Customer Reviews

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Upgrade [Old Version]

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

For anyone who uses Microsoft Exchange server, you need the full version of this product. That's all good and well. What is NOT good and well, however, is that Entourage still does not support key features of Outlook and Exchange: you cannot sync tasks and notes, you cannot archive, and you cannot import .PST files. Entourage does not support complex HTML, either, so forwarding or replying to a complex HTML email results in garbage HTML tags going to your recipient. In short, what should have been a triumph for Microsoft is a resounding dud. The Mac is still very much a second class citizen for Microsoft users in an enterprise. I hope Microsoft will immediately address Entourage. Sadly, in this release, they did next to nothing to provide serious Entourage improvements.

The other applications are mildly spruced up, and are now Universal (Intel) binaries, so they run faster on the new Macs, and are now feature set equivalent to Windows.

But if you are like me and 90% of your work day is spent on email, the lack of a serious equivalent to Outlook on the Mac makes this release a real disappointment. Entourage should have been brought up to Outlook-like capabilities, but it is far, far behind its Windows companion.

Personally, I would recommend using Apple's Mail and iCal, coupled with Apple's iWork products. I bought both and was hoping, frankly, for better from Office. I'm going back to iWork and Apple's applications and ripping out my Exchange server. Microsoft had four years to bring Entourage up to par. Instead they've delivered essentially a universal binary release on Entourage 2004. We Mac users deserve better.

Microsoft decided to downgrade Excel for Mac 2008 by not including Visual Basic (aka "macros") and the Analysis Toolpack (the statistics tools), which are both very important for business / technical users and included in the 2004 version. And worse, theses packages are an integral part of Office 2007 for Windows. To me, this clearly shows that Microsoft only downgraded the new version Excel for Mac so that prosumers still have a reason to keep running Windows, despite all the known problems with Vista. If MS offered a "full" version of Excel, many users would see no point in running XP/Vista anymore...

Despite all the enhancements in the 2008 version, Office for Mac 2004 runs without a problem in Intel Macs (thanks to Rosetta) and delivers what is expected. So people that use macros or the statistical tools just CAN'T upgrade to the new version.

The suite seems fast and well put together, however aside from the aforementioned missing VBA support and analysis toolpaks in Excel, one major highly visible feature is missing from Entourage. The missing feature is the ability to forward HTML emails. It's a glaringly ridiculous feature omission. I don't want to have to continually fallback to mail.app just to forward intact HTML emails. Microsoft needs to fix this now.

Office 2008 is much faster than the 2004 version, and it makes your entire system feel delightfully snappy. Unfortunately, Word 2008 doesn't work with Spaces. It allows you to place different documents in different spaces, but your documents won't stay there. Instead, they all return to one space. Who would have thought Word 2004 (which has no problem with Leopard) would work better with Leopard than Word 2008?

Summary verdict: if you use Word and rely on Spaces, you'll hate Office 2008.

If you do any programming or statistical analysis with Office, stay away from this ripoff!!! VBA and the Analysis Toolpak are gone -- and of course, you won't find this out until AFTER you've wasted your money!!!!!

This review will not discuss MS Office vs. its competitors. I am a long-time PC user who switched to the Mac about a year ago. I have used Office forever because it was the standard at every job I've had. I know it inside and out.

When I switched to the Mac I tried Office 2004 and didn't like it. I was fortunate enough to have an Intel-based Mac, so I loaded Office 2003 using Parallels. I even tried Office 2007 and disliked it because it seemed like all they did was rearrange the menus and make it harder to use.

Office 2008 is a winner for these reasons based on my experience:

* The overall product is the one that I've grown used to over the years. The menu structure is exactly (OK, let's say 95%) the same as Office 2003 for Windows. That means the learning curve is almost zero.

* It has many design features that make the Mac better to use than Windows.

* It uses the Inspector interface instead of the "ribbon" that Office 2007 for Windows uses (which I dislike)

* It's fast!

It doesn't have Visual Basic macros. But I'm not a big macro user. I will keep Office 2003 on my Parallels/Windows side of the computer, so if macros are important I'll have access to that function.

If you have Office 2004 on your Mac, just insert the upgrade CD and go. It will detect Office 2004 and install normally. If you don't have 2004 on your system, you'll need to have the original 2004 CD to insert at the end of the install for verification.

If you're committed to Microsoft Office for personal reasons or company reasons and you want a version of Office that is fast and Mac-like, then this is for you.

I bought a beautiful new iMac for Christmas for the family (and me). It came with a coupon from Microsoft that permitted me to upgrade (for free) Office 2004 Student/Teacher Edition to Office 2008 Home and Student Edition when it became available in the Spring. I thought, "wow, those guys at Microsoft are pretty neat. What a nice gift and just in time for the holiday." I brought my shiny new iMac home, set it up, and it ran beautifully - of course. In short order, I had Entourage interacting with my Exchange server at work sending / retrieving email. What could be better, the kids had a place to do their homework and I did too.

I got my new version of Office 2008 Home and Student Edition today. I installed it. I started Entoruage, and guess what? It no longer supports Exchange servers. Like buying a new car and finding out that, although last years model had air conditioning, this years model does not - I was stunned. Could my new found appreciation for Microsoft be dashed so suddenly? You bet it could be - those Bas.....!

My only alternative, if I would like to send and receive email at home is to upgrade at considerable expense to the standard edition. So, if I want to retrieve my previous functionality, I get to pay ~$200.00 for an upgrade to Microsofts gracious "free upgrade offer." A truely brilliant peice of marketing.

My company (the one that I own) spends several $100,000.00 annually on Dell computers to be included with our products. Each Dell has a host of Microsoft software on it. I swear that I will do everything I can to have our design teams remove Microsoft's products from ours - sorry Dell. Microsoft is a decietful company and should pay the price for their "bend the customer over" mentality.

After a year of frustration, Microsoft has finally enabled Mac users to open and save documents in Office 2007's Open XML format (.docx, .xlsx and so on).

But apart from that and some pretty interface improvements, I see little reason to have upgraded.

SPEED: Some people claim a speed improvement in Office 2008 on Intel Macs, but I have seen none on my current iMac running Leopard.

ADVANCED FUNCTIONS: Office no longer supports macros created by PC users.

E-MAIL: I've noticed one improvement with Entourage 2008: It crashes less often than Entourage 2004 on my Intel Mac. But I've noticed little improvement, otherwise.

Entourage does not provide significantly improved support for Exchange. Group calendaring and out-of-office message support are only marginally improved. There's still no synchronization of tasks, notes or rules.

In recent years, the ability to customize and enhance one's e-mail application has become standard procedure for heavy-duty users of e-mail. But while other mail applications such as Mozilla Thunderbird support plug-ins regardless of one's host operating system, Entourage still does not work with Outlook add-ons and vice-versa.

Speed is important when searching through thousands of old e-mail messages. But strangely, Entourage's internal search feature seems slow as ever. Yet searches for the same Entourage 2008 messages are almost instantaneous in Leopard's Spotlight. So I question Entourage's partial but incomplete integration with Spotlight.

ONLINE INTEGRATION: Office Live Workspace (Microsoft's answer to Google Docs) does not recognize Mac installations of Office 2008 and therefore is rendered almost useless.

MESSAGING: Finally, MSN Messenger -- after all these years -- STILL does not interconnect with AIM, Yahoo, Google Talk, Jabber and other widely accepted instant-messaging protocols.

Office 2008 is an expensive, glitzy anachronism in an age of online and open-source office applications.

Never in my experience with mainstream software has it been my displeasure to deal with software this buggy. Powerpoint cannot work with many fonts reliably other than the ones it comes with. Word cannot print documents with pictures in it with any regularity. And excel was losing data ... my people would work on a document, save it, open it later, and the data entered was no longer there. This software was not ready for release. And the features added hardly account for the price. Plus, one last little, FU to everyone involved, it saves file types that require people to upgrade to their software (or you can download utilities that allow you to change docx to doc). I recommend anyone considering the Mac MS Office 2008 upgrade to wait, and then wait some more. We bought itm installed it and have now downgraded back to 2004. Sort of the same thing that happened with Windows Vista users. Caveat Emptor.

Overall this suite is excellent with a beautiful new interface. Science and other technical users need to be made aware that Microsoft has removed Visual Basic for Applications(entire suite) and the Analysis Toolpack from Excel 2008. Be careful that Microsoft does not in fact sell you a "downgrade". For business users the suite is excellent. Everything seems to run well and is very stable at least on my Macs.