Microsoft offering Office 2008 free trial for Mac users

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Comments

  • Reply 41 of 63
    quadra 610quadra 610 Posts: 6,757member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by jpellino View Post


    ...well, not entirely.



    "Remove Office" continually quits. So manual it is and good luck.



    Even after stripping one architecture with Monolingual, each app is still twice the size of their 2004 equivalents. And I can't see any huge gains from 2004.



    And the font nonsense has to stop. Why they feel they have to install several MS equivalents of existing fonts is beyond me.



    Not to mention typographic controls in Word are utter crap.
  • Reply 42 of 63
    Take a hike! I'm using iWork 08 and by 2010 it will improve greatly.

    I don't need all the bells an dingles.
  • Reply 43 of 63
    hudson1hudson1 Posts: 800member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by jpellino View Post


    ...well, not entirely.



    "Remove Office" continually quits. So manual it is and good luck.



    Even after stripping one architecture with Monolingual, each app is still twice the size of their 2004 equivalents. And I can't see any huge gains from 2004.



    And the font nonsense has to stop. Why they feel they have to install several MS equivalents of existing fonts is beyond me.



    Purely a guess but I suspect the font issue is to maximize compatibility with the Windows version.
  • Reply 44 of 63
    nikon133nikon133 Posts: 2,600member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by shavex View Post


    Hahahah Free Trial for Mac owners and just buy it for PC owners. I wonder what caused them to make this move? Maybe all the Mac owners are already broke from buying their computer they cant afford the software to go along with it HAHAHAH!



    You're a funny boy



    Every new PC I've seen recently comes with pre-installed 60-day trial Office, and all it requires is license key to be purchased and typed in to make it full install. I think that pre-install is universal - basically has all the features (from Office Ultimate), and license key will determine what features will remain after



    For custom system builders (or people who purchased computer before), 60-day trial can be downloaded from Microsoft site. I'd presume procedure is the same as for Mac users.
  • Reply 45 of 63
    nikon133nikon133 Posts: 2,600member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Hudson1 View Post


    Purely a guess but I suspect the font issue is to maximize compatibility with the Windows version.



    I think you're right.



    Office 2007 for Windows has Calibri for default font; since it is default, majority of people will likely just leave it like that.



    Few more sets are being shipped with new Office, and in their defence, they are better looking than previous Arial, Times New Roman... If you install compatibility patch for Office 2003, you'll get all those fonts as well.
  • Reply 46 of 63
    nikon133nikon133 Posts: 2,600member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by gabberattack View Post


    I will never buy it. It took me like 10 minutes just to figure out how to print a page on Windows version. I had a computer class Office 2003 couple years ago and I learned pretty well how to use it. But when I had to use that new bloated version with whole setting changed, I was happy to have iWork and OpenOffice at home. Those people at Redmond just don't get it.



    Very common problem among Windows users freshly moved to Office 2007, apparently



    Don't know what was your problem, though, but from what I've seen many people will fail to realise that round thing in upper left corner is actually a button for what was previously known as FILE menu.
  • Reply 47 of 63
    charlitunacharlituna Posts: 7,217member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by teckstud View Post


    Doesn't this free trial come already with the purchase of any new iMac or MacBook as well? It used to with the prior Office- I thought it still did.



    as of last june there was nothing Office on the computers when you bought them. I don't know if that's cause Microsoft didn't want to give Apple a license to do it or cause Apple dropped doing it because they wanted folks to trail/buy iwork.



    Frankly i'm fine with iwork. I don't do all the complex macros stuff that would make Office worth it. and I have the preloaded mail/addressbook/ical in place of Entourage.



    but I can see where some folks for whatever reason would rather have Office so whatever
  • Reply 48 of 63
    nikon133nikon133 Posts: 2,600member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by drackmere View Post


    I cannot speak for the rest of you on this list, but I find it distasteful that MS first has the inclination to insult Mac users , then has the chutzpah to try and sell their wares to us. The only MS office product used at my house is Word, and that is because it is difficult for my wife to learn new software (brain injury). If she could without freaking out, I would switch to OO, and NeoOffice for everything. Since I do not use spreadsheets, I could not care less about Excel. So the last office purchased, is truly the last office purchased.



    I'm really not following you. What is wrong and distasteful for having an extra option? If Mac users don't need Office, no one will purchase it and MS will stop developing it... as long as they are developing it, it seems there are enough Mac users that actually need it (even if they don't want it).



    At least it is version made for Mac exclusively and is different from Windows version - much as I know.



    Me, I'd be happy to see some of Mac-only titles done for Windows.



    And some of Playstation 3 exclusive games
  • Reply 49 of 63
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by davebarnes View Post


    Microsoft changed the formatting of copied text somehow so you can no longer copy from a Word doc and paste formatted text into Dreamweaver CS 3. A task I do many times each day. The only solution is to upgrade to Adobe CS4 for only $600. Not ready to do that as my income has been negatively impacted by this recession.



    You do know that you can "Paste Special > Plain Text," right? I like that better anyway because I'd rather apply my own formatting than carry any Word formatting into HTML.



    Anyway, I don't have a problem with Office 2008. It's more stable for me than 2004, and the interface is good, by which I mean it stays out of the way and lets me work. Microsoft did not carry their Office 2007 for Windows interface disaster over to the Mac version, thank goodness. I haven't seen any downsides in the work that I do, so the extra stability was worth the price of the upgrade.



    It is funny that it took over a year to get a test drive together, though.
  • Reply 50 of 63
    bsenkabsenka Posts: 799member
    My trial version that came with my iMac still works after a year. I don't even get reminder messages or anything. I hate it, and would have deleted it long ago if the wife and kids didn't use it.



    Besides, who actually ever pays for Office anyway? Even people who are hard core anti piracy usually have a copy that they got "from their brother" or something like that.
  • Reply 51 of 63
    aplnubaplnub Posts: 2,605member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by bsenka View Post


    My trial version that came with my iMac still works after a year. I don't even get reminder messages or anything. I hate it, and would have deleted it long ago if the wife and kids didn't use it.



    Besides, who actually ever pays for Office anyway? Even people who are hard core anti piracy usually have a copy that they got "from their brother" or something like that.



    We pay for it in my company. I think the price for MS Office 2008 is very fair and the license agreement acceptable. If the Windows version was priced and licensed like the Mac version I would believe they would sell more boxes legally.



    Excel is the only MS Product I use on the Mac side and don't mind paying for it at the current price levels.
  • Reply 52 of 63
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by shavex View Post


    Hahahah Free Trial for Mac owners and just buy it for PC owners. I wonder what caused them to make this move? Maybe all the Mac owners are already broke from buying their computer they cant afford the software to go along with it HAHAHAH!



    No one goes broke buying a Mac. The people who buy Macs are generally people who are smart enough to afford them.



    Besides, a test-drive of iWork comes preinstalled on all new Macs. Who wants MS bloatware like Office?
  • Reply 53 of 63
    aizmovaizmov Posts: 989member
    I'd gladly pay for MS Office 2008 if it was on par with MS Office 2007.
  • Reply 54 of 63
    I understand you Redmond guys are desperate, but no thanks!

    For my line of work iWorks, OpenOffice and FinalDraft do a much better job than your bloatware.
  • Reply 55 of 63
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by bdkennedy1 View Post


    Yay! Slow your machine to a crawl for free!



    No need to download Office for that. I can do that just by letting Safari run for too long without a restart. Oh, happy memory leak!



    It's good to see that they released a demo that isn't incredibly handicapped like the 2004 trial version. How can you try out a word processing program if you can't even print out your documents?
  • Reply 56 of 63
    puecpuec Posts: 1member
    What is Office 2008? Is that some kind of virus for Mac?
  • Reply 57 of 63
    bwikbwik Posts: 565member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Aizmov View Post


    I'd gladly pay for MS Office 2008 if it was on par with MS Office 2007.



    Exactly but it's not even close to the same product as the windows version of office. Something which by the way is very stable and powerful.
  • Reply 58 of 63
    I wouldn't buy Office 2008 if it was only $49.95. If you haven't tried it you won't believe how hard it is to use. In order to teach students how to use this product our local Junior College offers a Office 2008 class but it last a whole semester. If it takes over 3 months of 2 classes per week to learn how to fully use this product I can't imagine how an avg. user, much less mom & pop, could ever be productive in a short period of time. I un-installed it after only a few days & re-installed Office 2003. MS sure has missed the boat with their 2007 / 2008 software / OS offerings..
  • Reply 59 of 63
    bregaladbregalad Posts: 816member
    It's great news. Even more people will get a chance to discover just how much Office 2008 sucks.



    It boggles my mind how a native Intel suite (08) could be so much slower than a PowerPC suite (04) when running on Intel hardware.
  • Reply 60 of 63
    aquaticaquatic Posts: 5,602member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by tomkarl View Post


    IMHO - In normal business communications, justifying the right side of text makes it difficult to read and is out of use.



    I wish! My office still does this...Yuck! I'd say the only place for right justification is newspapers, brochures, or other quickie material where the appearance is almost as important as the text.



    MS Office 2008 is so weird, it used to be HALF the speed of 2004 PowerPC code running EMULATED on Intel Macs! Nuts! After all the updates, which really helped, I'd say it's almost as fast. How they managed to pull that off is anyone's guess. Perhaps Bill Gates had them put a line of code with a loop in there that activates on launch to hang the application for a minute. The weirdest part is that I don't really see what is different from 2004, except that they removed VBA which kind of sucks big for a lot of users.
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