Comments on: Mac Office 2008: Shinier, Easier To Use

By: Leela

Leela — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 05:37:46 +0000

I can’t BELIEVE they got rid of macros! I’ve only just realised and am extremely pissed as this now adds hours to my workload!

What a mess!

That said, it’s still more functional and powerful than IWork or any of the other processing programs … still .. I can’t believe they’ve done this to me!

By: amin

amin — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:37:35 +0000

Specs: macbook, 2.4ghz core 2 duo, 2gb ram

Why does anybody even care about Word? there are many programs that people can use as replacement (abiword being a great choice). Same with powerpoint…i mean these two programs do not have features that are that original.

Excel on the other hand is different. Knowing excel pretty well, I have to say this was the only concern I had switching over to mac…as I have heard many bad things about ms office for mac (2004 floating toolbars was LAME). I havent even tried 2008 because of all the bad reviews.

I am trying NeoOffice which I understand is pretty darn compatible with office. The spreadshee program is pretty decent. Havent got to the point of using lookup tables, or filtering data or anything (where my concerns are- support for complex formulas as well). But overall its not bad at all. My second choice would be iwork…although i hear Numbers (iworks equiv. to excel) sucks!

By: Tom Shannen

Tom Shannen — Sat, 10 May 2008 03:31:06 +0000

Mac Pro went back to Apple – without macros in excel you have a children’s homework spreadsheet. Spreadsheets can not be setup to run extensive “what if scenarios” by changing a parameter and seeing what happens to the results. This is an important feature for business. In excel 2008 your choice is the deadly XXXX instead of a calculation or going through every calculation of the spreadsheet and changing that parameter. Maybe Microsoft did this to keep marketshare in the business world – Paranoid?

By: Johan Forssblad

Johan Forssblad — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 07:18:51 +0000

Hi,
I must say I was disappointed when I upgraded (?) from Microsoft Office v.X (since 2004) to Microsoft Office 2008 for Macintosh.
Excel is the worst. Things which worked before are now not working and need rework to show up properly. It is very slow with all these buttons that are displayed in film like sequences instead of popping up immediately. Fun the first time, but after a while you only want speed and no fance gimmics. (It really feels like it is time to buy a new computer again but I have it running on a 2.66 Mac Pro Quad core with 6 GB of RAM.)
Word 2008 has crashed or had to be shut down about five times a day.
Yesterday it said I couldn’t save my 4.7 MB document because the disk was full. There was 50 GB free. No other disks helped. Nothing but to shoot it down and restart Office. Then there was enought space for Word to save when I had retyped my changes …
There seems not to be many new good things I had wished for or expected after four years of development. Mostly more fancy and CPU consuming GUI.
I’m more or less forced to use Office because some of our customers and clients require us to sent our diagrams and documents in a compatible format which they can edit and send back and forth without screwing up graphics, layout etc.
I wish I could get our money back! Don’t buy it yet! It is far from a finished product in my honest opinion despite I have the latest autoupdate installed.

By: jonathan

jonathan — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 13:54:38 +0000

There may be better products out there, I’m not really qualified to judge. Having said that, I don’t understand why so many of you are having so many troubles with Office for Mac ‘08. I use Windows Office 2003 (obviously government! lol) at work and Office for Mac ‘08 at home. Granted, I may not be operating on the same level as many of you, but I haven’t encountered many of the basic problems you complain of. I haven’t had ANY compatability problems with Windows Office 2003. Neither do I see my programs loading slowly. There is no ‘lag’ between loading and accessing programs. I like the fancy visual presentation of it and find the menus easily accessible and not in my way. I have no experience with Visual Basic and cannot comment on that, though it seems to be a major downfall for many users. All in all, it seems to be a good program to me.

By: fridge

fridge — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 14:19:44 +0000

There are better word processors then Word. There are better presentation applications then Power Point, but… Excel is (was) Excel and there is no real competition. The downside is that the new Excel does not support Macros? So from an Excel point of view, our new shiny Office has become semi-cross platform (the only app in the Office suite that does not have a viable mac alternative is no longer cross platform… coincidence?, I don’t think so). I feel pretty screwed by MS that they can not get their act together and support macros, independent of platforms. But hey, don’t we mac users love being punished by MS? Paying and upgrading year after year… and then, oops, sorry… by the way… no support in our new shiny Office suite for all the hundreds and hundreds of documents and spreadsheets you have previously created with Macro functionality! Is there any other reputable software company one feel less secure with buying software from then MS? In my opinion, the best thing one can do is to get as far away and as little dependent as possible as one can from MS, or next update they pull the plug on both Word and Excel and leave us with PowerPoint.

By: Bruce A

Bruce A — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 20:17:20 +0000

Martin, what kind of Mac are you running? I’ve got a MacBook (original 1.83ghz Core Duo) with 2gb of RAM. From launch to ready to type is thirty seconds. I can have Mellel or TextWrangler open in about five seconds. It could certainly be a lot worse but it’s still pretty darned slow.

By: dex

dex — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 18:32:15 +0000

Jim, this is usually case of most of the new software versions. But it isn’t only functionality that counts. What about ease of use, stability, speed and interface, eg.? Unfortunately, Office:mac 2008 is not really a good example for improvement (although it certainly is much better than the old ‘97 ).

By: jim

jim — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 16:18:46 +0000

I really do not understand why anyone would pay for MS office when you could use neo office for free. It basically gives you the functionality of office 97.

By: Jake

Jake — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 15:31:33 +0000

No one know is you can do turbian style papers with 2008? I need to know before I can make a purchase.

By: dex

dex — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 15:18:47 +0000

I was waiting for its release – I wanted to buy Office. Then I got a new MBP with Leopard, tried iWork and was very satisfied with it, more then with NeoOffice. Then MS Office came out – I tried it – I don’t want it anymore. It’s not worth it. Only (and I really mean it) thing that it’s good for is compatibility with Windows Word. But other than that… No way.

By: Martin

Martin — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 12:57:54 +0000

That was meant to say “literally just finished my first full project”. Kind of lost a bit of the impact there…

By: Martin

Martin — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 12:56:35 +0000

Well, I’ve literally finished my first full project using nothing but Office 2008, the paper is still warm in my hands, and it looks bloody fantastic if I do say so myself. The images and tables presets have just given it that edge over any written work I’ve done before (not that I do that much, being an IT technician), and it took basically no extra effort on my part.

Judging by the comments on here though, I think I’ll be taking a look at Pages very soon to compare…

By: Austen Saltz

Austen Saltz — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 11:24:23 +0000

I think that people have come to expect for Word to be a powerhouse. It’s not the application you open to do a quick read-through. It’s for serious writing and work, and it’s got a load of features to help with that.

By: Martin

Martin — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 10:29:13 +0000

Fair point Brad – I had Word open already and when I opened it again it took 4.5 seconds. On a fresh boot it takes 8. I still wouldn’t call 8 seconds a long time.

By: Brad

Brad — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 06:11:36 +0000

While Word has improved some things, I’ve never installed software that was so long in coming and so disappointing.

Oh and by the way, it opens slower (I wonder if that 4.5 second opening time mentioned above was a first time open on a freshly booted machine, or if it had been opened, closed, and reopened).

Oh, and I run Office 2007 in Parallels, and every component opens more quickly than the Mac 2008 counterpart.

By: Austen Saltz

Austen Saltz — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 03:08:17 +0000

@Duncan: Simply because it’s the industry standard. That’s why office over iwork, especially if someone wants to use their mac for work, compatibility is a huge issue. Also, openoffice and neooffice aren’t as fully matured and are not as polished, and do not have all of the features of office 2008.

And IMHO, office 2008 is a very good application.

By: Duncan

Duncan — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 23:34:18 +0000

Installing Office 2008 on my MacBook Pro was a terrible decision. The only thing I was really looking forward to was the speed bump I assumed I would see as a result of the programs finally being UB. Instead, they are all just as slow.

I’m not really a fan of the new layout either, though I will admit that it does look nice. The formatting palette is still there, rather than integrated with the menus at the top of the document. I don’t know about anyone else, but I like to be able to see many different windows from different programs at the same time, and the formatting palette gets in the way of that.

The most important problem with Office (for me, anyway) is the loss of VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) support. All the Add-Ins you could previously add through the Add-In menu option now no longer work. This is a problem for me, because the only reason I would ever use Office was for Excel’s Data Analysis tool pack. With that gone, I need to use computers in my school’s library to analyze lab data for lab reports.

I can’t see why anyone would want to pay $400 (or I suppose $130) for Office when OpenOffice is free, and iWork is better.

By: Bob

Bob — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 23:11:22 +0000

I agree that all around 2008 is much better. However, I was quite suprised, or should I have been, that 2008 doesn’t support right-to-left scripting!

By: Fraser Drew

Fraser Drew — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 18:19:12 +0000

I have stuck with Pages… except for a recent report, in which I had to do lots of windows people collaboration, I had to use Word, exporting in Pages does not work when u have a complicated, 20+ Page document with images, the formatting gets screwed.
However, having said that, Pages is awesome, Word is a big piece of excruciatingly slow, poor at formatting, waste of space – junk. MS NEED to start from the ground up, and have something of comparable speed and ease of use.

By: Martin

Martin — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 18:11:57 +0000

I must be the lucky one, then. As soon as a document’s open it’s ready to use; no crashes or anything yet, just the annoying Spaces glitches.

Anyway, I got Office (along with my Macbook Pro) free because I work in the IT dept of a college, so I can’t really complain… I’m testing it for deployment across the college, and as much as I don’t think it’s quite ready for the students to use yet (at least another 2 updates I reckon), it’s certainly running better for me than 2004. I’ve never used Pages, mind, so maybe that would completely shift my perspective.

By: DChu

DChu — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 18:06:46 +0000

Why you have to pay for MS Office? Try OpenOffice. It has all the major functions for doc and spreadsheet, good enough for most people and businesses.

By: Pakk99

Pakk99 — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:59:45 +0000

I just timed Word 2008 on my 2×2.66 Dual-Core Mac Pro with 8 GB of memory, and Word took 24 seconds to load, and 43 seconds before I could access a menu. And, switching from PowerPoint to Word took 17 seconds, and 81 seconds before I could access a menu. These results vary slightly each time we open Office 2008, but they are fairly consistent on each of our 4 Mac Pro’s.

By: Shiraz

Shiraz — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:56:56 +0000

Word opens a doc in about 5 seconds for me, but I can’t actually do anything to that doc for another minute. It’s gotten to the point where I actually cringe if I accidentally open something with Word. Plus it crashes often. I’ve switched to Pages. I only go back to Word now for grammar checking since Pages’s grammar checker sucks whereas Word’s spell checker sucks. Using both programs (and wasting more time than I should) I can actually get stuff done!

By: Martin

Martin — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:16:07 +0000

For those complaining about slowness, I’ve just timed Word opening – 4.5 seconds here, from clicking the logo to the document opening and being ready to use. That seems fine to me. Do you all take amphetamines in your coffee or something?

By: Tris Orendorff

Tris Orendorff — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:06:10 +0000

Regarding the Visual Basic issue: I think most people donâ€™t realize that VB was a major vector for spreading viruses, worms and other nasties on Windows 98.

Regarding the slowness of this version: Is it as slow as OpenOffice 2 on the Mac or Office 2008 on Vista?

By: Jake

Jake — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:40:36 +0000

Can MS 2008 do turabian better then the older versions of MS office?

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:33:35 +0000

Build on teh worst features of Office 2004. Slow launch, change for change sake, not well documented, not too friendly to my old animated power point lectures. Take me back to Office X.

By: Kim

Kim — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:16:53 +0000

Regarding the Visual Basic issue: I think most people don’t realize that third party products for Word may rely on VBA. For example, my EndNote bibliography management program no longer works, nor does my medical dictionary spell-checker, because both used VBA in Word. My point is that you don’t have to be a user of macros that you’ve written yourself to possibly be affected by this loss of functionality. I’m now having to find replacements for these two utilities, which will of course cost me more money.

By: Bruce A

Bruce A — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:15:19 +0000

“Mac Office 2008: Shinier, Easier To Use”

…Slower Than Molasses Running Uphill In January.

There. I fixed your headline for you.