Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac goes gold, ships next month

AppleInsider

Microsoft Corp. said Tuesday it has wrapped up development of Office 2008 for Mac, the first overhaul to its productivity software suite for Apple's Mac users in nearly half a decade.



The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant said the frozen code will be released to manufacturing later this evening, ahead of the software's official launch next month at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco.



Come January 15th, Office 2008 for Mac will be available in three distinct editions ranging from an entry level $150 Home and Student Edition to a high-end $500 Special Media Edition.



However, Microsoft is currently running its "Super Suite Deal" promotion, which allows customers to purchase the current $330 Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac Standard edition or the current $130 Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac Student and Teacher edition and then receive the $500 Office 2008 for Mac Special Media Edition for only the cost of shipping and handling.



To take advantage of this offer, simply purchase Office 2004 for Mac Standard Edition ($330) or Office 2004 for Mac Student and Teacher Edition ($130) from an authorized reseller like Amazon.com by January 14th. (Your receipt must be dated between Nov. 1, 2007 and Jan. 14, 2008.) Then print and complete the Super Suite Deal Redemption Form [pdf].



Those customers who participate in the promotion and return the Super Suite Deal Redemption Form by February 14th, 2008 will receive a copy of Office 2008 for Mac Special Media Edition for the cost of shipping ($7.00 US, $10 CND) once it becomes available next month.



Microsoft does not appear to be requiring proof that participants who purchase Office 2004 for Mac Student and Teacher Edition are actually students or teachers. Therefore it appears likely that anyone can purchase the Student and Teach Edition for $130 from Amazon and then receive a copy of the $500 Office 2008 for Mac Special Media Edition for just the cost of shipping and handling.



Those readers interested in Office 2008 for Mac may want to check out AppleInsider's recent Road to Mac Office 2008 series, installments of which are listed below in the order they were published.



Road to Mac Office 2008: an introduction

Road to Mac Office 2008: installation and interface

Road to Mac Office 2008: Word '08 vs Pages 3.0

Road to Mac Office 2008: Excel '08 vs Numbers 1.0

Road to Mac Office 2008: PowerPoint '08 vs Keynote 4.0

Road to Mac Office 2008: Entourage '08 vs Mail 3.0 and iCal 3.0

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creb

I still use Office, but have friends that will no longer have anything to do with Microsoft. Office's pricing remains ridiculous. Since I have been dealing more with Pages, I may or may not upgrade to this version.

samnuva

iWork all the way.... cheaper, more useful, easier, and MADE BY APPLE!

k2director

For those who are considering buying Office 2004 Student/Teacher edition now, and then taking the free upgrade to Office 2008 Special Media Edition, consider this:



1) The 2008 Special Media Edition only allows for installation on one computer, while the Student/Teacher edition allows for 3 computers. So when you get the 2008 upgrade, it's my understanding that you actually LOSE two legal licenses for other computers. (And yes, Office is smart enough to check to see if illegal installations are running on the same network, and will refuse to run.)



2) I checked the fine print on Microsoft's upgrade offer, and it says allow 6-8 weeks for delivery of your Special Media Edition upgrade. I don't know about you, but after waiting two long years for Microsoft to make a Universal Binary of Office available, I most definitely will not have the patience to wait another 6-8 weeks (potentially) for my upgrade to arrive in the mail.

buck

I agree about iWork. In fact every time somebody says "...but still for serious word-processing needs Pages isn't enough" or something along those lines. I never understood what they meant. For me Pages is far far more advanced than Word. In fact had to use the newest Word with the ribbon interface on a Windows machine. It was a horrible experience! I couldn't make the line spacing right (the lines would just get cropped in half instead of shrinking the white space), found it was really hard to navigate through the ribbon to find the function I wanted and finally there was no "Save As"! I had to manually add a button to the ribbon to make such a simple operation happen. No, I'm never ever going to touch Office again. It's a beast that deserves to die along with all its disgusting proprietary formats that nobody (including Microsoft with its Mac Office) can properly decrypt. And the bottom line is that you just can't produce a document that looks neat and good and professional in Word. After using it for some time I understood the reason behind putting the zillion spaces on a line to straighten things up. You just can't do it any other way! But you can in Pages.

dr_lha

Quote:

Originally Posted by Buck


I agree about iWork. In fact every time somebody says "...but still for serious word-processing needs Pages isn't enough" or something along those lines. I never understood what they meant.

Ever had to submit a Word Document for publication in a journal or a book? Ever had to produce a format specific galley proof from a Word Document template given to you by a publisher? No? Then Pages will be fine for you. For those of us who need to actually use a Word Processor for a living, its not up to the job sadly. This is what people mean when they say that "Pages isn't enough".



In a Word dominated world, nothing less than 100% Word compatibility will do for people who publish professionally, and Pages isn't near close enough. I know, I tried writing a journal article in Pages using a standard template provided by the publishers, and Pages just didn't get any of the margins or formatting right, so I had no choice but to revert to Word. Word is just a necessary evil I'm afraid.



Thank god most of the work I do is in LaTeX!

bdkennedy1

Have no use for it anymore. I don't even know any friends that use Office on the Mac.

foo2

N.B. For people taking advantage of the deal, in the fine print, Microsoft says the ship date will be approx. 6-7 weeks after general availability.

thinkadrian

What about Office Business, Office Corporate and Office Ultimate Edition?

kaiwai

Quote:

Originally Posted by dr_lha


Ever had to submit a Word Document for publication in a journal or a book? Ever had to produce a format specific galley proof from a Word Document template given to you by a publisher? No? Then Pages will be fine for you. For those of us who need to actually use a Word Processor for a living, its not up to the job sadly. This is what people mean when they say that "Pages isn't enough".



In a Word dominated world, nothing less than 100% Word compatibility will do for people who publish professionally, and Pages isn't near close enough. I know, I tried writing a journal article in Pages using a standard template provided by the publishers, and Pages just didn't get any of the margins or formatting right, so I had no choice but to revert to Word. Word is just a necessary evil I'm afraid.



Thank god most of the work I do is in LaTeX!

True. then there are university students like me who love iWorks but find that everything is released in PPT and DOC format, which most of the time can be rendered ok in Pages, but a good amount of formatting is also lost in the process.

football

Microsoft can f'ing bite me with that pricing. Loving Pages, bye bye Word.

buck

Quote:

Originally Posted by dr_lha


Ever had to submit a Word Document for publication in a journal or a book?

I'm sorry, but I always thought that *serious* publishing agencies don't rely on Word. PDF, Quark maybe... but Word? This is insane. What layouts specifically are we talking about? Seems like the margins etc stuff is universal... But I'm not trying to argue for the sake of argument, I honestly never had to submit anything in Word format, so maybe there are indeed some cases...

What that means though is not that Pages is incapable of producing better documents but rather that nobody wants to embrace open standards... Certainly the reviewers could've said that instead of the mysterious 'serious word processing'.

buck

Quote:

Originally Posted by kaiwai


True. then there are university students like me who love iWorks but find that everything is released in PPT and DOC format, which most of the time can be rendered ok in Pages, but a good amount of formatting is also lost in the process.

Hi Kaiwai!

Well, I feel that if nobody does anything, if nobody complains or goes against the tide, nothing will ever change. I try to do that, I still have the power. Otherwise we'd be forever stuck in the swamp that's office formats until Microsoft decides it's time for you to embrace a different format, and everyone will suck up on it, like it was made in Heaven.

gavinscrimgeour

kaiwai and Dr_Iha have valid points. Word or Office is a necessary evil, and many people will encounter situations where information is either given to them in a specific format, that has to be adhered i.e. no deviation from the formatting of a Word Document for the giving or receiving of documents, where iWork cannot fully guarantee compatibility.



I have a MacBook and had an iMac Intel, with boot camp installed. On Tiger I had Office 2004 (I believe) and it ran slow as hell, down to the "emulation???"



This latency made me simply use Office on the XP partition (boot camp) which ran, rightly so, very fast indeed, and left the Mac Office sitting in the dark.



Aside from Microsoft?s versions: Home, Student and the other one, we can expect a massive difference in performance, and as a result we will join the crowd of people using Office as a necessary evil, and we may even enjoy it, as you all have to admit from the screen shots, it is very appley/apple'esk!



Canny wait to see the final version.

lorre

Quote:

Originally Posted by dr_lha


Ever had to submit a Word Document for publication in a journal or a book? Ever had to produce a format specific galley proof from a Word Document template given to you by a publisher?

Ever tried opening a semi-advanced Word document in 4 different versions of Word? Did you see the exact same thing on your screen 4 times? I made a rather complex document in NeoOffice (I put spreadsheet tables and graphs in a word processing file, used auto numbering, background images etc.), then did some finishing touches on OO 2.2 on my dads PC, and had to print it at school using OO 2.0. Worked just fine. I blame the .odt format for that. DO the same thing with Word for Mac, Word 2000 and Word 2007 and see what I mean. Office isn't even compatible with itself...

shanmugam

Quote:

Originally Posted by k2director


For those who are considering buying Office 2004 Student/Teacher edition now, and then taking the free upgrade to Office 2008 Special Media Edition, consider this:



1) The 2008 Special Media Edition only allows for installation on one computer, while the Student/Teacher edition allows for 3 computers. So when you get the 2008 upgrade, it's my understanding that you actually LOSE two legal licenses for other computers. (And yes, Office is smart enough to check to see if illegal installations are running on the same network, and will refuse to run.)



2) I checked the fine print on Microsoft's upgrade offer, and it says allow 6-8 weeks for delivery of your Special Media Edition upgrade. I don't know about you, but after waiting two long years for Microsoft to make a Universal Binary of Office available, I most definitely will not have the patience to wait another 6-8 weeks (potentially) for my upgrade to arrive in the mail.

actually Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Home & Student Edition $140, you can run 3 license (with out exchange support of course, who uses exchange @ home?)



wait until Jan 15 get the 2008 if you need ...



http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Offi...7415365&sr=8-1



http://images.amazon.com/images/G/01...8-mac-comp.jpg



not a bad price considering it is from m$



iWork 08 and Office X running on my mac currently ...

gavinscrimgeour

kaiwai and Dr_Iha have valid points. Word or Office is a necessary evil, and many people will encounter situations where information is either given to them in a specific format, that has to be adhered i.e. no deviation from the formatting of a Word Document for the giving or receiving of documents, where iWork cannot fully guarantee compatibility.



I have a MacBook and had an iMac Intel, with boot camp installed. On Tiger I had Office 2004 (I believe) and it ran slow as hell, down to the "emulation???"



This latency made me simply use Office on the XP partition (boot camp) which ran, rightly so, very fast indeed, and left the Mac Office sitting in the dark.



Aside from Microsoft?s versions: Home, Student and the other one, we can expect a massive difference in performance, and as a result we will join the crowd of people using Office as a necessary evil, and we may even enjoy it, as you all have to admit from the screen shots, it is very appley/apple'esk!



Canny wait to see the final version.

bageljoey

Quote:

Originally Posted by dr_lha




Thank god most of the work I do is in LaTeX!

Wow. I haven't thought about LaTeX since my Thesis in '90. It still exists??

dr_lha

Quote:

Originally Posted by Buck


I'm sorry, but I always thought that *serious* publishing agencies don't rely on Word. PDF, Quark maybe... but Word? This is insane. What layouts specifically are we talking about? Seems like the margins etc stuff is universal... But I'm not trying to argue for the sake of argument, I honestly never had to submit anything in Word format, so maybe there are indeed some cases...

What that means though is not that Pages is incapable of producing better documents but rather that nobody wants to embrace open standards... Certainly the reviewers could've said that instead of the mysterious 'serious word processing'.

Well nobody would use Quark to write a book or a scientific paper. The issues I've had is that publishers have sent me a ".dot" Word template and told me to send them either a completed word document or a PDF file generated from that .dot file, which they use for direct publication. Opening the ".dot" file in Pages simply doesn't work, all the margins and the page size was wrong. OO2.2 would probably have done it, but given the choice between OpenOffice or Word on a Mac, the choice is pretty simple for me: Word all the way. Maybe if they make a Cocoa native version of OO (NeoOffice ain't it).



It may not make any sense that Word is an industry standard (trust me, it gives me no pleasure), but it is.

doh123

Quote:

Originally Posted by dr_lha


Well nobody would use Quark to write a book or a scientific paper. The issues I've had is that publishers have sent me a ".dot" Word template and told me to send them either a completed word document or a PDF file generated from that .dot file, which they use for direct publication. Opening the ".dot" file in Pages simply doesn't work, all the margins and the page size was wrong. OO2.2 would probably have done it, but given the choice between OpenOffice or Word on a Mac, the choice is pretty simple for me: Word all the way. Maybe if they make a Cocoa native version of OO (NeoOffice ain't it).



It may not make any sense that Word is an industry standard (trust me, it gives me no pleasure), but it is.

I haven't tried a .dot in pages... but they always seem to work fine in NeoOffice. How is NeoOffice bad to use? Seems like you don't like it, but its been fantastic to me, and even has more compatibility with Windows MS Office than MS Office 2008 does.

mr. me

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bageljoey


Wow. I haven't thought about LaTeX since my Thesis in '90. It still exists??

It's more popular than ever.