done that before. Powerpoint is an amazing memory hog. 2G of RAM for a 40mb presentation? Get real. Word is ok except for the "new" standard, which means documents must be saved in two formats (what were they thinking?). Excel is the worst. The menu forces one to select from projects and elements galleries that are ridiculous, not useful and impossible to work around. And no more macros? Was there no beta testing? I actually paid microsoft $50 more for phone help to find hidden menus. Type "chart label" into the Help menu and get No Results Found. I could go on, but my bottom line is don't upgrade.

Horribly, horribly slow on my quad core 2.66 GHz Intel Tower Macintosh with 4 Gigs Ram.

Sometimes I have to wait 5 seconds for letters to appear after typing in word. Excel is very slow as well.

Very, very disappointing. Microsoft support basically told me "too bad sucker".

Complete and Total Waste of Money

This version of Office is a down-grade from 2004. MS omitted vital parts of the system making it unuseful for students/teachers/scientists
1. Excel - unuseful as described in earlier statements (mainly problems with using analysis and for some reason they emoved possibility of using real error bars (cutom)... move impossible to understand
2. Powerpoint - decides for you what you can group /ungroup etc.
3. Word - incompatible with reference managers such as endnote
The only part that's a bi improved is entorague...
bottom line... I deleted the software I purchased and I am using 2004 again !!!!!!
I WANT MY MONEY BAAAACCCCKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!!!