Microsoft Office for Mac 2008: Verdict? It's exceptional
I bought Microsoft's newest version of Office for Mac (2008) on Tuesday and have been using it nonstop ever since. (Check out the CNET review here.) It is snappy, intuitive, and even innovative in some ways. (MyDay, seen at right, is a blessing.) In short, Microsoft has done something very, very right with this product. I recommend it to everyone who needs it.
Entourage is the biggest area where I see improvements. It is soooo fast compared with Office 2004 for Mac. The UI is gorgeous. My favorite improvement, however, is My Day. It's a floating window that shows my upcoming appointments, "To Do" items, and e-mails that I've flagged for action. It's such a simple addition, but I'm already wholly reliant on it.
The product does have some downsides.
It doesn't save into the OpenDocument Format. (Yes, this is a problem for me as I also use NeoOffice, especially for my presentation files.) And it obnoxiously saves into its new Office Open XML format (which you can turn off but which is aggravating all the same since 99.999 percent of the world still uses the old file formats). Also, synchronization to my BlackBerry has died with this upgrade since PocketMac no longer seems to be able to find the Microsoft Sync Services. (A call to Microsoft's help desk made it clear that Microsoft doesn't know how to find them, either.)
In fact, I can't seem to get it to sync with Apple's iCal and Address Book, either (though colleagues of mine have had no issues doing so). A call to Microsoft has them pointing the finger at Apple, and I'm sure Apple will point a finger back when I call them. Why these companies can't use open standards to make integration easier, I don't know.
What I do know is that the upgrade was worth the price. You might ask why I don't use OpenOffice/NeoOffice exclusively, given that I'm an open-source proponent. Answer: I want an all-in-one communications suite, and neither Apple nor the open-source community makes one. Apple forces me to use disparate applications (Address Book, iCal, Mail, etc.). Open-source provides paltry e-mail tools with the same lack of integration between calendaring, tasks, etc.
So I use Microsoft's Office product, and I'm exceptionally happy with Microsoft Office for Mac 2008, in particular because of its improvements to Entourage, its e-mail client. It's an excellent product.
Matt Asay is general manager of the Americas and vice president of business development at Alfresco, and has nearly a decade of operational experience with commercial open source and regularly speaks and publishes on open-source business strategy. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
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I have yet to use the new suite and will only do so if I can get my hands on it for free before I graduate from college. If not, I will make the small investment in iWork and be done with Office until they make some UI changes.
Mac users are never going to be happy until the Earth is flat again, just like they always envisioned it.
That said, it still ain't worth the money. I'm basically an Excel power user so I don't have much to say about the other apps, but I see no benefit to the upgrade at all. What's the point in having a million rows when the calculation speed for a simple 60,000 line workbook is slower than it was in Excel 2003? On a decent rig, pretty much any halfway complex thing I try to do takes forever. Worse, it sucks up all system resources. At least with Excel 2003, if I knew I had some complex formulas to process, I could let it calculate while I checked email or surfed the net, or even opened up a second instance of Excel and worked in there. With Excel 2007 all you can do is sit and watch the screen because it takes 100% of your resources so you can't even alt-tab away from the monster.
I'd like to whack Mr. Ballmer on his shiny white head.
Mac users are never going to be happy until the Earth is flat again, just like they envision it.
In their defense, Microsoft does make nice mice.
We are in the process of converting to ODF so we can keep our options open going forward. If MS will make include native support for ODF in MS Office (Windows & Mac) we'll probably keeping using it. If they don't, we won't.
Therefore, until they can come up with a way to access my Appleworks files, I am NOT wasting my money on another program that doesn't do what I want! ANY SUGGESTIONS would be greatly appreciated!
sage@washtucna.com