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General discussion

Microsoft Office 2008, is it really worth it?

Jan 5, 2008 10:48AM PST

I have Microsoft Office 2004 and it works just fine. I just read the article about Microsoft Office 2008 and I really want to get the copy of it. However the thing is that the price is too expansive and I don't think it's worth buying. What do you guys think?

Discussion is locked

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I've always found that the Home version is pretty good
Jan 5, 2008 12:13PM PST

The one that's $150, which I think is called the Student/Home edition or something, is not bad for the price, since you get the four apps in it. As to the more expensive versions of MS Office for Mac, I never thought they were worth the price. When you think about it, the $150 version is a better deal, since I remember that some places would sell Word, PowerPoint, and Excel separately for more.
I intend to get the Home edition when it comes out to upgrade my copy of Office, and I recommend it to all who use Office for Mac. If I recall correctly, the 2004 version was for PPC and the upcoming version will have Universal support, so Intel users will experience better performance. Word does act up on me sometimes... That's just my two cents.

-BMF

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It ends up being your choice to
Jan 6, 2008 3:04AM PST

spend the money... Personally, I have yet to find problems trading files with my work Windows XP machine running Microsoft Office 2003 and NeoOffice http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php which I run on my Mac...

If there are specific feature you need which are not available elsewhere, then you don't get much choice, I guess...

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I think that specific feature is
Jan 6, 2008 4:23AM PST

the Virtual PC program which "allows you to browse PC files on Macs easier". I think that's what it does.

I bet the real reason is you're paying for the name, Professional or Home. Of course you can't really tell the difference when using Word or PowerPoint so there really is no reason to spend extra cash on this.

-BMF

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Wait for the update to office 2008
Jan 26, 2008 12:38AM PST

I am quite disappointed with this version. It is no faster than the Power PC only version on a MacPro. Entourage has issues with email viewing. For instance scroll wheel on mice do NOT work to scroll a HTML message in the preview pane.

If there are such clearly obvious misses in the initial release you have to assume there are quite a few others the beta testers may have identified but where not fixed because of schedule. Please wait for the the release of at least the first update.

There are enough issues I am actually considering abandoning office 2008 and reverting to 2004.