Customer Reviews

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Home & Student Edition [Old Version]

5 star:		(197)
4 star:		(150)
3 star:		(114)
2 star:		(67)
1 star:		(119)

 

 

This version of Office 2008 is an improvement over Office 2004 in that it runs natively now on an Intel Mac. It is a major improvement in speed. And the stability has improved in that it has not crashed on me in the week it has been in use. Office 2004 used to crash almost daily before. If you do not have an Intel Mac do not bother with this upgrade. You are better off with Office 2004.

The look on Office 2008 is aesthetically pleasing and is more consistent with the elegant look of OSX.

That is about the best I have to say for this new upgrade. Word is so buggy I feel like I am working with a Beta version. I work a great deal with Spaces in Leopard and I have found that Word documents will jump to other windows. I have also found that when working in the notebook layout it can become unstable and partially disappear on me. The work arounds I have been using to stop this is I minimize the documents or I open another program in the Spaces window and then return to the document.

Word is still an excellent word processing program. The Notebook layout is essential for the note taking that I have to do, which other word processing programs don't have. Since I have to share documents with others it is handy to have a standard program with which to work.

The default format in Word is now Microsoft's .docx (xtml), which can be changed in the preferences to the more universal .doc.

When I have gone to the Microsoft website they have admitted that many of these problems are bugs and that they are being addressed. Another work around that MS recommended in Word was to create a new template from which to operate as it seems that the present template can be easily corrupted.

Since Office 2008 no longer works with macros and Visual Basic I have had to abandon the Excel self-calculating Invoice template I used to use all the way back to my PC days. I am now using a template that is in Pages - that works beautifully. The reason I am sticking with Excel over Numbers is that Excel is still a more powerful program. It keeps track of things that Numbers won't keep track of.

I am happier that Entourage is now more stable and responds better than the 2004 version. The My Day widget is a nice idea, but there is almost no room for customization and really makes no difference to how I organize my day.

I am left wondering if Microsoft is planning to go out of business. It seems that their products are getting worse. It is as if they have become bereft of any sense of creativity or innovation.;0) I had read that Office 2008 was designed by Mac enthusiasts. I think that was Microsoft propaganda. The impression I get is that Microsoft does not care about Mac business.

Is this a worthwhile upgrade? Not yet. If you can wait for the bugs to be worked out it will be a more satisfying upgrade. If you are dependent upon Visual Basic, or are operating on a PPC, save your money.

I was running office 2004 and waiting for this. This review is limited but I was looking for specific things.

The good:
-universal binary (faster on intel macs)
-PowerPoint now shows the slides on the left instead of just the text outline.
-you can install it alongside office 2004 and run both versions on the same computer

The bad:
-dragging images from other apps doesn't work anymore
-when you paste an image in word or PowerPoint, it gets converted to a different format so that if you put it back to the original app it's a simple picture instead of an editable one. (for example if you make an illustration in OmniGraffle, paste it in word 2008, you come back a week later and decide you want to tweak it, you can no longer copy the image back to OmniGraffle and edit it. You either must have saved the original or start over. Office 2004 didn't do this and so sadly I'm more productive with office 2004).
-installation is not drag and drop anymore and it installs things like silverlight without asking you. I feel my Mac got dirty now with who knows what installed where.

What didn't change
-you still can't generate motion paths in PowerPoint (to move objects around on a slide) like you can in the PC version since a few versions ago. But you can play this back fine if you generated the PowerPoint on a PC.

Conclusion
-intentionally crippled.
-a step backward for me as I want to use it for lectures in my class but now I'm afraid to because I have hundreds of diagrams and illustrations that now will be locked in PowerPoint.
-I'm going to completely use Keynote/Pages (iWork) from now on. Unfortunately some 3rd party apps require Office so I'm stuck with it. And it doesn't have all the features yet of Office.
-Unfortunately OpenOffice/NeoOffice exhibit the same image formating problem and they have their own issues.

Disappointing.

EDIT:
I have since reformatted my computer and sold Office to a Colleague who needed it. Good Riddance. So long Microsoft.

EDIT #2:
To add a hopeful note, I discovered Nisus Pro word processor. It does (technical writing) things Pages doesn't (e.g. index) and seems better than MS Word.

EDIT #3 (Oct 2009)
I'm doing fine without MS Office for a long time now. For very math heavy documents I use Lyx (free, little complicated to start but worth it). For casual word processing, I use Pages or Nisus or openoffice (typically one of these will open a doc or docx file correctly). I use Keynote for presentations with LaTeXiT (free) for math equations. And Numbers or openoffice has been adequate for spreadsheets. Since the new OS (snow leopard) has built in exchange support (which this version of office doesn't), there is nothing lacking.

I just bought a MacBook Pro 15". I love it. I am an Attorney and so I was concerned about making sure everything I produce on this machine is compatible with microsoft documents and programs. I bought the Macbook Pro because I didn't want to deal with Vista and because I am over microsoft in general --hot fixes, service packs, all sorts of SLOP work...and then this most recent and astounding inability to produce a stable product. Anyway, it was a big deal for me to buy a Macbook Pro rather than a Toshiba with Vista preloaded..I digress.

THE PROBLEM: I loaded microsoft Office for Mac, 2008 Home and Student Edition with hopes of using it. I shortly found that COMMON fonts do not transfer in Word, Excel does not work as smoothly and then I received a "Welcome to Entourage" email from microsoft that literally overwrote a weeks worth of emails. Poof! all gone! (gratefully I only had a weeks worth before my welcome email) I called microsoft to ask if there was a way to unwrite the overwritten and was promptly told that I need to establish a "case number" before they could process my inquiry. A Case number? good grief---A CASE NUMBER. Is it that bad? Yes, I could see how many companies may want to sue microsoft for all kinds of things right now. Anyway, I promptly uninstalled Office for Mac 2008 and I will return it. Maybe microsoft will decide to fix this BETA, surely we can expect microsoft to service pack/ hot fix this product to death and then MAYBE in six months at least something as minor as the default settings will coincide with the real world.

THE SOLUTION: I partitioned the hard drive on my macbook, installed WINDOWS XP and loaded my copy of 2003 Office Suite. Everything is perfect now. I get to have the very best laptop in the world and all this great functioning apple software (If you haven't made the switch---you will love Apple --it's so clean). I can create documents (because I must) THAT DON'T CRASH on the other side of my mac HD (the dark side). It's like having two computers in one; the preferred being the Apple. Why can't Apple make microsoft Office? (yes I really do know why).

THE FUTURE: Will I ever install a microsoft product onto the mac side of my HD again? --Not until mircosoft decides to come clean and deliver a product that isn't messed up. Who do these people think they are? How long do they think we'll just take it? Well, this time I didn't take it, instead---- I took it back.

Office 2008 is little more than window-dressing over the now-antiquated Office 2004. There are a few improvements to a few minor details, such as in Powerpoint 08's custom animation workflow, where one can now select more than one graphic element to move order of appearance in the animation order panel, that is now optionally persistent (i.e. no longer in a modal dialog box that you have to click out of in order to see your changes.) Much like iMovie 2008, the software advertises a streamlined, simplified workflow for beginners to the software, with a few new predefined templates for such things as posters, collateral campaigns, etc. Yet also like the new iMovie, the "updated" software ignores the needs and wishes of its original constituency, more advanced users who have dutifully ponied up money update after update.

For example, Office-for-Mac users have been waiting patiently for years and years for Office to enable its users to customize command key actions, to speed up workflows -- such as the ability to tell office to link the key combination COMMAND + OPTION + I, say, to the action "import a new image." Yet this ability, so fundamental to expert users, is missing from this update -- and Microsoft has done nothing even to enable such repetitive actions with its own keystroke functions. The user is forced to import images using laborious menus or icon clicks.

Even more galling, however, is the apparently anachronistic relationship between "Office 2008 for the Mac" and its analogue on the Windows side, Office 2007. Whereas Office 2007 offers a dramatically redesigned, much more contextual user interface (for better or for worse), Office 2008 for Mac features no such redesign -- only a greatly fattened, Leopard-style grabber bar that features a few tools in its toolbar strip, a gross misuse of this new Leopard feature that, as far as I can tell, is impossible to remove.

Further, new features included in Office 2007 for Windows are missing from Office 2008 for Mac. The former's new ability to animate page elements along a path -- moving them from one place on the screen to another -- is missing from the latter. Although this new feature is primitive and buggy in Office 2007 (most attempts to zoom in and edit an animation path resulted in an abrupt move of the windows focus back to the center of the screen, for example -- which is fine if you are editing a path that happens to BE in the center of the screen, but vexing and tedious if you're editing an element on an edge of the slide, as you keep needing to rescroll over to it after everything you do).

These and more features from Office 2007 I simply assumed would be in any product labeled "Office 2008". Boy was I wrong.

But wait -- there's more. Microsoft's own registration system not only failed to complete, but was actually able to corrupt my Leopard MacBook's keychain to boot -- this last "surprise" leading to an apparently unnecessary deletion of my entire keychain -- a HUGE pain). A look at Apple's discussions revealed that apparently many users are experiencing such frankly inexcusable issues.

To summarize, two familiar latin words come to mind for this clearly unambitious and half-baked piece of software:

CAVEAT EMPTOR
(BUYER BEWARE)

First, where did all of the reviews of this product go? Last time I checked the number was large and the consensus was fairly negative.

With Mac sales up and MS always paranoid, did MS decide that the Mac version of Office could be released with reduced features and more bugs than usual? This software reminds me of what we endured the darkest days of Apple hardware/software in the mid-90s. As examples of feature cuts, Excel 2008 has neither Solver nor any of the analysis add-ins. Fairly simple operations in Excel, such as drawing a graph, sometimes now involve a substantial amount of time to complete. I can't recall the last time that attempting to draw a simple scatterplot produced a warning that due to the "complexity" of the graph, I might experience a long wait. Similar operations were essentially instantaneous in the 2004 version.

The only thing I have found to like about the new Excel is the increase in the number of cells in the spreadsheet.

In Word, as in the bad old days, simply scrolling is an adventure. The screen does not re-draw correctly even in a short document with simple formatting. Be careful about scrolling and then deleting. You may be very surprised by which portion of text disappears.

I've been a Mac user since System 6, and I'm hard pressed to remember an "upgrade" this stripped of features and full of bugs.

I read it time and again: Some people don't necessarily want to buy Office, but they think they have to. If your employer or school requires it, I suppose the choice is made for you.

But this version of Office presents some very real problems.

If you are working in a PC-dominated environment, buying this version of Office is still not necessarily the answer. First, there are the reasonably well-known limitations of the Home and Student Edition: No support of Exchange or SharePoint, for example. Then, there is the much criticized decision to leave VBA out of all 2008 editions of Office:mac, affecting mostly Excel macros.

But then there are the less-publicized omissions and missing features: The Data Analysis Toolkit no longer works with Excel. (It used to in version 2004, but due to the lack of VBA, no longer does.) There is no equation editing in this version, nor will you be able to open those created in Windows versions of the software.

In fact, upon installation, Office does install a "readme" file (although it buries it in the program folder and does not call the user's attention to it) that contains a link to the "known issues" page for Office:mac at Microsoft's website. There, you find a list of further obstacles and incompatibilities when trying to work with Office users on Windows or with older versions of the software. And don't think these are isolated examples only power-users will encounter. I ran into them in surprisingly short order. Worse yet, there is currently no "test drive" version (as there was with 2004)for you to try before you buy.

With that "compatibility" so compromised, I can find no reason compelling enough to recommend this version of Office. It's buggy, slow, and expensive. Alternatives like iWork and OpenOffice are not only cheaper (or even free), they work much better.

UPDATE - Since I first posted this review, there has been an update patch issued by MS, and the price of this software has been cut by a third. My opinion and advice remain unchanged. Avoid Office:mac 2008. Performance, stability, and compatibility remain poor. The only difference is that you will now waste "only" a hundred bucks, instead of one-fifty.

Overall this office suite is excellent. A word of cautiuon for those who use Excel for Scientific and technical work: Visual Basic(entire suite) and the Analysis Toolpack have been removed from Excel 2008. This applies to all office versions. Be careful that Microsoft is not in fact selling you a "downgrade".

These comments focus primarily on Word and Excel, which are the applications I use. I have a 2.2 Ghz Core Duo 2 MacBook Pro with 4 gigs of RAM, so this is a very fast computer by most measures. Keep this in mind while reading my comments.

Pros:
1. The toolbars are better integrated into the workspace.
2. The graphics look a lot better.
3. File sizes are smaller in the new native format.

Problems:
1. Resizing a window is incredibly slow and takes 100% of the available computer power. It feels like you're using a computer from years ago.
edit: much better now, but still slower

2. The first launch of an office program after a restart takes a very, very long time - at least twice as long as a Office 2004 program.
* edit: improved by a noticeable amount

3. You can't edit equations from the Windows document format of Office 2007.
**edit this is fixed.

4. Any equations you make in Microsoft Word print fuzzy unless you reopen each one prior to printing. For a long document, this process sometimes takes me about 10 minutes just to print a document I created years ago and resaved in the new format.
** edit: this is fixed

5. Excel crashes about twice per day, even when working on new documents with just a few cells.
**edit: this is fixed

6. Documents created in the new native format take much, much, much longer to open than the exact same documents in the old format.
** edit: better, but still true.

7. Compared to Office 2008, Office 2004 is amazingly fast and is much more stable.
** edit: Office 2004 is still better, but not by much

8. The overall program is buggy. Things like adjusting or removing tabs don't work correctly - generally, it only registers something after a long delay.
** edit: much improved

9. Every document I create double-spaces between paragraphs. I can turn this feature off for a given document, but I can't save a default. Every time I save the default document template, it ignores this setting for some reason.
**edit this is STILL not fixed, although you can change it if you follow a very complicated procedure.

In short, this is stunningly poor software, with a new challenging annoyance around every corner I've turned. I'm continually surprised by how unresponsive and slow the software is, and compatibility with older versions of Office is fairly bad. I would recommend staying with Office 2004 or buying it instead of Office 2008.

March 24, 2008: I deleted Office 2008 from my system and reinstalled Office 2004. I'm much happier, and things work again!

March 31, 2009: I'm still not impressed with this software, but it's now acceptable.

In case there wasn't enough evidence in the world at large regarding Microsoft's failure to do ANYTHING right, Office 2008 for Mac is just one more solid example of the ineptitude and lack of anything resembling intelligence in Redmond Washington.

First of all, I have three macs and one PC, bought three licenses of this alleged 'upgrade' and have since uninstalled them and replaced them with Office 2004.

One mac is a iMac G5 with maxed out everything and it ran painfully slow. The other two are Intel based macs with 4GB of RAM and 256MB of Video RAM and to my surprise it loaded twice as long as Office 2004. This is not a random occurrence, every time on both computers it takes nearly 40 seconds just to load. My four year old PC loads Word in about .5 seconds.

Forget using the notebook layout. The interface is awful and the only way you can switch between levels is by setting your margins in 'Print Preview'. As a law student I am constantly outlining and the fact that I have to do my outlining in 'Print Preview' mode is just ridiculous. Office 2004 did the job just fine by hitting the 'Tab' button.

I know there are those of you who actually studied software programming who will argue that I don't understand anything about how the software works. You can even convince me that Office 2008 is faster and more stable etc... But as someone who spends about 12 hours a day in Word I can say this product really really, ridiculously sucks.

I find myself saving every time I type a period because the software is so unstable. One second you're typing, the next you are faced with a twirling umbrella for four minutes. Sometimes it just flat out crashes on you. Then you enter 'Recovery Mode'.... enough said.

Finally, why does Microsoft insist on making nothing backwards compatible. By that I mean why not stick with .doc? Why did Microsoft have to go out and invent something called .docx? Now when I E-Mail my work as attachments to friends, I have to convert it to .doc before sending it. I don't care what advantages .docx has, the fact is, Microsoft simply wants everyone to upgrade. As a business savvy individual, I can understand that, but wouldn't you rather make something that is easy to use and reliable?

Just like I downgraded my PC from Vista to XP I am downgrading back to Office 2004.

It is a "Universal" application, and therefore, this upgrade is a "must have" for users of Office 2004. The speed and general improvement in responsiveness on Intel Macs is quite apparent.

Also, it supports the new Microsoft document formats generated by the Windows Office Suite. Most people will need this, sooner or later, but it is difficult to escape the conclusion that this is a "problem" created by Microsoft that allowed them to sell a "solution". There is no functional benefit to these new formats and they remain incompatible with other office suites, despite claims that they are "open".

Overall, I was disappointed.

The "upgrade" to Entourage is very limited. You'll have no trouble using it, and it is faster, but obvious features are missing (e.g, direct support of web calendar feeds). Entourage 2004 had such potential and yet the new version is virtually identical to the old. In fact, aside from re-compiling the code for Intel processors and making the user interface pretty, it would appear that nothing else was done. Sad.

A caution regarding Entourage: Support for Exchange Servers is not included in the "Home and Student" edition. This is a ham-fisted downgrade from the previous release. If you install the Home and Student edition on a computer that previously was configured to retrieve mail from Exchange, you end up with an unusable installation and no way to "undo" it. When you try to delete the Exchange account, you will go down a path of seriously untested code that hangs Entourage and ultimately makes your computer unstable. The only way out of this is to uninstall the Home and Student edition and (buy and) install the full edition! Beware!

Fortunately, the uninstall and install functions are rock solid.

Finally, the Remote Desktop support that was available in Office 2004 is missing in this "upgrade". If you need that, you'll have to preserve it from your Office 2004 installation before you let Office 2008 silently obliterate it! Fortunately, the old version seems to work afterwards.

And it would be nice to see Mac editions of Groove, and some of the other Win Office components. Another missed opportunity.

On the whole, this is a must-have upgrade that left me feeling disappointed. What has Microsoft been doing with this product for the past 5 years?