Customer Reviews

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Special Media Edition [Old Version]

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(52)
3 star:		(20)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

I hope this review serves to clarify some of the complaints that people have posted regarding Office 2008.

Preface:
After being disappointed with Leopard 10.5 -which I also reviewed- I kept using Tiger. When finally 10.5.2 arrived I began using it. It fixes many Leopard bugs. According to some websites, at least 130 bugs have been fixed. This is important since many problems with third party software may be related to other software or to the operating system. For example, Apple is aware of problems with its Sync services and Core Image. Also, some bugs have existed for many years and have not been fixed, such as a potential bug when moving data to an external device.
Keeping these issues in mind I did a completely clean install of Leopard 10.5.2 in a brand new hard drive.
I installed Office 2008 as well as the available upgrade to 12.0.1.

First Impressions:
Some useful features have been added, such as Elements Gallery, which may be a time saver for many people. Some features have been removed, such as VBA, and this may be a deal-breaker for many people.
I'm keeping Office 2004 in a separate partition in order to use previous versions of Word and Excel.
At the same time, I can still use the new versions when I don't need the VBA features.
Lack of VBA support was announced well over a year ago, so this came as no surprise.

Starting up:
Each program took approximately 10 seconds to launch. Office seems to have a peculiar way of handling fonts, though, and launch times can be greatly effected. After installing another program that installed more fonts, and installing Extensis Fusion to manage my fonts, launch times for Office programs was approximately 150 (one hundred and fifty) seconds, instead of the original 10 (ten) seconds.
Now it takes about a minute to launch these programs. In all fairness, the slow down is partly caused by third party software.

Overall (and very brief) impressions:
PowerPoint works with presentations that used to crash my 2004 version. The 2004 version was practically unusable for me. This was a welcome upgrade.

Excel works fine and the Elements Gallery is a good addition. It lost VBA support and the Abalysys Toolpack. I kept the 2004 version as well.

Word seems to be a solid upgrade. Some third party templates do not work with 2008, so I kept Word 2004.

Entourage works very well. I had to re-select the folders that I had set up for my rules, and re-apply categories to my folders. Syncing with Address Book always adds many duplicate contacts. Fortunately there are scripts to deal with this inconvenience. Hyperlinks still require a workaround, as mentioned by another reviewer. I would not rate Office with 1-star solely based on that issue.

Expression Media used to be called iView MediaPro, iView Multimedia, and iView many years ago. It used to be a $25 shareware program when I first used it. Eventually it became quite expensive so I never upgraded until I received this version. So far I'm happy with it. It has worked fine for cataloging thousands of fonts and pictures, and I'm entitled to a free upgrade when version 2 comes out.

Price:
There are free Office alternatives, as well as iWork. I( still prefer Microsoft Office for the most part. The only exception may be Keynote 4.
Microsoft offered a substantial discount under the names of The Technology Guarantee Program and the Super Suite Deal. Additionally, for one day they offered a $[...] rebate. So users could get the Mac Special Media Edition for approximately $[...]-$[...] with these offers.
Had it not been for the offer, I would have stayed with Office 2004. I've used Office 2008 for a few days, every day, and so far have encountered no problems.

Overall I'm satisfied with the upgrade. Support has been great, both by Microsoft and the MVP people. Search their forums and you'll find a lot of useful advise.

I can't believe I'm going to say this, but, Microsoft Office 2008 for the mac, is a must buy if your even remotely interested in office suites.

I run a few different online businesses, as well as doing some consulting, freelance work, and other such practices. Microsoft office deeply changes how I function, and operate in the world. Talk about improved efficiency.
I'm honestly considering no longer buying the yearly iwork suites.

Some new features in MS Word:
Publishing Layout View (this lets you create brochures, flyers, etc, etc) Very easy. This is similar to using Apples Pages. You can get to this view by clicking file -> project gallery and choose one of those kinds of views like Flyers, or Newsletters.

Word's new "Publishing Layout" view lets you create documents off templates similar to those from pages. You can add new pictures just by dragging and dropping your data into the various placeholders found in the template.
Publication Templates - appears at the top of publishing layout view, and lets you change the document into a different type of template (such as a different newsletter) (you can also customize any template when you create a theme using your own pictures, and elements (so much easier than in pages!).

Document Elements - this lets you easily create table of contents, cover pages, Header, Footer, and Bibliographies, you can access these features when you are in Print Layout view.

Excel offers up some new features:
Ledger Sheet (brand new!) - these are preformatted sheets, that let you do things like balance checkbooks, create expense reports, and many other things. This is really cool, and almost pays for itself for buying 2008.

In the project gallery (my favorite office feature) when you have excel open, click Ledger Sheets (off on the left) and you can click Accounts, Budgets, Invoices, Lists, Portfolios, Reports.

If you click one of the ledgers with the green excel bar at the top, it is one of the new ledger features, and as such, already has data, formulas, etc.

Formula Builder - you can now create formulas step by step. You can search for what your trying to do, and you can also scroll through and see all the functions. This is great for when you know, but your not sure which function exactly.

When you double click the function, you then "build it" at the bottom, this is very easy.

Auto Complete Formula - This is similar to when your using dreamweaver in the code view, and start typing in html. In excel when you type = then a letter like S and it will auto complete to sum or show you other options that you can choose. This is very cool and helps to make sure you get the right syntax and the right command each time.

Powerpoint 2008 also has some great new features I will talk about here:
Powerpoint now has Themes which give your slide presentations a unified theme, so everything looks the same (fonts, colors, special effects), and even better, these "themes" translate into other office products (such as word)

You can also now create your own custom layouts inside of powerpoint, which lets you choose where you want your images, text, charts, etc.

Powerpoint now lets you share your presentations to iphoto (which you can then sync on your ipod/iphone) Basically it turns your presentations into images. This is great if you want to share you presentation with someone who does not have powerpoint, or if you prefer to not lug your laptop around, and prefer to just your ipod/iphone as your presentation device.

Entourage New Features:
You can now create to do lists (and flagging). When your in entourage, click To Do List (which is next to your calendar) and you can add stuff that you need to do, you can also set due dates.

From an email, you can choose if / when you want to follow up with the email and flag it by clicking (tomorrow, next week, or choose one on a certain date), you can also choose a reminder. (to remind you at a certain time)

If your not going to be at the office for a while, you can setup an automatic rule, that can automatically reply to your incoming emails, telling them that you are away, and you will be back ___ and you can contact someone else, or if its important, call me at this number ___
To set it up go to Tools -> then click on Rules. Give it a name, and set up the function.

When you get back, all you need to do is go to Tools -> rules -> and uncheck whatever you named the rule to stop it for now (you can always reenable by clicking that box)

My favorite new feature quite easily is Entourages My Day.app.

My Day lets you manage your to do lists, and your calendar (and you no do not have to have entourage running) it shows what you need to do, the timeline, it is so cool, and is another one of those lovely features that make this a no-brainer purchase. If you have an appointment later on in the day (say you have a meeting at 8), it will show at the top that you are "free until 8) which is such a nice feature. You can skip around to other days and see what you need to do, (or what you previously did). You can add new tasks (to do) from within the my day.app so you do not have to open up entourage to add a quick task.

Another great feature is the Calendar, which is now very useful, looks much better, and is more functional.

The main difference between Special media and the regular edition of 2008 is Expression Media 2 (which you will need to download from Microsoft's website) This is a very nice, high end organizational software to manage you digital files (including raw images) Search is very fast, and tagging is quick and easy. One of the benefits for me with using this software is the ability to create different contact sheets, and online photogalleries. If you do not currently have a program capable of managing your digital assets, you cannot go wrong with Expression media. It is very robust, and powerful. It does not (for me) replace my current workflow (Adobe Lightroom) but for the price, it is very much so worth it. I highly recommend it if your into digital photography, or even just image creation. I'm using it now to organize files that I create (opposed to digital photography), and it works very well. It increases productivity, is beautiful, and helps me keep track of everything very quickly.


In conclusion, my productivity has greatly increase since getting Microsoft Office. Entourage alone eliminates so much hassle, that in an of itself is worth getting. No longer do I need Mail.app addressbook, ical, stickies, all open at the same time. I can open up entourage, set my schedule, close it, and have my day.app open telling me what to do and when keeping me on track and on schedule.

The new features in word / excel / and powerpoint do give serious fight to the iwork suite. I look forward to the next office release, and the next iwork release (to see how apple fights some of these cool and exiting features)

Easily a 5 out of 5. The only downside to 2008 is you loose macros, and you loose VBA scripting. (but you can use applescript and automator, and VBA is supposed to be back soon, which will give us macros back).

I've used the Windows version of office since 97 to 2003 to 2007.
I've also used the Mac version of office from 2004 and now 2008.
The 2008 is better than 2004 no doubt.
But having used Pages and Keynote of iWork, I still appreciate the clean design and overall layout of Pages much better than that of the Office Word.
I don't want to do a full blown comparison, but just to share personal use experiences.
The 2008 is fancy. It has a lot of interactive menus for different functions and when in different needs. But I still don't think the user need to be so deeply involved in everything it can do. It is just fancy.
I like the Notebook feature of the Word, however, it does a much better job than MacJournal which I bought. So I am only using Word in the Notebook mode when I am in lecture or in need of taking a meeting note. (of which I can turn on the Audio recording mode). The recording is done nicely, but I think it should have a choice of different indexing (by time interval or by note taking; text input). (For example, there may be 30 min of lecture I didn't want to take notes but I want to be able to access different sections of the 30 minutes at 5 min indexing.
As for the Media Expression feature, I haven't used it because I am afraid that it will create a double database of my iPhoto library which is exceeding 120GB already (including the MP4 movies).
I was using the Home and Student edition before I got the Full blown version (with the Exchange support--which I don't need.)
I don't feel any difference from the base student version. Not only that, the Student version comes with 3 different product ID for different computers you and your children may have (in school, in a different room, etc.) This full version comes with only 1 product number.
The 2004 version was very stable. The 2008 version creates some kind of trash everytime after you use it.
When I use Word to take notes daily, if you turn off and on again, there is always something in the trash that was created by Word. I don't know why.
Overall, I give it 4 stars because of its features.
But the look is still very busy and fancy.
It also crashes when I copy and paste a huge web page into a Word document.
That's why I still use Pages to save webpages (copy and paste) or newsletter publishing. It is just much more stable and easy to do.
I'd recommend the Student version if you don't need the Exchange support.
I used the Excel a few times and it is stable and fast.
Powerpoint is also like the 2004, nothing much is new. I still prefer Keynote because it just looks much more professional and easy to add animation and slide transitions.
The $149 student version is a good deal if you don't like iWork. I spent $79 and got the iWork.
I find myself using both of them about 60% Office and about 40% iWorks.
Oh, almost forgot, very important.
After installing this, your Quicktime will not be able to play WMV file (only audio with black screen), even if you have Flip4Mac installed.
You need to reinstall the Flip4Mac to get it to work again.

I ordered the 2008 version of Office due to its Universal support in the hopes of improved performance over the 2004 version (which relies on Rosetta for non-Intel software versions). I frequently manipulate very large spreadsheets containing a mixture of data and formulae in Excel. To get an idea of the differences in performance, I timed a couple of tasks that I routinely do on my Mac Pro (2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors and 4 GB of RAM).

In the first test, I timed how long it took Excel to open a 15.6 MB Excel file containing a mixture of data and embedded formulae. In this test, it took the 2004 version 19 seconds to open the spreadsheet and the 2008 version significantly slower in 25.5 seconds.

In the second test, using two keys I sorted a 27 column by 6939 row spreadsheet with no embedded formalae. I found the 2004 version of Excel performed the task in 11 seconds and the 2008 slightly faster in 10.5 seconds.

In the third test, using three keys I sorted a 51 column by 6244 row spreadsheet with lots of embedded formulae. I found the 2004 version of Excel performed the task in 16 seconds and the 2008 version significantly slower in 21 seconds.

Beyond the performance differences, I was annoyed by several changes made to the 2008 version of Excel. First, the software no longer provides an indication of when it is working -- no hourglass, no stopwatch, etc. Thus while I'm waiting for half a minute for Excel to manipulate the spreadsheet I'm left wondering if it is really working or if I accidentally hit the "cancel" button. Second, the toolbars are not as configurable as the 2004 version. I like to have the "Standard", "Formatting" and "Formula" toolbars open. In the 2008 version I am not allowed to position the formula bar directly over the spreadsheet and I'm only allowed to have the Standard bar open directly over the spreadsheet. The 2008 version also added an extra menu line for "Sheets" "Charts" "SmartArt Graphics" and "WordArt" that I will never use yet cannot turnoff. The bottom-line is that with the 2008 version, I now have less usable space for my worksheets, less configurability than I previously did, am forced to make more mouse clicks and move the mouse pointer more thank I did with the 2004 version. While I mainly use Excel, I did note that the new version of Word also has the same toolbar issues that I noted for Excel.

Another annoyance -- though one-time -- is the number of very large updates that had to be downloaded to update the shipped software. While I didn't time these, I was able to install the software from the DVD in about 2 minutes. It took about 45 minutes to download and install all of the software updates.

Overall, I'm glad that I didn't un-install the 2004 versions of the Office applications as I think I'll continue to use them until support for the 2004 versions is dropped and I run into compatibility issues.

18Dec08 Update: I uninstalled all of the Office 2008 applications from my computer and am back to using Office 2004 as I continued to find the older versions of the applications to be superior to the 2008 "upgrade". Also, as a word of caution -- any files that save in the new application versions are not backwards compatible.

Office 2008 Special Media is a strong upgrade. The new interface is extremely user friendly and logical. It looks very similiar to the 2007 version on the PC side. I cross platforms with my company everyday and it is seamless to work with PC files. The media package is a great addition that is more than worth the small price difference above the standard edition. Buy this with confidence and ENJOY the much needed update from Office 2004. I use a MacBook Pro, 2.4ghz, 2GB Ram.

In Redmond Washington the thinking seems to be that Mac users prefer them because of the superb graphics capabilities. So bundled with this perfectly ordinary edition of Office 2008 for Mac is a stand alone program called Expression Media.

Reading about it sounds like some Microsoft graphics program on par with maybe Photoshop. But it is not editing software at all. It is an album maker which is essentially useless to Mac users with Apple iLife '08 which includes iPhoto which does everything Expression Media does only better.

The rest is just plain old Office-down a bit in price but looking for all the world like the PC version of Office 2008. The new version is somewhat improved over Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac Standard [OLD VERSION] and although Excel is a more powerful spreadsheet than Numbers (found in Apple iWork '08) the Apple office suite is a superior product.

But this is not bad. It just hasn't caught up to Apple.

Like my long title says, its great to be running Office on Intel Macs without having to rely on Rosetta. Running Office 2004 with Rosetta worked well. Rosetta is an awesome technology, but it did translate into slow application launch times. Once the application started, everything was fine.

With this version, it runs natively on both Intel and PowerPC chips. It is fast and stable. IT is Office. We all know and love/hate Office, so you probably already know what it can do. It is missiing VBA support though. This may be a problem for some. I haven't experienced any of the negatives that other have reported. The interface is a bit different, but easy to understand in just a few minutes of use.

I highly recommend Office 2008 if you need Microsoft Office. Even if you have Office 2004, it is worth the upgrade just to get off of Rosetta.

As for the "Special" part of this particular version, it includes Microsoft's Expression Media. This is a great addition to the package, but I doubt Expression Media will gain traction against Apple's iLife suite and other Apple branded media applications, such as Aperture. It is worth trying though, as you may find them more intuitive if you are a long-time Microsoft user. It is similar to Aperture, in that, you can manage your media even if it is stored offline on CDs or DVDs. Its a nice digital media organizer.

A lot reviews that I see in software magazines start out by listing the good, then the bad parts about a program or an upgrade. I could do that here, but so far, and I'm a month or so into the program, I haven't discovered the bad. The program installed without a hitch on my G4 last generation PowerBook and likewise on my Intel iMac.

I can't compare Office 2008 to prior versions on the Mac because until now, I've been using a program called Nisus Writer which I've been using for years and years. It's a very nice program and does everything you'd want a word processor to do. Well, not quite everything. It's supposed to be able to open Word docs, and it does, but the headers and footers come out all messed up.

Not so with this program (be sure to set the prefs to save in doc format). With Word in Office 2008 I can view all the docs I get as attachments as they were meant to be seen. Also, I've been working almost exclusively with Word since I installed it on my machines to see how it compares with both Nisus and with Word 2007, which I have on my iMac running on
Windows in emulation via fusion.

I like the new interface. I like the easy of use, of course I'm not a novice. Just the fact that Microsoft put so much time and effort into this program makes me feel that the Mac is going to be around for a long time to come. After all, If Microsoft believes in the Mac, then it's bound to survive.

I was driven to finally upgrade my Office 2004 to the new 2008 version, as I was getting unexplained reboots from my new Mac Pro. Adobe Tech Support suggested it might be software related so I upgraded Office and Adobe Creative Suite to the latest versions.

Office's new interface is actually quite elegant and, although I never thought I'd say this about a Microsoft product, fairly intuitive. The new windows are slightly Windows-like, in that they have menus at the top of each window, not just at the top of the screen as is common on the Mac. Word, which I use most of the time, has several new features that make it much easier to use. At the top of each window are several tabs that allow instant access to templates, tables, charts, SmartArt Graphics and WordArt. The overall look is FINALLY Mac-like and very pleasant to work with. The Microsoft Mac Unit has actually outdone themselves in this version and I applaud their endeavors.

Office for Mac has always lagged considerably behind the Windows version. Office 2008 has delivered new features that Mac users will definitely like--primarily in the ease of use and interface design--yet it's easy to transition from the older 2004 version to the new one.

I'd heard grumblings and complaints about the new Office, but to date I haven't experienced anything but delight in what Microsoft has created. I'm finally pleased to say "Well done Microsoft!", and believe me, that statement has been a long time coming.

Note: I haven't tried Entourage and never used it in the earlier version, so you're on your own on that one. Maybe someone else can comment.

I've used Microsoft Office 2004 for quite awhile on my three Mac PowerBook G4s and have never had any problems. Nonetheless, I was anxious to try this updated 2008 version. I had no problems with the installation, although, like others, I was highly annoyed with all the updates that had to be downloaded right off the bat. I used the new MS Office 2008 for a few weeks, but didn't really notice a huge improvement over the 2004 version. In fact, like at least one other reviewer here, the program froze on a number of occasions while I was using it. Luckily, I never lost any crucial data during these freeze-ups, but they were frustrating enough for me to decide to uninstall the 2008 version and go back to MS Office 2004. To be fair, I suppose the issues I had with this program could possibly be related to the fact that my Mac PowerBook G4s are older. But since all of my machines meet the minimum system requirements listed for the software, it shouldn't be a factor. For this Mac user, MS Office 2004 works just fine, and I'll stick with it now.