Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Upgrade
by Microsoft Software
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Software Reviews of Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Upgrade
Customer Review: A huge step backward
Summary: 1 Stars
I have found absolutely everything about this upgrade to be a step backward. After several months of frustration, I'm uninstalling Office 2008 and reverting to 2004. Here's a sampling of why:
- Frames don't work in Word the way they used to. Formatting a graph or table within a Word document is much more labor intensive.
- Excel can't record macros any more. Even as a reasonably experienced coder, it's much easier to start with a recorded version.
- None of the programs play nicely with Spaces. You document may spontaneously jump to space 1, but your toolbars, etc will remain in space 2
In short, I can think of no reason to buy this.
Customer Review: MACuser from '84
Summary: 4 Stars
It's about the only game in town for word processing. Used to use WRITENOW! up until OSX came along. Word is good, but too sophisticated for everyday use. Excel is still the best spread sheet around and Power Point seems to be the in game for visual presentations.Customer Review: Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac
Summary: 1 Stars
Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac was purchased as an upgrade. I work as an editor and publisher of niche publications and it is necessary for me to have recent versions of software to serve my clients.
That said, this is the slowest, most memory-sucking MS Office yet. The performance on a G5 2.0 Dual GHz Mac running Mac OS 10.5.5 is abysmal. On my Intel Mac Dual Core 2.0 GHz MacBook Pro, the performance is only slightly better.
I suspect the primary reason for the slow boot-up time is that (as a publishing professional) each machine has more than 100 fonts open at any given time. MS Word does not handle large font libraries very well.
My recommendation is to avoid this program if you can. The Text Editor that is part of Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) is far more nimble and allows documents to be saved as any number of MS Word version documents. It is a better bet for casual Mac users.
PowerPoint is only useful to view PowerPoint documents. I seldom need this function. I do not use MS Messaging or Ms Entourage (Mac Mail is better integrated with my iPhone).
I use MS Excel from time to time. Again, it is slow starting up, but functions well beyond that.
The bottom line is that I own MS Office 2008 for Mac because I have to, not because I want to.
Customer Review: Microsoft Office 2008
Summary: 4 Stars
In general I found this to be a good upgrade and specifically useful since in my work I am being sent files from the PCs that are XML using Microsoft Office 2007. I like the changes in PowerPoint that make it easier to make changes. In addition this program allows me to make any file into a PDF without having to go print and making a copy. So far no problems or crashes.Customer Review: After all, it is still a Microsoft product
Summary: 3 Stars
Well, it could be worse. Before I purchased this upgrade I was working on Office X for Mac, and it was definitely worse than this is--Word in Office X was crashing on me upwards of twenty times a day. The 2008 version is definitely more stable than what I was using, but all of the other reviews that say it is slow were not exaggerating. (I'm using a well-equipped MacBook Pro, so it's not the computer.) I often work on multiple documents at a time in Word, and at times it can take up to and more than twenty seconds to switch between documents...in the same program. That seems a little ridiculous to me. I think it's the usual issue you run into when you use Microsoft products: new versions just pile new functions on top of poorly written code, so yeah, you're getting some cool stuff, but it's all based on something that doesn't work particularly well. I did try out iWork, but I work with files from a lot of different people and iWork just wasn't able to work seamlessly enough with those files for what I needed. (In fact, it kept crashing every time I tried to open an RTF file.)
So, what's my overall take on Office 2008? It is definitely more stable than the version I was working on. It has some nice features, but a lot of those features bog down the programs, making getting things done quickly a bit of a problem. Was it worth the money for the upgrade? I'd have to say "yes," but there are some annoying "features" that take some getting used to.