Office 2008 is dodgy. Nothing compared to iWork, which I feel is much, much better. However, Office 2008 addresses many compatibility issues for those running Intel Macs, and having to deal with Windoze users. Excel 2008 is pretty bad but I hope better with this update.
Basically it is inferior to NeoOffice, and also iWork 08 (which I have).
Word is OK, and thank goodness the Equation Editor is included (which I use constanty).
EXCEPT WHEN WORD SAYS MY DISK IS FULL. THis is a very frequent error. During which I CAN'T SAVE MY EQUATIONS. SO MY WORK GETS LOST. Like 1988 all over again.
Moving on, Excel 2008 is a complete joke. No Equation Solver. No VBR. NO MACROS!!!!!!!
NO MACROS, NOT EVEN ONE!!!!!!!!!!
NOOOOOOO SOLVER NONE!!!!!!
WTF
Powerpoint, it goes without saying, is an atrocity. That's why I have Keynote from Apple.
AND WHAT ABOUT MICROSOFT ACCESS 2008? WOULD THAT BE ASKING TOO MUCH?
Ohhhh No, the Mac users can't get their hands on MS' precious Access product which is an INTEGRAL part of Office.
Basically I argue MS could be sued for selling "Office" without Access. What if Word were deleted?
Fortunately NeoOffice provides an Access clone free of charge. Next time, who needs Microprick anyway.
Clearly Office 08 is an assault on the Mac. How many people use Solver anyway... in a big company, maybe 20. The other 10,000 would work great on a Mac. So what does this achieve anyway??? Jeesoos..
And I just searched for this update. None was found. "Your Microsoft Software has no updates at this time. 12.0.0 on Mac OS X 10.5.2 MacBook.
I got an education discount on the software. In truth, I like Word a lot better then 2004. I find Microsoft did a really good job refining the Interface. I especially like the new tool bar layouts and the publishing tools. That is not to say there aren't some minor bugs, but over all I like the changes. Enough to sell out full price for it: probably not. Then again, I primarily use Word over anything else in the package.
As far as Macros go, I never really used them, so the lack of Macros support doesn't effect me. With that said, I really don't blame Microsoft for dropping the support. Microsoft was well into the development of this version of Office, when Apple said, "Hey, guess what we are switching to Intel processors." Not only did Microsoft have to retool the software for the new architecture, it had to switch to Apple's developer tools to do it. Apple's tools are nice, but they are not as feature complete as some of the other tools out there ( at least at the time). It is a real pain to switch to tools less capable and unfamiliar to you. Microsoft had to make decisions on how to best get the product to market with all the rewriting it had to do. Since Microsoft plans on dumping its current Macro language in the next version of Office for Windows, it made little sense to delay Office for the Mac by an additional year to port a language that would soon be irrelevant on Windows as well.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Achiever
To the folks who have purchased and installed Office '08: do you like it?
Come on you jest. Give examples on how Office 2008 is inferior to both NeoOffice and iWork? Maybe your experience is completely different then mine, but NeoOffice is dog slow on a Mac compared to Office 2008. Moreover, NeoOffice is pretty much a copy of an older version of Office for Windows. Don't get me wrong, for a free application, it is great. However, on usability it is hardly superior.
In addition, I use Office for cross platform compatibility. If you use any sort of fancy formatting, NeoOffice and iWork will not keep true to the original Office formatting. Since, I need to share Office documents that is a big deal.
Pages is cool for the price, but it is not Word. Does that mean Word is worth the price? Probably not, but it is a better application. On the other hand, Keynote kicks Powerpoint's butt, and I prefer Apple's Mail to Entourage. Entourage, however, does have more bells and whistles and works with Exchange better.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bwik
I just got an Office 2008 license as a student.
Basically it is inferior to NeoOffice, and also iWork 08 (which I have).
I have to agree with this. I think Office 2008 has improvements over 2004, but I still think Office 2007 is better then 2008. Since, I use Office for compatibility, I would rather have Microsoft use the same basic interface for both the Windows and Mac versions of Office.
Quote:
Originally Posted by qualar
I hate Office 2008 for Mac. Why couldn't they have used the same interface as Office 2007 for windows. I have uninstalled Office 2008 and will be using Office 2007 in Fusion. It is just unacceptable that Office 2007 runs faster in Fusion than Office 2008 for Mac runs native in OS X.
90% of the replies to this thread are just plain immature.
MS Office love it or loath it is the defacto standard productivity suite for 90% of the world's leading companies, so to dismiss it as worthless is also idiotic.
Who's been doing that exactly? A lot of us rely on Microsoft Office for our work, so are rightfully pissed off when MS release sub-par upgrade that actually lacks features compared to the previous version.
Quote:
I think this latest version is excellent, but then I'm running it on an Intel Mac with Leopard that's less than two years old. Nearly all of the complaints seem to come from people running Office on state-of-the-ark machines with processors that really should be in a museum.
Again, what are you basing this comment on? I was one of the ones complaining about performance and both my machines are less than 14 months old, including a Quad Mac Pro.
Quote:
If your Mac is 2004 vintage and you have no plans on upgrading any time soon, then maybe you should just stick with MS Office 2004 too.
Or if you need VBA, or if you don't want constant beachballs while trying to manipulate graphs in Excel (even in the new faster update), or constant high CPU usage on a modern machine.
Quote:
The ability of 2008 Office for the Mac to provide seamless compatibility with all past and present Windows based Office docs is alone worth the price of admission.
It doesn't provide seamless compatibility though does it? If it did then Excel spreadsheets with Macros and VBA scripts would work. I'm sorry but your comments not only seem to be grossly misrepresenting people on this forum, but also clearly show that you are not a power user of Office.
Come on you jest. Give examples on how Office 2008 is inferior to both NeoOffice and iWork? Maybe your experience is completely different then mine, but NeoOffice is dog slow on a Mac compared to Office 2008. Moreover, NeoOffice is pretty much a copy of an older version of Office for Windows. Don't get me wrong, for a free application, it is great. However, on usability it is hardly superior.
In addition, I use Office for cross platform compatibility. If you use any sort of fancy formatting, NeoOffice and iWork will not keep true to the original Office formatting. Since, I need to share Office documents that is a big deal.
Pages is cool for the price, but it is not Word. Does that mean Word is worth the price? Probably not, but it is a better application. On the other hand, Keynote kicks Powerpoint's butt, and I prefer Apple's Mail to Entourage. Entourage, however, does have more bells and whistles and works with Exchange better.
I grant your point that NeoOffice can be a pain. But its Excel is largely a clone of the real Excel... menu item for menu item. As for being dog-slow, it is... if your computer is old. For me it's not a problem.
As for "sharing Office documents...'
Come on...
joking right?
Office documents can't travel 50 feet inside the same company without the formatting going to sh**. Plus the viruses issue. You can't even mail .doc files through Google; ring a bell? My email throws away Office files because of viruses.
Been there done that. That's what PDFs are for.
Could most enterprise users get by with Apple Numbers, yes they could. It can do many things and I hope Apple keeps expanding it.
Since I actually need "real Excel" I guess the best option will be Office 2007 running under Parallel/Windows, which is what I should have done anyhow. The real reason I have WinXP on the machine in the first place is SAS.... which doesn't support the Mac at all these days.
Since Microsoft plans on dumping its current Macro language in the next version of Office for Windows, it made little sense to delay Office for the Mac by an additional year to port a language that would soon be irrelevant on Windows as well.
"we have no plans to remove VBA from future versions of Office for Windows. We understand that VBA is a critical capability for large numbers of our customers; accordingly, there is no plan to remove VBA from future versions of Excel."
90% of the replies to this thread are just plain immature.
MS Office love it or loath it is the defacto standard productivity suite for 90% of the world's leading companies, so to dismiss it as worthless is also idiotic.
I think this latest version is excellent, but then I'm running it on an Intel Mac with Leopard that's less than two years old. Nearly all of the complaints seem to come from people running Office on state-of-the-ark machines with processors that really should be in a museum.
If your Mac is 2004 vintage and you have no plans on upgrading any time soon, then maybe you should just stick with MS Office 2004 too.
The ability of 2008 Office for the Mac to provide seamless compatibility with all past and present Windows based Office docs is alone worth the price of admission.
So presumably that includes most of the posters who are stated running intel machines? How about the octo-core intel machine with 10 gigs of ram?
I upgraded to a brand-new MacBook Pro this January and bought Office 08 the day it came out, Worst. Piece. of software crap I have ever owned. Only thing I can remember causing me so many headaches was OS/2 Warp a long time ago. Excel graphs with any significant data sets are practically unuseable they are so slow. Never mind that every third time i update a chart it causes the program to crash. Lets not get started on my now regular routines of 'chase the Word doc across Spaces!' or 'hide and go Word doc seek!"
Office documents can't travel 50 feet inside the same company without the formatting going to sh**. Plus the viruses issue. You can't even mail .doc files through Google; ring a bell? My email throws away Office files because of viruses.
This is pure anti-MS crap. The entire world is sharing .doc files without these issues. When was the last time you heard of a significant presence of a Word Macro virus? 1995?
Office 2008 is terrible, but you're going to far here.
I work with many others sharing excel data with charts. I have to open them in office 2000 (windows) on either parallels or vmware. The charts open very quickly ( a second or so), and i can jump from sheet to sheet of charts with what seems like no delay at all. If I open these same charts in excel 2008 (pro edition) it takes 40 seconds to load. (Even if excel is already running) Clicking on each sheet takes 25 seconds before the beach-ball stops rotating - and I have a chart. Change axis, click on a data point within the chart - 25 seconds again. I have 2.4MHz santa rosa MBP with 4GB, 17 inch high res. Its truly awful. I cannot recommend mac to so many individuals, since they use office so much - and I know they would not be happy. Pity IWork will not allow secondary axis.
Office 2008 (esp excel) is simply too slow to be useable, at least for me. BTW 2004 was no slower, perhaps slightly faster, but so slight as to be still unusable. As for the no vba etc.. that makes several USB devices we have designed, that we interrogate using Excel pretty much useless, and we must write new applications without excel. The update seemed to improve chart plotting by about 30%. I am so excited. If MS would take office 2000, and re-compile at least word and excel for intel macs - it would be just wonderful
This is pure anti-MS crap. The entire world is sharing .doc files without these issues. When was the last time you heard of a significant presence of a Word Macro virus? 1995?
Office 2008 is terrible, but you're going to far here.
The entire world is sharing .doc files without issues????
Every job interview I had in the early 2000s, I would see my .doc Resume printed out in front of them. Always messed up. 2 pages instead of 1 page, etc.
In the corporate world inside a company, usually you can depend on Word formats (not always as I already said). But complex Excel will lose its formatting all the time. .pdf is the only good output option there.
These days, I only do my CV in .pdf form. It is the only safe option. Also the only e-mail friendly option.
Word and Excel viruses continue to exist. I had one at my last corporate job. We were running Office 97....
WHICH BY THE WAY is a vastly SUPERIOR to the Mac OfficeLite trash we are getting these days. Many companies still run Office 97 to this day, because it works. But does it preserve formatting... Hell no. But at least it has Excel macros, VBR, Solver, Access/SQL (for the love of Heaven), etc.
Wow. It's been nearly a day that this has been released and my autoupdater STILL doesn't pick it up. On top of that, when I download the DMG and run the installer, it tells me that it can't install because I don't have a version of Office 2008 on my machine. I did a standard install, haven't renamed anything, and everything is in the folders they're supposed to be in. I've read on other forums that the solution for this is to uninstall and re-install Office. Are you kidding me? No thanks.
I wish iWork published .doc items and Numbers recognized what have become "standard" formulas and references- I would bail on Office entirely.
If you open text only documents you will get compatibility with all other versions. However, if you try to open excel sheet or word document created on windows you will get many problems. Also, Mac version lack many features that used to be available on Office 2004 and still available on Office for windows. If you have windows, MS Office is the best application without doubt. On Mac, on the other hand, nothing is close to windows Office. We are irritated that MS is not giving enough attention to Mac version of Office. Maybe if they try harder then they won't worry about people switching from Windows to Mac.
I agree entirely. I have a brand new MacPro with 8 (countem!) processors having had a 400MHz G4 tower for 8 years and was looking forward to improvements in using office applications I am obliged to use for compatability reasons. Office 2008 is without doubt the biggest disappointment. I ran into the problem of embedding Excel spreadsheets in a word document when preparing my first bill since the upgrade. I just ran into another problem. I cannot seem to insert pictures into Word documents. .tif, .pdf and .jpeg files are rejected. In the end I had to e-mail the pictures with the document. How do we let Micros*** get away with this? I certainly do not want to go to a MS operating system if they can't upgrade an office suite.
90% of the replies to this thread are just plain immature.
MS Office love it or loath it is the defacto standard productivity suite for 90% of the world's leading companies, so to dismiss it as worthless is also idiotic.
I think this latest version is excellent, but then I'm running it on an Intel Mac with Leopard that's less than two years old. Nearly all of the complaints seem to come from people running Office on state-of-the-ark machines with processors that really should be in a museum.
If your Mac is 2004 vintage and you have no plans on upgrading any time soon, then maybe you should just stick with MS Office 2004 too.
The ability of 2008 Office for the Mac to provide seamless compatibility with all past and present Windows based Office docs is alone worth the price of admission.
I agree
MS Office has worked great for me so far. It is unfortunate that the simple interface of the windows version was not brought over to the mac. Oh well took me a day to get used to the Mac and Windows version. Everything in excel/word/powerpoint loads up fast for me.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tim Moore
I just ran into another problem. I cannot seem to insert pictures into Word documents. .tif, .pdf and .jpeg files are rejected. In the end I had to e-mail the pictures with the document. How do we let Micros*** get away with this? I certainly do not want to go to a MS operating system if they can't upgrade an office suite.
Works fine for me. Just dragged and dropped a .jpeg into a word document.
I agree with you about PDFs, however, there are many instances where Office really is the only option that makes sense. For instance, many government employers want Office docs. The University of Michigan only accepts applications in Word or plain text. In some work environments you have to share documents that one person starts writing, and another person finishes. PDF isn't good for that.
I have no problem with iWork. I just don't think it is Office. I also do not think it was ever intended to be. Apple's just offering a low cost solution for people who don't need all the extras Office offers.
For what it is worth, I like Office 2007 over Office 2008. Up until Office 2007 came out, I like Word Perfect over Office.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bwik
I grant your point that NeoOffice can be a pain. But its Excel is largely a clone of the real Excel... menu item for menu item. As for being dog-slow, it is... if your computer is old. For me it's not a problem.
As for "sharing Office documents...'
Come on...
joking right?
Office documents can't travel 50 feet inside the same company without the formatting going to sh**. Plus the viruses issue. You can't even mail .doc files through Google; ring a bell? My email throws away Office files because of viruses.
Been there done that. That's what PDFs are for.
Could most enterprise users get by with Apple Numbers, yes they could. It can do many things and I hope Apple keeps expanding it.
Since I actually need "real Excel" I guess the best option will be Office 2007 running under Parallel/Windows, which is what I should have done anyhow. The real reason I have WinXP on the machine in the first place is SAS.... which doesn't support the Mac at all these days.
Nice post. Strange though because I remember reading over the course of the last six months from various sources that Microsoft would be killing VBA eventually the next version of Office for Window only to replace it with something else. If I recall, one was even a Microsoft engineer. Either that information was wrong, or Microsoft changed its mind because of client complaints. Killing it didn't make much sense to me because so many large companies have a lot of Macros they rely on.
"we have no plans to remove VBA from future versions of Office for Windows. We understand that VBA is a critical capability for large numbers of our customers; accordingly, there is no plan to remove VBA from future versions of Excel."
Comments
Basically it is inferior to NeoOffice, and also iWork 08 (which I have).
Word is OK, and thank goodness the Equation Editor is included (which I use constanty).
EXCEPT WHEN WORD SAYS MY DISK IS FULL. THis is a very frequent error. During which I CAN'T SAVE MY EQUATIONS. SO MY WORK GETS LOST. Like 1988 all over again.
Moving on, Excel 2008 is a complete joke. No Equation Solver. No VBR. NO MACROS!!!!!!!
NO MACROS, NOT EVEN ONE!!!!!!!!!!
NOOOOOOO SOLVER NONE!!!!!!
WTF
Powerpoint, it goes without saying, is an atrocity. That's why I have Keynote from Apple.
AND WHAT ABOUT MICROSOFT ACCESS 2008? WOULD THAT BE ASKING TOO MUCH?
Ohhhh No, the Mac users can't get their hands on MS' precious Access product which is an INTEGRAL part of Office.
Basically I argue MS could be sued for selling "Office" without Access. What if Word were deleted?
Fortunately NeoOffice provides an Access clone free of charge. Next time, who needs Microprick anyway.
Clearly Office 08 is an assault on the Mac. How many people use Solver anyway... in a big company, maybe 20. The other 10,000 would work great on a Mac. So what does this achieve anyway??? Jeesoos..
And I just searched for this update. None was found. "Your Microsoft Software has no updates at this time. 12.0.0 on Mac OS X 10.5.2 MacBook.
(see the bottom part of the page for 2008)
I just installed the update, Excel seems a bit more reliable now, from initial testing I have done.
Doesn't f*up when I use spaces, no intermittent 20-sec beachballs.
As far as Macros go, I never really used them, so the lack of Macros support doesn't effect me. With that said, I really don't blame Microsoft for dropping the support. Microsoft was well into the development of this version of Office, when Apple said, "Hey, guess what we are switching to Intel processors." Not only did Microsoft have to retool the software for the new architecture, it had to switch to Apple's developer tools to do it. Apple's tools are nice, but they are not as feature complete as some of the other tools out there ( at least at the time). It is a real pain to switch to tools less capable and unfamiliar to you. Microsoft had to make decisions on how to best get the product to market with all the rewriting it had to do. Since Microsoft plans on dumping its current Macro language in the next version of Office for Windows, it made little sense to delay Office for the Mac by an additional year to port a language that would soon be irrelevant on Windows as well.
To the folks who have purchased and installed Office '08: do you like it?
In addition, I use Office for cross platform compatibility. If you use any sort of fancy formatting, NeoOffice and iWork will not keep true to the original Office formatting. Since, I need to share Office documents that is a big deal.
Pages is cool for the price, but it is not Word. Does that mean Word is worth the price? Probably not, but it is a better application. On the other hand, Keynote kicks Powerpoint's butt, and I prefer Apple's Mail to Entourage. Entourage, however, does have more bells and whistles and works with Exchange better.
I just got an Office 2008 license as a student.
Basically it is inferior to NeoOffice, and also iWork 08 (which I have).
I hate Office 2008 for Mac. Why couldn't they have used the same interface as Office 2007 for windows. I have uninstalled Office 2008 and will be using Office 2007 in Fusion. It is just unacceptable that Office 2007 runs faster in Fusion than Office 2008 for Mac runs native in OS X.
What update? I can't seem to get it on the microsoft update app thingy.
I had the same problem. Also, the article link doesn't contain the .dmg. Just go to:
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloa...F089EE4#viewer
it has the downloadable file
90% of the replies to this thread are just plain immature.
MS Office love it or loath it is the de facto standard productivity suite for 90% of the world's leading companies, so to dismiss it as worthless is also idiotic.
Who's been doing that exactly? A lot of us rely on Microsoft Office for our work, so are rightfully pissed off when MS release sub-par upgrade that actually lacks features compared to the previous version.
I think this latest version is excellent, but then I'm running it on an Intel Mac with Leopard that's less than two years old. Nearly all of the complaints seem to come from people running Office on state-of-the-ark machines with processors that really should be in a museum.
Again, what are you basing this comment on? I was one of the ones complaining about performance and both my machines are less than 14 months old, including a Quad Mac Pro.
If your Mac is 2004 vintage and you have no plans on upgrading any time soon, then maybe you should just stick with MS Office 2004 too.
Or if you need VBA, or if you don't want constant beachballs while trying to manipulate graphs in Excel (even in the new faster update), or constant high CPU usage on a modern machine.
The ability of 2008 Office for the Mac to provide seamless compatibility with all past and present Windows based Office docs is alone worth the price of admission.
It doesn't provide seamless compatibility though does it? If it did then Excel spreadsheets with Macros and VBA scripts would work. I'm sorry but your comments not only seem to be grossly misrepresenting people on this forum, but also clearly show that you are not a power user of Office.
Come on you jest. Give examples on how Office 2008 is inferior to both NeoOffice and iWork? Maybe your experience is completely different then mine, but NeoOffice is dog slow on a Mac compared to Office 2008. Moreover, NeoOffice is pretty much a copy of an older version of Office for Windows. Don't get me wrong, for a free application, it is great. However, on usability it is hardly superior.
In addition, I use Office for cross platform compatibility. If you use any sort of fancy formatting, NeoOffice and iWork will not keep true to the original Office formatting. Since, I need to share Office documents that is a big deal.
Pages is cool for the price, but it is not Word. Does that mean Word is worth the price? Probably not, but it is a better application. On the other hand, Keynote kicks Powerpoint's butt, and I prefer Apple's Mail to Entourage. Entourage, however, does have more bells and whistles and works with Exchange better.
I grant your point that NeoOffice can be a pain. But its Excel is largely a clone of the real Excel... menu item for menu item. As for being dog-slow, it is... if your computer is old. For me it's not a problem.
As for "sharing Office documents...'
Come on...
joking right?
Office documents can't travel 50 feet inside the same company without the formatting going to sh**. Plus the viruses issue. You can't even mail .doc files through Google; ring a bell? My email throws away Office files because of viruses.
Been there done that. That's what PDFs are for.
Could most enterprise users get by with Apple Numbers, yes they could. It can do many things and I hope Apple keeps expanding it.
Since I actually need "real Excel" I guess the best option will be Office 2007 running under Parallel/Windows, which is what I should have done anyhow. The real reason I have WinXP on the machine in the first place is SAS.... which doesn't support the Mac at all these days.
Since Microsoft plans on dumping its current Macro language in the next version of Office for Windows, it made little sense to delay Office for the Mac by an additional year to port a language that would soon be irrelevant on Windows as well.
Guess again:
http://www.betanews.com/article/Next...VBA/1201120613
"we have no plans to remove VBA from future versions of Office for Windows. We understand that VBA is a critical capability for large numbers of our customers; accordingly, there is no plan to remove VBA from future versions of Excel."
WOW - hope the 23 people who bought the suite don't crash their servers while they all rush to download it all at once.
So that means only 1 Mac user did not buy it?
90% of the replies to this thread are just plain immature.
MS Office love it or loath it is the de facto standard productivity suite for 90% of the world's leading companies, so to dismiss it as worthless is also idiotic.
I think this latest version is excellent, but then I'm running it on an Intel Mac with Leopard that's less than two years old. Nearly all of the complaints seem to come from people running Office on state-of-the-ark machines with processors that really should be in a museum.
If your Mac is 2004 vintage and you have no plans on upgrading any time soon, then maybe you should just stick with MS Office 2004 too.
The ability of 2008 Office for the Mac to provide seamless compatibility with all past and present Windows based Office docs is alone worth the price of admission.
So presumably that includes most of the posters who are stated running intel machines? How about the octo-core intel machine with 10 gigs of ram?
I upgraded to a brand-new MacBook Pro this January and bought Office 08 the day it came out, Worst. Piece. of software crap I have ever owned. Only thing I can remember causing me so many headaches was OS/2 Warp a long time ago. Excel graphs with any significant data sets are practically unuseable they are so slow. Never mind that every third time i update a chart it causes the program to crash. Lets not get started on my now regular routines of 'chase the Word doc across Spaces!' or 'hide and go Word doc seek!"
As for "sharing Office documents...'
Come on...
joking right?
Office documents can't travel 50 feet inside the same company without the formatting going to sh**. Plus the viruses issue. You can't even mail .doc files through Google; ring a bell? My email throws away Office files because of viruses.
This is pure anti-MS crap. The entire world is sharing .doc files without these issues. When was the last time you heard of a significant presence of a Word Macro virus? 1995?
Office 2008 is terrible, but you're going to far here.
Office 2008 (esp excel) is simply too slow to be useable, at least for me. BTW 2004 was no slower, perhaps slightly faster, but so slight as to be still unusable. As for the no vba etc.. that makes several USB devices we have designed, that we interrogate using Excel pretty much useless, and we must write new applications without excel. The update seemed to improve chart plotting by about 30%. I am so excited. If MS would take office 2000, and re-compile at least word and excel for intel macs - it would be just wonderful
This is pure anti-MS crap. The entire world is sharing .doc files without these issues. When was the last time you heard of a significant presence of a Word Macro virus? 1995?
Office 2008 is terrible, but you're going to far here.
The entire world is sharing .doc files without issues????
Every job interview I had in the early 2000s, I would see my .doc Resume printed out in front of them. Always messed up. 2 pages instead of 1 page, etc.
In the corporate world inside a company, usually you can depend on Word formats (not always as I already said). But complex Excel will lose its formatting all the time. .pdf is the only good output option there.
These days, I only do my CV in .pdf form. It is the only safe option. Also the only e-mail friendly option.
Word and Excel viruses continue to exist. I had one at my last corporate job. We were running Office 97....
WHICH BY THE WAY is a vastly SUPERIOR to the Mac OfficeLite trash we are getting these days. Many companies still run Office 97 to this day, because it works. But does it preserve formatting... Hell no. But at least it has Excel macros, VBR, Solver, Access/SQL (for the love of Heaven), etc.
Can Excel 08 even use ODBC data?
I wish iWork published .doc items and Numbers recognized what have become "standard" formulas and references- I would bail on Office entirely.
If you open text only documents you will get compatibility with all other versions. However, if you try to open excel sheet or word document created on windows you will get many problems. Also, Mac version lack many features that used to be available on Office 2004 and still available on Office for windows. If you have windows, MS Office is the best application without doubt. On Mac, on the other hand, nothing is close to windows Office. We are irritated that MS is not giving enough attention to Mac version of Office. Maybe if they try harder then they won't worry about people switching from Windows to Mac.
I agree entirely. I have a brand new MacPro with 8 (countem!) processors having had a 400MHz G4 tower for 8 years and was looking forward to improvements in using office applications I am obliged to use for compatability reasons. Office 2008 is without doubt the biggest disappointment. I ran into the problem of embedding Excel spreadsheets in a word document when preparing my first bill since the upgrade. I just ran into another problem. I cannot seem to insert pictures into Word documents. .tif, .pdf and .jpeg files are rejected. In the end I had to e-mail the pictures with the document. How do we let Micros*** get away with this? I certainly do not want to go to a MS operating system if they can't upgrade an office suite.
90% of the replies to this thread are just plain immature.
MS Office love it or loath it is the de facto standard productivity suite for 90% of the world's leading companies, so to dismiss it as worthless is also idiotic.
I think this latest version is excellent, but then I'm running it on an Intel Mac with Leopard that's less than two years old. Nearly all of the complaints seem to come from people running Office on state-of-the-ark machines with processors that really should be in a museum.
If your Mac is 2004 vintage and you have no plans on upgrading any time soon, then maybe you should just stick with MS Office 2004 too.
The ability of 2008 Office for the Mac to provide seamless compatibility with all past and present Windows based Office docs is alone worth the price of admission.
I agree
MS Office has worked great for me so far. It is unfortunate that the simple interface of the windows version was not brought over to the mac. Oh well took me a day to get used to the Mac and Windows version. Everything in excel/word/powerpoint loads up fast for me.
I just ran into another problem. I cannot seem to insert pictures into Word documents. .tif, .pdf and .jpeg files are rejected. In the end I had to e-mail the pictures with the document. How do we let Micros*** get away with this? I certainly do not want to go to a MS operating system if they can't upgrade an office suite.
Works fine for me. Just dragged and dropped a .jpeg into a word document.
I have no problem with iWork. I just don't think it is Office. I also do not think it was ever intended to be. Apple's just offering a low cost solution for people who don't need all the extras Office offers.
For what it is worth, I like Office 2007 over Office 2008. Up until Office 2007 came out, I like Word Perfect over Office.
I grant your point that NeoOffice can be a pain. But its Excel is largely a clone of the real Excel... menu item for menu item. As for being dog-slow, it is... if your computer is old. For me it's not a problem.
As for "sharing Office documents...'
Come on...
joking right?
Office documents can't travel 50 feet inside the same company without the formatting going to sh**. Plus the viruses issue. You can't even mail .doc files through Google; ring a bell? My email throws away Office files because of viruses.
Been there done that. That's what PDFs are for.
Could most enterprise users get by with Apple Numbers, yes they could. It can do many things and I hope Apple keeps expanding it.
Since I actually need "real Excel" I guess the best option will be Office 2007 running under Parallel/Windows, which is what I should have done anyhow. The real reason I have WinXP on the machine in the first place is SAS.... which doesn't support the Mac at all these days.
Guess again:
http://www.betanews.com/article/Next...VBA/1201120613
"we have no plans to remove VBA from future versions of Office for Windows. We understand that VBA is a critical capability for large numbers of our customers; accordingly, there is no plan to remove VBA from future versions of Excel."