Customer Reviews

Microsoft Office X for Mac Upgrade [Old Version]

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I am forced to use a Windows PC at work and use MS Office every day. I hate this term, but I would fall into the "power user" classification. I have a Mac with OS X at home, and working from home often, I use the OS X version of Office. I can say without hesitation that the OS X version is superior. With this limited space let me just say that there are no issues sharing documents. I am constantly building spreadsheets, powerpoint presentations, and Word docs at home and sending them to colleagues and customers with no issues. They never even know I am on a Mac. The Mac version is more intuitive and looks better as well. If you want a deep discussion of the features, see the details on Apple's web site.

While there is a lot more exciting software out there, something like the Office suite is one of those basic things that makes or breaks a user's experience. The deeper I sink into management, the more time I spend using Word, Excel, and Entourage.
Office v. X really makes that time as pleasant as possible. If you're familiar with the suite of Office products, there's nothing really earth-shatteringly different... between Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, it's more a matter of a bunch of small changes in interface and workflow that make the overall experience better (along with not needing to start up Classic).
On the other hand, Entourage is bittersweet. It's really a fantastic email, calendaring, and contact management piece... it handles time-zones, links contacts, meetings, and email messages, and even lets you automatically color-code messages and events based on who sent them. For our purposes it blows away both Outlook and Notes. At the same time there is an ugly side. You can't sync Entourage to a Palm yet (still under development at this time, but it should be available soon), which is a huge blow to its usability. There are issues with the size of the database it maintains (as well as the fact that it's a self-contained database that's useless to other applications), and it has some glaring issues accessing mail on some IMAP4 servers (Domino, for example).
All in all, it's an excellent package... Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit does a wonderful job (in my experience, MS Office v. X provides a much better overall user experience than Office XP). Bottom line is that, even while there are still some bugs that really need to be worked out, Office v. X is well worth the cost of the license. Keep up the good work, MBU.

As a long-time user of both Windows and Apple software products, I can honestly say that this software package hands down, is the most elegant, intuitive, user-friendly, bug-free piece of software I have ever owned.

And for users of both systems, it is a dream to go back and forth between Windows and the Mac. There is no conversions, etc, as in the past, the files just open and work as if the file had been created on the native system.

Note that all of the software in this suite - Word, Excel, Powerpoint and especially Entourage (Outlook in Windows) are far superior to the Windows products. And once you start using them, you won't want to go back to the Windows versions.

Congrats to the Macintosh team at Microsoft for one of the most refreshing pieces of software in years, and of course congrats to the Apple OS X team that made this possible as well.

I recently upgraded from Mac Classic (9.2.x) to OS X Jaguar. That was a story in and of itself. There was a major bump along the way for me there. However, now that it's done, I'm quite happy. OS X Jaguar is great. Best OS ever in my opinion. Fast, stable, feature-rich.

So, now that I've got an OS, I need office apps. I work at home mostly; and the people I work with all use Windows XP in the office.

Whatever your/my opinions about MS Word, Excel, and Powerpoint might be as standalone applications hardly matters these days. The facts are that they have become the de facto office app standards.

I'm happy to say that the Office X versions of these apps are just fine. All the functionality is there. They have been updated to take advantage of some of the cool new features of OS X. And, they have proven to be remarkably stable in my opinion. I've had no crashes at all to speak of.

Most importantly for me, they provide seamless file-sharing with other folks using other systems. I regularly exchange Word, Excel and Powerpoint files with colleagues (via email and our company network) using Windows-based systems without a hitch!

Despite some initial grief from our IT staff about me using a Mac; I've proven to them all that there is absolutely no reason not to. The fact that Microsoft has made these office app file formats stable and sharable across platforms has made my life a heck of a lot easier. There are no barriers to me using a Mac any more.

I'm a Graphic Designer so I rarely use Word or Excel except for very, very basic tasks, such as copying and pasting text into desktop publishing programs. So I can't comment too much about those programs. The one application I use day in and day out all day long is Entourage.

1. Can't be programmed to accept my company's address book automatically. I have to enter the person's address in order for it to be saved.

2. If you accidentally have the wrong address typed in, well, it saves it anyway and eventually you have a list of wrong addresses to choose from your list of correct addresses. I haven't had the time to figure out how to delete addresses.

3. Tasks? Projects? Clutter tools. I never use them. Don't have the time to figure them out. Don't want to. I actually tried to utilize the Projects wizard and after spending xx minutes setting it up, I had this "That's it?!?" feeling; I didn't find it helpful or useful or intuitive at all. I'll do better to jot project notes on a piece of paper.

By far my biggest gripe is that Entourage makes EVERYTHING an ordeal to set up. I'm NOT a programmer, I don't think like a programmer. I don't have time to spend PROGRAMMING functions that should be built in.

For instance, Entourage does NOT have a basic out of office reply function! To use OoF you have to go to Tools, then Rules, then figure out which specific set of actions go together and in what order and even then it doesn't work. I had to GOOGLE for help because there is nothing about Out of Office reply in the Entourage Help section and the steps I followed based on the directions here: http://homepage.mac.com/barryw/weblog/files/category-6.html weren't even available!! I was flabbergasted and disgusted.

How could they make a function as basic and necessary as Out of Office reply so impossible to figure out or even find? Microsoft is just a huge, lumbering, programmer-minded troll and I can't stand it anymore. If this suite wasn't forced upon my by my office I'd NEVER use it.

This is a great upgrade over my previous Word & Excel 98. I got the Word and Excel upgrade, but got Power Point and Entourage (a mail and calendar program) free. But, frankly, I wouldn't upgrade if it weren't for my employer upgrading to Office XP.

The programs have crashed a few times, but I recon that's an OS X (10.1.2) problem. Similar problems have happened elsewhere.

It's indeed the best from Microsoft. I only use Word and Entourage and I must say they both are fantastic. Entourage is simply a great software that is clearly better than Outlook for Windows.

This is a worthy upgrade. As usual, all components mesh nicely with each other and are on par with the Window's counterparts. Actually, PowerPoint actually has more transitions and export options on the Mac version. A worthy upgrade.

I've been using PC versions of Office for years. The Mac version is every bit as capable, and it's functionality and interface are very similar, making for an easy and seamless transition between the two versions. I actually prefer the Aqua interface of the Mac version. I do wish that Access and Visio were available, but apart from their absence, I find nothing else lacking.

It's good, I love Entourage much better than Apple's e-mail and calendaring software. The others are comparable to Windows products; nothing special about them.