Customer Reviews for Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Home & Student Edition

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Home & Student Edition
by Microsoft Software

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Software Reviews of Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Home & Student Edition

Customer Review: Good all-around package for the home office
Summary: 4 Stars

We have been using MS Office for a number of years for three of its functions: word processing, presentation slides and spreadsheets. It does all three well.

Recently, we began using Mac presentation software (Keynote) for making presentation slides. It is better than Power Point for some things, but we think that both are needed for developing good presentations.

Word Perfect was our all time favorite word processing program, but MS Word is a good substitute. Excel is nearly worth the price of the entire package. It is a very easy to use information management program and nearly perfect for home financial management activities. The integration of the various functions of Office is an additional plus.

Customer Review: One Mac app that doesn't "just work."
Summary: 2 Stars

I have been terribly disappointed with Office for Mac 2008 since Day 1. When I first installed it and found that the (controversial) ribbon from Office 2007 for PC wasn't there, I felt like I had been cheated somehow. However, as I used Office for Mac more, I found that the ribbon was the least of my worries. I have two primary criticisms...

First, Office 2008 is exceedingly slow. I have a 3.06GHz C2D iMac with 4Gb RAM and this is, without doubt, the slowest launching program I have. Even after multiple updates, it's still 2-3x slower than Pages on first launch. Furthermore, while using the program, actions like autocorrection, etc take almost a full second to implement, during which time Office stops responding graphically (it's actually working, just not displaying anything until it churns through the autocorrect, after which it "speed types" in what was in the buffer).

Second, the Thesaurus is also particularly disapppointing, since it doesn't seem to be able to sense the forms of words. Many "-ing" words show their root in the thesaurus, which you then use to find a synonym and, after inserting, you have to go back and manually change the form. Ridiculous.

Third, there appears to be a bug (perhaps related to the autocorrect lag) where changes to a document sometimes cause a "visual corruption." It's difficult to explain, but an example would be where a significant amount of text is changed from double-space to singe-space. After doing so, it is entirely possible to have a "phantom" sentence on the page that disappears if you scroll up then back down. It's almost as if Word correctly moved everything, but forgot to update the screen to show the changes.

There are several other problems that I just don't have the heart to detail here (some of them are personal frustrations with design decisions). The bottom line, however, is that this is the first Office suite in 15 years that I have wished I could "unbuy." There are too many "annoyances" here. It could be that I use documents between Office 2007 on a PC and 2008 on a Mac, but shouldn't there be 100% compatibility. Perhaps the 2011 version will be better, but for the time being, this is the single most frustrating piece of software I currently have on my iMac, primarily because I know how well it works on the PC side. I'm not one given to conspiracy theories, but I just can't help but shake the feeling that Microsoft didn't put their best and rightest on this "Mac" project. :(

Customer Review: Buy Used!!!
Summary: 5 Stars

It's way better to buy these programs used as there is absolutely no reason to pay full price for something you install once and forget about. I saved $50!
Also the Mac version of this program is waaaaay superior to the PC version, especially Microsoft Word.

Customer Review: Office for Mac
Summary: 5 Stars

Converting from PC to MAC I found that the "compatibility" of IWork when transferring documents to clients with PCs wasn't all that I had hoped. Hyperlinks were lost. Track changes didn't show for their comments. Office just makes it easier. I bought this product and got what I expected. It's Microsoft Office, with all its good and bad points. What can I say? I went to Amazon to find the best price, and I did, saving $50. Got what I expected and paid less. That pretty much covers it.