Customer Reviews

Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 Business Edition Upgrade [Old Version]

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(22)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I installed Office 2008 on my 1.25GHz G4 iMac, running System 10.5.8 . Since many reviewers have thoroughly discussed the features of each Office application already, I am focusing this review on my experience of upgrading from Office v.X to Office 2008 on a PowerPC iMac.


Background:
*I have experience with several versions of Mac Office, beginning with version 4.2 . I also have used Office 98, Office 2001, and as mentioned above, Office v.X before upgrading to Office 2008.
*The way I use Office has changed over time. I made extensive use of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in graduate school and in various professional settings through Office 2001. Now I mostly use Excel to do basic financial analysis and Word to write personal documents.


Installation:
*Installation is straightforward, using Apple's familiar Installer mechanism. I prefer this method to the old drag-and-drop installation method because OS X is so sensitive to where things are installed.
*The installer program automatically finds older versions of Office and allows users to delete them easily.
*Many customized settings can be transferred from previous Office installations, including dictionaries, autocorrect lists, and proofing tool settings.
*Once Office 2008 is installed, several updates must be downloaded and installed. Microsoft should have made this process more user-friendly. Users must manually shut down other applications, including the Office 2008 Installer, before running the update installer.


Pros:
*Office is now a Universal Binary so the same program will run on both PowerPC and Intel Macs.
*An Uninstaller is placed in the Office folder automatically.
*Office will check for updates automatically on a schedule chosen by the user. No more messing around on the Microsoft website, hoping you didn't miss a Service Pack or Critical Update.
*Users can now turn the feedback sounds on and off. If hearing a chime, a popping bubble, or some other "cute" noise every time you did something drove you crazy, you will greatly appreciate this long overdue feature.
*Speaking of unnecessary cuteness, Clippy the Paperclip is gone! Yesssssss!


Cons:
*All the applications startup and quit slowly on a G4 machine. Office v.X applications started and quit virtually instantaneously (yes, I realize v.X was written specifically for PowerPC processors). Saving files is slow as well.
*Office 2008 uses a new file format that is not compatible with other versions of Office. If you send documents to people who are not fully up to date, you have to save a second version or limit yourself to working with the older file format.
*It's good that Microsoft no longer just ports Windows Office to the Mac. Nonetheless, there are user interface inconsistencies both within and across the applications which keep Office from feeling 100% Macintosh.
*Silverlight, Microsoft's attempt to compete with Macromedia Flash, is installed by default.

*WARNING FOR POWER USERS: No macros in Excel! Bad, bad, bad move. And no support for Visual Basic.


Bottom line: Office 2008 doesn't hold any surprises for experienced Office users. For the most part, everything still operates in the way to which you are accustomed. If you own a PowerPC Mac and use an older version of Office, you should carefully consider whether you want to upgrade or not. The benefits of the new features may be outweighed by the inconvenience of the slower performance and/or the need to adjust your workflow.

3.5 stars, rounded down to 3 due to the removal of macros and Visual Basic from Excel.

My system: Macbook Pro 2009 with Snow Leopard.

I already was using the Microsoft Office for Mac 2008, Special Media Edition. However, I always welcome an additional update when it comes to my Office Suite. Please keep in mind that this is an "UPGRADE" and not the full version. Installation on the system works quickly on the Mac OS X. If you do not own a previous version of the MS Office for Mac, this will not work on your system.

I am a casual user of the Office Software where I generate Memorandums for work, Powerpoint presentations for lectures, Excel for Tabulating donations for taxes and Entourage to organize my schedules. Aside from the general uses, I like to help make newsletters for my daughter with clip art. Given that my work computer uses MS Office, the portability between my Mac OS X Snow Leopard and my Windows Based Office PC allows me great flexibility.

The core of the suite includes Word, Powerpoint, Excel and Entourage. Where this specific edition thrives is in the setting of your Business. Utilizing Workspace Support, you are able to share your documents and work from any Computer. Data such as documents, contacts, tasks and calendars are stored in a secure location. Two features help this version stand out from the rest of the MS Office Packages:

1 Office Software Training that is included in Disk 2 (AKA MS Office +) that has tutorials for utilizing software for beginners and advanced users.

2 Available Clip Art and Business Templates

Aside from the sharing information and the templates, the core features are the same. If you have staff who are novices or need additional training, the videos will help. This edition is helpful for small businesses whereby saving time is a major priority for getting the proper deadlines and reports out in an efficient manner. If you are a person contemplating which version you need (amongst the various Editions on the market), it is best to compare the features side by side to determine what best suits your needs.

I bought the Business edition of MS Office for Mac 2008 because I have two Macs and need to be able to have Office open on both at the same time, which is not allowed on Office 2004. While I perhaps should have looked longer and harder for the fine print that says so, I knew that Office 2008 provides 3 product keys, allowing up to 3 computers to run it simultaneously, but this is only true of the Home and Student edition, not the Business edition. While that might make sense to someone at Microsoft, it sure as hell doesn't make sense to me. So, having missed that small detail, I bought the Business edition, only to find out that it didn't provide the only feature I bought it for. Fortunately, the seller allowed me to return it even though I'd removed the cello wrap, but hadn't removed the disks from their sleeve. I've now ordered the Home and Student edition instead, but the logic of why it provides three keys and the Business Edition only provides one still escapes me.

We've had no problem with the installation or use of the Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 Business Edition Upgrade and I'd especially recommend it to businesses who can benefit from the Microsoft Office Exchange Server support. I have many clients who are not Mac based and with this upgrade, documents are now easily shared without conflict or alteration. Although many complain about Microsoft and its products, I'm a fan of Office for Mac and really like this business edition. For me, it's intuitive and offers more options without making me feel overwhelmed by products I don't use. I also enjoy discovering new uses for the components and must admit that I'm still experiencing hours of education (and entertainment) as I learn more about the program. It's a winner for me.

If you have used MS Office in the past, it will take you a while, to navigate through all applications again. Unlike a lot of people, I've always been an admirer of Microsoft products. Granted, they tend to be expensive, overpriced even, but they typically do what they're intended to do with an honest amount of ease. The design templates is a plus for me because it made my simple office requirements much more efficient and stress free. Furthermore, the Menus have been replaced with tabs, but unlike to the Windows version of Office 2007 and 2008, you still have the familiar 'pull down menus'.

Aside from that the 2008 version of Office for Mac is more of the same the familiar suite of office programs with some spiffed up new features only it suffers from the problem that causes many users to loathe Microsoft: instability. The program is generally reliable, but it still had enough problems like all software, including an overall slowness, to be frustrating for me.

I like the features, like the ease of use. But overall I kept wishing that the platform was just a small more stable. I have to say that "Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 Business Edition upgrade" is worth buying and if you already have the 2004 version I think the upgrade is worth it, too.

NOTE - to use this, you'll need to own a full non-educational/home version of a previous version of Mac Office.

I love OpenOffice and I hate spending money on buying MS Office. However, I got tired of OpenOffice. I got tired of it crashing when I opened files, the bizarre and irritating "recovery" mode, not being able to scroll in files, and so on. OpenOffice has made great strides, but for non-trivial Word or PowerPoint inter-op or even just basic features with 3 on the Mac, it's just not there yet.

So I took the plunge and bought the real thing.

I haven't used the MS Office apps for some time, but lately I've needed to do some serious doc creation with them. This is by far the best Office--I did consider buying 2007 to use on Vista, but the UI changes on the Windows version are too confusing.

I've had no inter-op problems with this version of Office and 2003 and 2007 on Windows, for both PowerPoint and Word. Note that with the missing scripting in Excel, this Office version is not quite full-featured, and that costs it a star. Furthermore, there's still stuff in Office that doesn't keep up with the simplicity of Pages and Keynote--Editing table cell borders is still a pain, aligning pictures in PowerPoint is tedious, and so on.

If you're fighting with OpenOffice and wondering why it's so slow and crash-prone, upgrade to the real thing. If you're coming from previous versions, know that this is, by and large, pretty stable and fast. I am puzzled why saving a 30 slide PowerPoint takes a good 30 seconds on my Mac Pro (it's so annoying I had to turn off auto-save), and Word and PowerPoint both do crash sometimes--but this is a great solution for those documents that need to be shared with others and thus Pages and Keynote do not get the job done.

I've been a Mac user for over 10 years, and a user of Microsoft Office for Mac for almost as long. I have to prepare lots of Powerpoint content for colleagues in China; they seem to only use Word infrequently, and communicate everything through presentations. So the main value of the Business Edition Upgrade for me was in the area of templates and graphics. As a bonus, I can also use the Remote Desktop to help troubleshoot configuration problems with family members PCs. (Of course if they'd just switch to a Mac...)

Writing a review of Microsoft Office is a little like writing a review of the internal combustion engine, or the incandescent light bulb, or wifi (802.11) networks. Like each of those technologies, Office has become ubiquitous. Like each of those technologies, there isn't a good substitute yet for it. Like each of those technologies, Office is flawed. And, like each of those technologies, Office 2008 is a great value, and you'd be foolish not to buy it.

I've used every PC version of Office going back to 1997, and every Mac version from the earliest to this one. I've used other presentation software, other word processors, and other spreadsheets. Microsoft Office is still the best value. Let's talk about each of the programs individually.

I think the best Office application is Excel. Excel has a steep learning curve; I had a class in how to use Excel 12 years ago that helped with a lot of tricky features, and would recommend that any serious business also take some formal training or read a book on it. The Mac version matches the PC version well for most common uses: you can create complicated models, analyze your results with pivot tables, and plot charts. If you liked writing macros in visual basic, or need to run visual basic macros from PC users, you'll be frustrated to find that they're missing. (Personally, I hate macros. I think they lead to confusing, difficult to maintain spreadsheets. You can accomplish 97% of the same functionality using Excel formulas and the Table function.) I miss web queries from Office 2004. I found it really convenient to be able to easily create a spreadsheet from a table on a web site, then refresh the spreadsheet as the data changed. (You can still make this work, though the GUI is gone.) The closest alternatives on a Mac are Apple's Numbers program in iWork and the spreadsheet in OpenOffice/NeoOffice. Personally, I think Numbers is useless for data analysis because it doesn't have pivot tables. The OpenOffice/NeoOffice version seems better, but the UI is clunky and it's slow because it's written in Java (not Objective C).

Word for the Mac is probably the most improved program in Office 2008, but is still seriously flawed. I personally think that Word has the worst UI of any program in the Office Suite: there is far too much functionality in Word, and it does almost nothing well. I've written many kinds of documents in Word: letters, white papers, and a book. (Yes, I wrote a whole book in Word). The UI in Word 2008 is much better, but unfortunately the program itself has some nasty bugs. My wife wrote a doctoral thesis in Word, and discovered as she was printing it (at the end) that inserted graphics did not print correctly. (Pages would look correct on screen, then print with no text.) Word doesn't work as well with the new XML based Office documents, and sometimes crashed when loading documents saved in Word in this format. Still, there aren't any great alternatives. Pages (in iWork) has a better UI, but it doesn't have enough functionality to write complicated technical documents. OpenOffice is less stable than Word. So again, Word is the least of three evils.

Powerpoint is another solid Office application. I've had good luck writing presentations in Powerpoint, even drawing diagrams in it. The Mac version works perfectly for me; I've never had it crash. The biggest problems I have with Powerpoint 2008 for the Mac are the ugly default chart formats (I wish that someone at Microsoft would buy a copy of the Edward Tufte books for every Office programmer), and the lack of certain animation options that were available in the previous version.

I think the most disappointing program in Office is Entourage. Entourage is the Mac equivalent to Outlook, though it looks like it was designed by people using Mac OS 9 trying to clone Outlook 1997. It's visually unappealing with lots of big buttons, thick outlines, and round edges. The only reason to use Entourage is if you need to work in an environment where other employees use Outlook for PCs. Even then, you probably shouldn't do it. For some odd reason, the Mac version seems to lose appointments and miss meeting updates. The Mac version also doesn't properly support resource booking. It's nicer to use than the web version of Exchange, but buggy enough to be problematic. I moved to Mac Entourage from Outlook for a PC, which works perfectly. It was a nasty shock to discover that meeting had vanished from my calendar (especially when someone walked into my office, annoyed that I'd missed a meeting).

A few more notes about the overall package. The palette layout in Office is reasonably intuitive, though not better than other Mac or PC versions. I don't find that it's a big improvement on toolbars, nor is it much better or worse than ribbons. It's frustrating that Microsoft moves around a lot of buttons between versions. Integration between different programs could be better on the Mac. Unlike PC versions, when you copy drawings from one program and paste them in another, they are not always pasted as drawings. (They're sometimes pasted as graphics.)

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac 2008 Business Edition Upgrade is a good value. The Microsoft Office apps can be frustrating, but they're a great way to get work done and are essential if you work with people using PCs.

Note that this software package is an upgrade version. You must be a licensed user of any Microsoft Office 98 Macintosh Edition suite or application, or any Office for Mac 2001-2004 suite or application.

Unlike a lot of people, I've always been an admirer of Microsoft products. Granted, they tend to be expensive, overpriced even, but they typically do what they're intended to do with a fair amount of ease. The 2008 version of Office for Mac is more of the same -- the familiar suite of office programs with some spiffed up new features -- only it suffers from the problem that causes many users to loathe Microsoft: instability. The program is generally reliable, but it still had enough problems, including an overall slowness, to be frustrating for me. I like the features, like the ease of use. But overall I kept wishing that the platform was just a little more stable.

I use Word and Excel almost every day, but installing this upgrade was a big hassle. I had to remove my existing installation of Office, then re-install it, then install this upgrade, then run the automatic updater. Headaches.

It is in almost all regards the same as the Home & Student edition. Microsoft throws in SharePoint support, Exchange server support, Entourage 2008, Remote Desktop, and some low grade clip art. But even without this package, Exchange is supported natively under OSX 10.6 and Remote Desktop can be downloaded for free from Microsoft. I've never met anybody who uses sharepoint. For most people, these extras just aren't worth much.

What *would* be worth more would be Visual Basic support, but Microsoft pulled that from all versions of Mac Office, including this one.