Microsoft Releases Free Office 2008 Trial and Updates for Office 2008 and 2004

[MacRumors]

http://www.macrumors.com/images/macrumorsthreadlogo.gif (http://www.macrumors.com/2009/04/14/microsoft-releases-free-office-2008-trial-and-updates-for-office-2008-and-2004/)

Microsoft today announced (http://www.officeformac.com/blog/Office-2008-for-Mac-Trial--Take-Office-For-A-Test-Drive) that it is now offering free, 30-day trial downloads (http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/Office2008/trial-download.mspx) of Office 2008 for users located in the United States.Many of us like to try something before we decide to buy. And with today's launch of the downloadable Office 2008 for Mac Trial, MacBU is giving our customers the option of trying out Office 2008 for 30 days: fully functional, no strings attached. It runs side-by-side with earlier versions of Office, and when your 30 days is up, you have the choice to either purchase a copy from your local Apple retailer or buy a product key from Mactopia online and be up and running without reinstalling.Microsoft has also released updates to its Office 2008 and Office 2004 application suites. According to a related security bulletin (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms09-009.mspx), Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 12.1.7 Update (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968694) and Microsoft Office for Mac 2004 11.5.4 Update (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968695) patch several vulnerabilities that could be exploited by maliciously crafted Excel files.

Article Link: Microsoft Releases Free Office 2008 Trial and Updates for Office 2008 and 2004 (http://www.macrumors.com/2009/04/14/microsoft-releases-free-office-2008-trial-and-updates-for-office-2008-and-2004/)

[kornyboy]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5H11 Safari/525.20)

This is nice. I prefer to try it before I buy it. I think that it is a little late in the game though. Office 2008 has been out for a long time now.

[gt1948]

Switch to iWorks o9

[duky]

Too bad it didn't fix the Spaces issue--better luck next time MSFT.

[nadyne]

Too bad it didn't fix the Spaces issue--better luck next time MSFT.

The Spaces issue isn't ours to solve. It's Apple's. We've shown them our code and they can't suggest a complete fix for it. For the deep gory technical details of the problem, check out this blog post from one of our senior developers: risks and rewards (http://www.schwieb.com/blog/2008/10/23/risks-and-rewards/).

Regards,
Nadyne.

[micko2004]

I wonder if this will be the one to fix the Sync Services major problem with iCal??? :)

[duky]

The Spaces issue isn't ours to solve. It's Apple's. We've shown them our code and they can't suggest a complete fix for it. For the deep gory technical details of the problem, check out this blog post from one of our senior developers: risks and rewards (http://www.schwieb.com/blog/2008/10/23/risks-and-rewards/).

Regards,
Nadyne.

Thanks for the details. It's just a bit strange that every other program on my Mac works perfectly fine (including Office 2004).

"However, changing our windowing system to not use Carbon Window Groups entails a complete rewrite, and is not something we can feasibly do in a bug-fix release."

I think MSFT should have looked into rewriting that code before upping it to 2008 as many people I know are switching to iWork on their Macs (including myself sadly, though it's happening very gradually right now)

[Achiever]

The 30 day free trial is a REALLY good idea. I have & use Office 2004 which works fine for my needs, but I will certainly give the 2008 version a free look and see if it sells me and if it doesn't, no loss. I like the approach here.

The Spaces issue isn't ours to solve. It's Apple's. We've shown them our code and they can't suggest a complete fix for it. For the deep gory technical details of the problem, check out this blog post from one of our senior developers: risks and rewards (http://www.schwieb.com/blog/2008/10/23/risks-and-rewards/).

Regards,
Nadyne.

Nadyne, I wish I had a nickel for every time I have seen you have to post this explanation regarding the Spaces issues because some folks still don't get it.... I cannot even imagine how frustrating it is on your end.

[supafly1703]

Thanks for the details. It's just a bit strange that every other program on my Mac works perfectly fine (including Office 2004).

"However, changing our windowing system to not use Carbon Window Groups entails a complete rewrite, and is not something we can feasibly do in a bug-fix release."

I think MSFT should have looked into rewriting that code before upping it to 2008 as many people I know are switching to iWork on their Macs (including myself sadly, though it's happening very gradually right now)

Agree with duky. All this does is push a Mac base accustomed to a certain UI towards solutions that conform to those expectations. And hey, maybe a code rewrite isn't a bad thing...then maybe it wouldn't take 10 bounces for Word to open and I wouldn't have to wonder why it's faster to emulate 2007 in Win7 beta via VMWare. Or is that the point? :eek:

[litopine]

The Spaces issue isn't ours to solve. It's Apple's. We've shown them our code and they can't suggest a complete fix for it. For the deep gory technical details of the problem, check out this blog post from one of our senior developers: risks and rewards (http://www.schwieb.com/blog/2008/10/23/risks-and-rewards/).

Regards,
Nadyne.

WOW you sound Crabby :eek: , Maybe you should go work for apple. :apple:

[nadyne]

Thanks for the details. It's just a bit strange that every other program on my Mac works perfectly fine (including Office 2004).

We're not the only app that has the problem. Any Carbon app that uses Window Groups has the same issue. Our use of Window Groups is more extensive than many other applications, and our apps are used by lots of people, so the problem is the most obvious for us. :(

I think MSFT should have looked into rewriting that code before upping it to 2008 as many people I know are switching to iWork on their Macs (including myself sadly, though it's happening very gradually right now)

Leopard was released at the end of October 2007, and Office 2008 was released two months later. Apple was aware of the problem, and we were aware of the problem. We were working closely with Apple to try to figure out exactly what each of us could do to try to fix it.

There have been some improvements, both in subsequent updates to Office 2008 and Leopard. We've got a great relationship with Apple, and they know how important this is to those users who use Spaces, so we continue to try to make this better. I'm a Spaces user myself, and getting this fixed would make a huge difference to me too.

Regards,
Nadyne.

[Wayfarer]

Microsoft - Too little, too late... I'm afraid.

[markfc]

The Spaces issue isn't ours to solve. It's Apple's. We've shown them our code and they can't suggest a complete fix for it. For the deep gory technical details of the problem, check out this blog post from one of our senior developers: risks and rewards (http://www.schwieb.com/blog/2008/10/23/risks-and-rewards/).

Regards,
Nadyne.

Ha Ha, Yeah it's "Apples" fault.... Vista is probably Apple's fault too...

[akm3]

Ha Ha, Yeah it's "Apples" fault.... Vista is probably Apple's fault too...

Microsoft has done a lot of crappy things, but we (the Apple community) are often too quick to heap blame on them for things that really aren't their fault.

It makes us sound like snobs and ultimately hurts Mac.

Thanks for that info Nadyne, I wasn't aware of it! - But I don't really uses spaces so I haven't ran into the bug.

[iSee]

Nice.

And, hey, let's not mindlessly bash MS Mac Business Unit here.
If they are willing to show up here and talk to us, let's be nice -- it will help them listen to us. :)

Also, er, well, I hate to do anything but bash MS, but I have both Office and iWork on my MBP, but day-to-day, I use Word. There's a reason for that.

[staccato83]

Can anyone help me out here?

http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/1662/picture1ztm.png

[beardboy]

I'm getting that exact same error!

Can't install as it says it can't find a suitable version?!

[adrian.oconnor]

Also, er, well, I hate to do anything but bash MS, but I have both Office and iWork on my MBP, but day-to-day, I use Word. There's a reason for that.

Me too. I do all of my word processing in Word 2008. I like Pages, but I found it isn't compatible enough and does too many random/annoying things, especially with page headers/footers and tables.

Excel I need for compatibility, but I much prefer the Numbers way of doing things now that I'm used to it. I use Numbers for my own stuff, Excel for customer-facing stuff.

Keynote beats PowerPoint hands down.

Anybody know how Exchange support is looking in the latest builds of Snow Leopard? It's one of the things Apple touted back when they announced it, but I've heard nothing since. Genuine Exchange support for Mail, iCal and Address Book would make me very happy!

[Sebby]

Office 2008 has been pretty good since 12.1.5 to be fair. Just updated to 12.1.7 with no problems. :cool:

[superleccy]

The form appears to be Anglophobic. :rolleyes:

Hmm... where shall I choose to live in the US?

SL

[badoian]

Can anyone help me out here?

http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/1662/picture1ztm.png

Same issue. Any ideas?

[Full of Win]

If they would only fix the QTVR bug in PowerPoint 2008, where it crashed it all when you use a QTVR movie after initially using it.

[Cabbit]

The Spaces issue isn't ours to solve. It's Apple's. We've shown them our code and they can't suggest a complete fix for it. For the deep gory technical details of the problem, check out this blog post from one of our senior developers: risks and rewards (http://www.schwieb.com/blog/2008/10/23/risks-and-rewards/).

Regards,
Nadyne.

Just a few points i would like to rase.


When is open document format planned.
Will we see performance improvements in load times be a key issue for the next version.
When is a messenger public beta due for personal video chatting.

[zerostar]

Same issue. Any ideas?

Same issue as well... ?? :mad:

EDIT: seems to be monolingual or any other things that tamper with the code... trying a fix from last time here:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=543237

let you know how it works...

EDIT 2: Yep seems to work the same :-) YAY!

[Kar98]

LOL, 158 MB to "patch several vulnerabilities that could be exploited by maliciously crafted Excel files."

[staccato83]

Same issue as well... ?? :mad:

EDIT: seems to be monolingual or any other things that tamper with the code... trying a fix from last time here:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=543237

let you know how it works...

I just found that exact thread and the above fix works.

[Kar98]

Switch to iWorks o9

As soon as it becomes usable in the real world, not just for "found puppy" flyers.

[iphonematt]

The Spaces issue isn't ours to solve. It's Apple's. We've shown them our code and they can't suggest a complete fix for it. For the deep gory technical details of the problem, check out this blog post from one of our senior developers: risks and rewards (http://www.schwieb.com/blog/2008/10/23/risks-and-rewards/).

Regards,
Nadyne.

Well it is somebody's. Most mac apps seem to work with spaces so i would say Microsoft better get their code changed to work with spaces or something. Apple could care less if office works... they have iWork as a competitor so why would they change spaces?
I think this is just a lame excuse from MS to now have to change office.

[Aqueus]

I did the update for 2008 today.. got rid of my 'CGBitmapContextGetData : invalid context' issue.. but I'm pretty sure that was addressed in a previous update..

However it opens MS Word documents just as slow as with the errors lol

YAY MS

[Shadow]

nadyne, I've said this before to other MacBU people on this forum (I can't remember any specific names), but I'd like to thank you for personally responding and providing support to us. I'm not an Office:Mac user myself (I respectfully prefer iWork and I think that it suits my needs better than Office:Mac), but it's refreshing to find a company that actually (or appears to) care about its users.

Also, will the Spaces issue be fixed in the next version of Office:Mac? What about a native Cocoa version of Office?
Just a few points i would like to rase.


When is open document format planned.
Will we see performance improvements in load times be a key issue for the next version.
When is a messenger public beta due for personal video chatting.


I'd also like to get some answers to these questions. Adium is good, but if the native Mac client has feature-parity with the Windows client (as well as tabbed conversations), I'd switch in an instant.

[nadyne]

Can anyone help me out here?

The most likely causes of not being able to update are:
* moving Office 2008 out of the Applications folder
* manually deleting something from the Office 2008 folder
* running an application like Xslimmer or Monolingual

If it's just the first one, you can move it back to Applications and it should be fine. If it's the others, though, the best solution is to uninstall Office and then reinstall it. If your concern is saving disk space, make sure that you do a custom install and only select the items you need.

Just a few points i would like to rase.
When is open document format planned.
Will we see performance improvements in load times be a key issue for the next version.
When is a messenger public beta due for personal video chatting.


I don't have anything to share with regards to ODF support.

Performance is an area that we continually work on, and we've already made huge improvements. Go back and look at the thread here for the 12.1.5 release to check out the reports from others here who installed it and reported seeing better improvements. We've got more in the pipeline. This update was specifically focused on the recent exploits found in Excel, and we wanted to get that out as soon as possible to minimise that.

The public beta for Messenger is coming later this year.

Also, will the Spaces issue be fixed in the next version of Office:Mac? What about a native Cocoa version of Office?

I can't say when Apple might fix their Window Group code to fix the problems that are found in Carbon apps. Cocoa is a part of our future plans. We've got 30 million lines of code, and a lot of other big stuff planned for the next version of Office, so Cocoa isn't going to happen overnight.

Regards,
Nadyne.

[Cabbit]

I don't have anything to share with regards to ODF support.

Office is kind of a non starter without support for ODF.

[Kar98]

Office is kind of a non starter without support for ODF.

iWork is a non starter without "save as...[common freaking format, especially when the document you opened already WAS in that format]". Instead one has to _export_ every time you want to save something in some of the most common formats of the industry. Yay! 4 clicks instead of one flick of the left hand.

[mrtekkid]

Ha Ha, Yeah it's "Apples" fault.... Vista is probably Apple's fault too...

Nah Vista is Bush's fault... :rolleyes:

[BBCWatcher]

Office 2008 has some very annoying limitations within Microsoft's control that I hope get addressed quickly. Here are a couple more:

1. Cannot open password-protected Powerpoint files. Microsoft Office for Windows has supported password-protected Powerpoint files for years, and Microsoft Office 2004 and 2008 can't seem to open them. This is silly: Office incompatible with Office.

2. Office 2008 recently acquired (via a "security" patch) less function: it cannot open certain older formats. (So much for our digital history.) There's a registry setting for Office 2007 that restores the function. What's the hack (at least) for Office 2008? And considering that Office 2008 doesn't even have the VBA engine that could execute "malicious" code, why shut this off anyway? There's no "security" reason whatsoever, and, once again, Microsoft is incompatible with Microsoft.

3. Microsoft needs a Visio viewer for Mac. Why can't Office 2008 import Visio files to include in documents? Microsoft incompatible with Microsoft.

[Cabbit]

iWork is a non starter without "save as...[common freaking format, especially when the document you opened already WAS in that format]". Instead one has to _export_ every time you want to save something in some of the most common formats of the industry. Yay! 4 clicks instead of one flick of the left hand.
I have not used iWork to comment on that. In my view i want all of my documents in ODF so if i send a college a document i know that he/she can read it without formating issues and that in the future if someone decides that say .doc is dead long live .docx and tuff luck if you want to open .doc.
When using a open format anyone can use the document is still the same as day one and it will work on any platform without failure. People that can get by on Works will still be able to read and edit these documents just not as well as the ones that choose to buy MS Word for more functionality. There is more to the application than the document; spell checkers, auto complete, automatic document recovery, and mail merge are but a few and though not the best examples good programs will stand out on there own merits they don't need lock ins to ensure they get used.

For the Office developer heres a we wish list.

ODF
Visio
Feature party MSN messanger
WMA/V quicktime plugin for protected media
And i hear some moaning about why Onenote a excellent student product is not available on the most used student platform.

[FoxyKaye]

The Spaces issue isn't ours to solve. It's Apple's. We've shown them our code and they can't suggest a complete fix for it. For the deep gory technical details of the problem, check out this blog post from one of our senior developers: risks and rewards (http://www.schwieb.com/blog/2008/10/23/risks-and-rewards/).

Regards,
Nadyne.
Too bad this doesn't fix the NO MACROS issue as well, not that M$ was aware this was going to be a problem in 2006 or anything.

Oh wait, the no macros issue will be fixed - by selling us the next version of Office.

Thanks but no-thanks - my entire organization is already moving over to Open Office.

[twoodcc]

very glad to see this. should help Office 2008 sales

[cguerin]

Nadyne

It appears the 12.1.7 update overwrites the Entourage EWS beta. I just tried reinstalling the beta, but it would not install. Any ideas?

[nadyne]

It appears the 12.1.7 update overwrites the Entourage EWS beta. I just tried reinstalling the beta, but it would not install. Any ideas?

If you're using the Entourage for Exchange Web Services public beta (http://blogs.msdn.com/nadyne/archive/2009/01/20/entourage-ews-beta-available-now.aspx), you should not install the 12.1.7 update. The beta is tied to 12.1.5. If you go back to the readme that we included with the beta, the first item in there tells you that you can't update. To continue using Entourage EWS, you're going to have to go back to 12.1.5. :(

Regards,
Nadyne.

[SnowLeopard2008]

Nadyne

I haven't updated in awhile so AutoUpdate wanted to download 12.1.0 update. I did and it froze. I force quit and downloaded it again. This time, nothing happened after it finished downloading. I downloaded again. Nothing happened... So far I wasted my time and HDD space and got nothing. Congratulations Microsoft.

I think Microsoft is just too big and slow. They release a trial OVER ONE YEAR after the software release. Have they ever heard of this new technology called expiration? It's based on the principle of time. Go R&D that Microsoft!

I don't really care who's at fault for the Office/Spaces issue. How can Apple be at fault for a product that their "competitor" (Microsoft doesn't even bother competing) developed?

[asphyxiafeeling]

WOW you sound Crabby :eek: , Maybe you should go work for apple. :apple:

how did that sound crabby? they explained the issue and gave a link explaining the details.

[Purdin]

I was very happy to see Office 2008 as a free trial download because I had been debating on whether or not to purchase it. I upgraded to iWork 09 and I love Numbers but I'm not to fond of Pages. Plus I was looking forward to trying out Entourage and Exchange support. But a huge feature that was missing for me was support for having Task and Notes sync from Exchange to Entourage. If that feature was working, I would buy Office 08 in a heartbeat. I'm currently using a beta version of Plaxo that I got directly from the company to sync tasks from iCal's To-Do list to my PC running Outlook but that's still kind of buggy and was hoping for direct sync'ing with Entourage. Has anyone heard of when this might be coming out?

[Tommigun]

You guys are such lambs that it truly blows my mind...

If there is a bug in Apple's API then every application using the buggy functionality will suffer of the same problem. How can you bash Microsoft for stating that the bug is not on their side? Insinuating that Microsoft is wrongfully accusing Apple is just silly.

Microsoft will of course eventually migrate to whatever new APIs Apple is providing, but rewriting applications on the scale of Office is a TREMENDOUS task and will of course warrant it's own revision (just think about the magnitude of the beta testing).

You are such a hostile group that it never ceases to amaze me how companies even bother supporting you. I *love* my iMac, I like checking out the news and occasional postings here, but you are by far the worst community ever.

You surely don't make me feel welcome to the Mac world. Think about that.

[yoyomaster]

nice of them to offer it, now...

[daneoni]

Some people on here make me ashamed to be a Mac user. Someone from MBU comes to a provide assistance even though they don't have to (try getting your beloved company that doesn't even provide detailed descriptions of its updates to do that) and you jump on him/her and start insulting/bashing...i mean come on!!!

The spaces issue has been beaten to death, i mean do you really think MS wouldn't have fixed it if they could?...seriously?. THINK!

Im not the biggest Microsoft fan but that doesn't warrant unnecessary uninformed/fanboyish attacks either.

[TheNorthWaves]

I have been waiting for a spaces fix since day one, but I agree with some of the previous posters that it's nice to at least have someone from the mac bu community who actually hangs around in each macrumors office 08 update thread.

We can all agree that this problem would be solved by now if it were that easy - we've had what, five upgrades? I think they'd have done it by now.

[franchex]

Hey, now Word and Excel Load faster than ever before.

Good work Msft!!

[nadyne]

I haven't updated in awhile so AutoUpdate wanted to download 12.1.0 update. I did and it froze. I force quit and downloaded it again. This time, nothing happened after it finished downloading. I downloaded again. Nothing happened... So far I wasted my time and HDD space and got nothing. Congratulations Microsoft.

Hmmm, not sure why the auto-updater isn't working for you, assuming you haven't done anything like run Monolingual or Xslimmer. You can always download the updates manually (http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.mspx/).

But a huge feature that was missing for me was support for having Task and Note sync from Exchange to Entourage

I've got (potentially) good news for you. If you're using Exchange 2007 SP1 RU4 or later, the next version of Entourage will give you task, note, and category sync, as well as a host of other improvements. This version is in beta now, and will hit final release later this year.

Additionally, Safari is going to be a fully supported browser for Outlook Web Access in the next version of Exchange, so you'll get the full experience of OWA when you move to Exchange 2010 -- so now you'll be able to see your tasks and notes there, too.

Regards,
Nadyne.

[JAT]

There was a free trial ages ago. It was called Office 2007 Free Trial. It sucked, still on 2004/2003 here. I'll upgrade when there is good reason. (kinda like when Excel/Word 6.0 came out)

That's great news about Safari. Course, I'd still have to get my office to upgrade.

[thejadedmonkey]

Well it is somebody's. Most mac apps seem to work with spaces so i would say Microsoft better get their code changed to work with spaces or something. Apple could care less if office works... they have iWork as a competitor so why would they change spaces?
I think this is just a lame excuse from MS to now have to change office.
Or maybe you're just too ignorant to read the link that Nadyne provided.
You guys are such lambs that it truly blows my mind...

If there is a bug in Apple's API then every application using the buggy functionality will suffer of the same problem. How can you bash Microsoft for stating that the bug is not on their side? Insinuating that Microsoft is wrongfully accusing Apple is just silly.

Microsoft will of course eventually migrate to whatever new APIs Apple is providing, but rewriting applications on the scale of Office is a TREMENDOUS task and will of course warrant it's own revision (just think about the magnitude of the beta testing).

You are such a hostile group that it never ceases to amaze me how companies even bother supporting you. I *love* my iMac, I like checking out the news and occasional postings here, but you are by far the worst community ever.

You surely don't make me feel welcome to the Mac world. Think about that.

QFT.

We all have our opinions. My opinion is that Microsoft is a better company then Apple, because they don't charge an arm and a leg to "buy in", and they don't nickle and dime you for functionality that should be included (Mini-Display port to DVI or Display Port adapter, anyone?)

However, you don't see me making personal attacks to the very people who developed the Mac, do you?

This post was written in Firefox on Windows XP. I would consider myself a recent un-switcher, thanks in part to people like nadyne

[paulmoscow]

they don't nickle and dime you for functionality that should be included
Have you ever heard about Client Access Licences? You need to pay for everything twice when using MS Server products. First buying a server itself, later paying for every single client computer. It's a thick layer of caviar on top of MS' bread and butter.

Server operating system products require a Client Access License (CAL) for each user or device that accesses the server software. CALs are version specific. They must be the same version or later than the server software being accessed. CALs permit access to servers licensed by the same entity. They do not permit access to another entity’s licensed servers

Microsoft Windows Server Client Access Licence
Microsoft Exchange Server Client Access Licence
Microsoft SQL Server Client Access Licence
Microsoft Office Live Communications Server Client Access Licence
Microsoft Office Project Server Client Access Licence
Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server Client Access Licence
Microsoft Windows Rights Management Server Client Access Licence

[psxguru]

I wish they would fix the record narration bugs in powerpoint

[macaliseme]

The Spaces issue isn't ours to solve. It's Apple's. We've shown them our code and they can't suggest a complete fix for it. For the deep gory technical details of the problem, check out this blog post from one of our senior developers: risks and rewards (http://www.schwieb.com/blog/2008/10/23/risks-and-rewards/).

Regards,
Nadyne.


How do I report a bug: I have my language setup to British English and my locale set to New Zealand and yet in Word the language selected is Australia.

I want Office to respect my language selection and instead use the British Dictionary.

Another annoying this is when I receive documents where it ends up using the dictionary of which the document was constructed with rather than my own - please add a setting so that it overrides the documents setting and instead uses my own preferred dictionary.

[Macmel]

Well it is somebody's. Most mac apps seem to work with spaces so i would say Microsoft better get their code changed to work with spaces or something. Apple could care less if office works... they have iWork as a competitor so why would they change spaces?
I think this is just a lame excuse from MS to now have to change office.

Maybe because iWorks is a competitor of Office only on Mac fanboys minds. Maybe because in the real world, outside Cupertino, 99% of computer users actually use Office and not iWorks. Maybe because if people, which in their vast majority want to use Office, find it unusable on Macs, they might consider switching to PC instead of switching to iWorks.
Office is the standard, both in the user and professional worlds. iWorks is absolutely unknown in the PC world (90% of the computers out there, don't forget) and almost unknown in the Mac World (I've been working in science for ten years where, as opposed to real life, more than 50% people use Macs and I have only seen once a presentation made with Keynote. Never ever I have seen a document, or a manuscript writen in Pages nor anyone I know using it. Even journals don't accept text documents in formats other than .doc or .pdf)

[MrCrowbar]

As soon as it becomes usable in the real world, not just for "found puppy" flyers.

I'm currently writing a small thesis on it. My only real grips are:
- it doesn't support citations at all (only supports a commercial 3rd party citation library plugin
- Paragraph Styles are buggy. Have to do workarounds to make correct subheadings
- Can't generate Table of Contents for figures, formulas, tables and/or citations.

On the other hand, it handles fonts correctly and style changes are easy to apply to the entire document. Does anyone know a way to export Pages documents into LaTeX files? LaTeX is awesome for theses and books but I haven't found a decent editor yet that doesn't look like an HTML editor. OpenOffice is broken in so many ways it's not even funny anymore...

[jc1350]

If you're using the Entourage for Exchange Web Services public beta (http://blogs.msdn.com/nadyne/archive/2009/01/20/entourage-ews-beta-available-now.aspx), you should not install the 12.1.7 update. The beta is tied to 12.1.5. If you go back to the readme that we included with the beta, the first item in there tells you that you can't update. To continue using Entourage EWS, you're going to have to go back to 12.1.5. :(

Regards,
Nadyne.

Unfortunately I leaned about the beta after it was closed. Does "later this year" mean "summer" or does it mean "more of a Christmas present?" I'm soooo waiting for a "real" Exchange client for Mac OS.

The EWS features in the Entourage 2008 update should help a lot (and it will be free according to Macworld magazine)!

[aristotle]

The Spaces issue isn't ours to solve. It's Apple's. We've shown them our code and they can't suggest a complete fix for it. For the deep gory technical details of the problem, check out this blog post from one of our senior developers: risks and rewards (http://www.schwieb.com/blog/2008/10/23/risks-and-rewards/).

Regards,
Nadyne.
Sorry but that is a problem for your team to fix. You are using a depreciated API which is no longer fully supported by newer releases of the OS. There has been a lot of lead time to rewrite your frameworks in Cocoa. If smaller developers can do it, then your developers should be able to as well.

I have a couple questions for you:
1. Are your teams using Agile practices?
2. Do you keep your teams to 10 people or less?

If you are using waterfall development or even trying to develop with teams larger than 10 people then that might be part of your problem right there. I don't see why you should not be able to rewrite smaller portions of your code at a time in short iterations. If some code is difficult to translate into Cocoa, think about a redesign. Sometimes it is better to just throw away code and start from scratch than trying to translate old code to a new API.

[iSee]

Sorry but that is a problem for your team to fix. You are using a depreciated API which is no longer fully supported by newer releases of the OS. There has been a lot of lead time to rewrite your frameworks in Cocoa. If smaller developers can do it, then your developers should be able to as well.

I have a couple questions for you:
1. Are your teams using Agile practices?
2. Do you keep your teams to 10 people or less?

If you are using waterfall development or even trying to develop with teams larger than 10 people then that might be part of your problem right there. I don't see why you should not be able to rewrite smaller portions of your code at a time in short iterations. If some code is difficult to translate into Cocoa, think about a redesign. Sometimes it is better to just throw away code and start from scratch than trying to translate old code to a new API.


Wow, this is an amazingly extreme oversimplification of what would be required to port Word to Cocoa.

[Tommigun]

Sorry but that is a problem for your team to fix. You are using a depreciated API which is no longer fully supported by newer releases of the OS. There has been a lot of lead time to rewrite your frameworks in Cocoa. If smaller developers can do it, then your developers should be able to as well.

I have a couple questions for you:
1. Are your teams using Agile practices?
2. Do you keep your teams to 10 people or less?

If you are using waterfall development or even trying to develop with teams larger than 10 people then that might be part of your problem right there. I don't see why you should not be able to rewrite smaller portions of your code at a time in short iterations. If some code is difficult to translate into Cocoa, think about a redesign. Sometimes it is better to just throw away code and start from scratch than trying to translate old code to a new API.

Oh thank god! You solved Microsoft's problems! WHY didn't they think about all that earlier?

Great when random Joe on a random forum thinks he knows his stuff better than a very large team of experts.
Get a grip of reality, please.

[Biolizard]

Sorry but that is a problem for your team to fix. You are using a depreciated API which is no longer fully supported by newer releases of the OS. There has been a lot of lead time to rewrite your frameworks in Cocoa. If smaller developers can do it, then your developers should be able to as well.

I have a couple questions for you:
1. Are your teams using Agile practices?
2. Do you keep your teams to 10 people or less?

If you are using waterfall development or even trying to develop with teams larger than 10 people then that might be part of your problem right there. I don't see why you should not be able to rewrite smaller portions of your code at a time in short iterations. If some code is difficult to translate into Cocoa, think about a redesign. Sometimes it is better to just throw away code and start from scratch than trying to translate old code to a new API.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!

Welcome to the real world of software development. If it isn't value for money, it doesn't get done.

[TheScavenger]

The only complaint I have about 2008 is that it takes too long to load on my early '08 MacBook.

- 320GB 7200 RPM
- 2.4GHz
- 4GB RAM

Not sure what else I can do to speed it up.

[nadyne]

The only complaint I have about 2008 is that it takes too long to load on my early '08 MacBook.

Other than making sure you've got the latest and greatest (since we've been continually improving launch time, as well as performance across the board, in the updates), one thing that often improves performance is to disable the WYSIWYG font menu. This especially helps if you've got lots of fonts. You can do this in the Preferences.

Regards,
Nadyne.

[Valmor]

Get a SSD and Office will start very fast. ;)

[pimentoLoaf]

Downloading update as I write this ...

Though I have automatic update, it's easier to control when it happens ... :cool:

[Old Muley]

Same issue as well... ?? :mad:

EDIT: seems to be monolingual or any other things that tamper with the code... trying a fix from last time here:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=543237

let you know how it works...


Thanks for the link and advice. I had "monolingualed" my system and was having the same problem too. Just a word to the wise; be sure to follow the instructions in the above linked discussion carefully or else you'll be unsuccessful.

[TheScavenger]

Other than making sure you've got the latest and greatest (since we've been continually improving launch time, as well as performance across the board, in the updates), one thing that often improves performance is to disable the WYSIWYG font menu. This especially helps if you've got lots of fonts. You can do this in the Preferences.

Regards,
Nadyne.

thanks for the tip.

[bigandy]

As nobody in my organisation uses Spaces, none of us have experienced the issues presented there. It's great to know the real reason why there is an issue though - but doesn't point to entirely being an Apple thing. It's more of a "well you should think about moving your codebase to Cocoa" in place of "Apple should be updating the Spaces code to support Carbon, despite the fact they're getting rid of Carbon APIs".

For us, the main issue with Office 04 and 08 the Exchange support provided. It's always seemed unreliable and flaky, and unfortunately now we're just getting to the point of deciding to deploy iWork across the company when Snow Leopard and Mail.app with Exchange support is delivered.


Some people on here make me ashamed to be a Mac user. Someone from MBU comes to a provide assistance even though they don't have to (try getting your beloved company that doesn't even provide detailed descriptions of its updates to do that) and you jump on him/her and start insulting/bashing...i mean come on!!!

The spaces issue has been beaten to death, i mean do you really think MS wouldn't have fixed it if they could?...seriously?. THINK!

Im not the biggest Microsoft fan but that doesn't warrant unnecessary uninformed/fanboyish attacks either.

I couldn't agree with you more. Then again, the general attitude of many users of MacRumors has become progressively less acceptable in recent months.

There was a free trial ages ago. It was called Office 2007 Free Trial. It sucked, still on 2004/2003 here. I'll upgrade when there is good reason. (kinda like when Excel/Word 6.0 came out)
Office 2007 was a Windows version, not a Mac one.

Wow, this is an amazingly extreme oversimplification of what would be required to port Word to Cocoa.
Absolutely!

[goosnarrggh]

Sorry but that is a problem for your team to fix. You are using a depreciated API which is no longer fully supported by newer releases of the OS.
Oh really? Here (http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Carbon/Reference/Window_Manager/Reference/reference.html) is Apple's developer reference website for the Carbon Window Manager API. Note that some of the entries listed on this website are marked with a note "Deprecated in Mac OS X v10.5". Also note that none of the entries under the Window Groups category, which is where Microsoft has identified the bug, are marked as deprecated. Therefore it is perfectly reasonable for the developer to proceed under the assumption that Apple will provide support for their use. The onus is on Apple to make its published APIs, not marked as deprecated, work as advertised.

There has been a lot of lead time to rewrite your frameworks in Cocoa. If smaller developers can do it, then your developers should be able to as well.

I have a couple questions for you:
1. Are your teams using Agile practices?
2. Do you keep your teams to 10 people or less?

If you are using waterfall development or even trying to develop with teams larger than 10 people then that might be part of your problem right there. I don't see why you should not be able to rewrite smaller portions of your code at a time in short iterations. If some code is difficult to translate into Cocoa, think about a redesign. Sometimes it is better to just throw away code and start from scratch than trying to translate old code to a new API.

If the only possible solution is to abandon the Carbon API, then I can give you a 100% guarantee that the affected versions of Office in question will never see a hotfix to mitigate this bug, because such a hotfix would essentially boil down to completely rewriting the entire application.

Moving forward, newer releases of Office may migrate to Cocoa in which case they will be unaffected by the bug.

[mrkgoo]

I just got done with a presentation in powerpoint and viewing a 300 page document in word. First time I've significant;y used the suite since I moved on from my PPC G4 and Office 2004 for quite some time.

I'm really liking Office 2008. Powerpoint has made leaps to catch up with Keynote (I don't use keynote, so it's probably still not as good as most would say, but it's very easy and straight forward to use). Word is impressive how it can now handle my file with ease. I suppose a dual core intel with 4GB ram helps too.

[TheMissingBite]

Can anyone help me out here?

http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/1662/picture1ztm.png

What hardware? No problems on my iMac.

[Bye Bye Baby]

Better late than never.

[Tonden]

The trial is not available to European customers!

This is what Customer Support wrote to me:

Dear Customer,

Thank you for contacting the Office for Mac Online Store.

We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you. At this time
the program is only available for U.S customers through our online
store. Please contact Microsoft Support at the link below for further
information on how to purchase Mac for European customers.

URL: http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/Office2008/default.mspx

Thank you, Microsoft.

Tonden

[nadyne]

The trial is not available to European customers!

You're right, it's not available outside of the US yet. :( It's roughly the same reason why the available songs/movies/television shows/applications in the iTunes Store aren't the same in every country. The US has the most Mac users, we didn't want to wait until we got the other countries lined up to get the trial out there.

Regards,
Nadyne.

[Bye Bye Baby]

Patch works well.

[badlight]

You're right, it's not available outside of the US yet. :( It's roughly the same reason why the available songs/movies/television shows/applications in the iTunes Store aren't the same in every country. The US has the most Mac users, we didn't want to wait until we got the other countries lined up to get the trial out there.

Regards,
Nadyne.

Nadyne, your input on Office for Mac is much appreciated, but the rationale for the restriction of the trial to US users for now is a bit thin. There are more than a few Mac users outside the States, who would appreciate a 30 day trial (though IIRC, the trial version of Office 2007 is for 90 days - is this to punish Mac users, or are they considered better able to assess the product quickly?).

Come on, get your colleagues to let the rest of us try it out!

[ravenvii]

I downloaded the Office 2008 trial, but the installer calls itself an update, and required me to put in a serial which I obviously don't have.

Is this download an epic failure or am I doing something wrong?

EDIT: The failure is me - I failed to read. I got it now.

[sdsvtdriver]

You guys are such lambs that it truly blows my mind...

...

You are such a hostile group that it never ceases to amaze me how companies even bother supporting you. I *love* my iMac, I like checking out the news and occasional postings here, but you are by far the worst community ever.

You surely don't make me feel welcome to the Mac world. Think about that.

QFT.

Seriously, MS should just tell you arrogant macboys to "GFY" and leave you with consumer level iworks. Why do you people even bother to use MS products then bitch about how crappy they are? Use your iworks or openoffice and hush up.

nadyne is nice enough to interact with everyone directly on YOUR forums. Show her the respect she deserves as a guest on the forums.

on another note...

nadyne, Thanks for the heads up on the Office trial. I will definitely download and evaluate. :)

[mrkgoo]

QFT.

Seriously, MS should just tell you arrogant macboys to "GFY" and leave you with consumer level iworks. Why do you people even bother to use MS products then bitch about how crappy they are? Use your iworks or openoffice and hush up.

nadyne is nice enough to interact with everyone directly on YOUR forums. Show her the respect she deserves as a guest on the forums.

on another note...

nadyne, Thanks for the heads up on the Office trial. I will definitely download and evaluate. :)

Technically, she is a member of the forum just as much as anyone else. These forums don't belong to us.

Anyway, as stated before, I like Office 2008.

[sushi]

You're right, it's not available outside of the US yet. :( It's roughly the same reason why the available songs/movies/television shows/applications in the iTunes Store aren't the same in every country. The US has the most Mac users, we didn't want to wait until we got the other countries lined up to get the trial out there.
Hi Nadyne,

Speaking of availability, why does Microsoft sell Office for Windows in Japan as follows?

Standard --> Word & Excel

Professional --> Word, Excel & PowerPoint

It would be nice to see the same package offered in Japan as in the USA.

[Ashka]

Could the Forum Moderators please change the misleading title of this thread to Microsoft Releases Free Office 2008 Trial for the USA ONLY.

At least it will save members from the rest of the World wasting their time and bandwidth reading all the posts only to find out that the trial is NOT available. :mad:

[stephen55]

iWork is a non starter without "save as...". Instead one has to _export_ every time you want to save something in some of the most common formats of the industry. Yay! 4 clicks instead of one flick of the left hand.

First off, iWork09 (Pages09 at least) has a checkbox "Additionally save as ..." in the File/Save dialog box. No export needed. And honestly, I think this is an advantage. Consider:

With a single click you can additionally save your files in MS Word format, while your original file is untouched and no formatting is ever lost. Disk space is cheap.

compared with the option of "saving" in other formats, including:

the obligatory warning message about losing formatting when saving in foreign formats
other warning messages when converting from and to formats
people ignoring it and complaining that the document looks "weird" after re-opening with iWork 09


I did some computer support as a student. Seriously, there are *dozens* of such error and warning messages hidden in Microsoft Office, depending on what format you save *from* and *to*. And it always confuses users.

I think that this is rather an elegant way of making sure that people won't lose (parts of) their work - plus, as a bonus, saving on warning dialogs.

[erratikmind]

Sweet! Didn't know about the 2004 - 11.5.4 update. I'll take it. :D

[Airforcekid]

I perfer iWork thank you!

[aristotle]

Or maybe you're just too ignorant to read the link that Nadyne provided.

Maybe you should stop flinging poo at other members and listen for once, you might learn something.

QFT.

We all have our opinions. My opinion is that Microsoft is a better company then Apple, because they don't charge an arm and a leg to "buy in", and they don't nickle and dime you for functionality that should be included ([/i]
I don't know where you begin. Someone mentioned CALs already but then there are all of the arbitrarily low storage limits in Exchange which require you to either upgrade to Enterprise or buy an additional license to compress the datastore offline to reclaim space from deleted messages. You have obviously not a developer since you have not priced out MSDN license or the price of developer tools and even VS.NET is missing a lot of debugging functionality found in Apple's free tools. For example, did you know that if you wanted to debug internet functionality in the Windows mobile device emulator that you need a license of Virtual PC to gain access to a virtual network device driver?

[ravenvii]

Well after a few days playing with Office 2008 trial, I must say it's not THAT bad. I hear here about how horrible Office 2008 is, and so forth.

But it's not that bad. It renders .doc and .xls files a million times better than iWork does, obviously, and it's not that slow. I do use Spaces, but I don't use it with Office (because of what I hear about all the bugs).

I still prefer to do my work in iWork, but for viewing documents and Excel spreadsheets, it works pretty well.

Now, if you bring out OneNote for Mac, just like OneNote I have on Windows, I'll probably have no choice but to buy Office!

And no, don't give me the "notebook template, how does that compare" crap, I want OneNote! :)

[ruskiwi]

I'd like to see Quick Look integrated with Entourage so that I can peek at attachments instead of opening them. That would be nice.

Also agree that there are too many naive posters throwing out random comments that sound more than just a bit nasty. I thought you had to be at least 13 to use the forums..? :p

[erratikmind]

I perfer iWork thank you!

I have iWork '09, as well. It's a great program. However, Office compliments my day to day with the Word docs, which I exchange with everyone else at work. If it were not for the said, iWork '09 would the the perfect stand alone application. I really would not need much more than that.

[Hal1980]

Nadyne thanks for your participation on this forum and your help! It is greatly appreciated.

I do have a strong request/question? Any plans for msft to return vba (I never upgraded 2004 because I need vba) or to return access?

These are vital applications in the finance sector and it makes it extremely difficult to eschew the need of other computers and out of date software to maintain functionality.

Timeframe?

Thanks in advance

[nadyne]

Speaking of availability, why does Microsoft sell Office for Windows in Japan as follows?
It would be nice to see the same package offered in Japan as in the USA.

Sorry, but that's never going to be a question that I'll be able to answer with any degree of confidence. I'm completely the wrong person to ask questions about the differences between the various editions that are sold in the various countries. I'm a member of the technical team in MacBU, not the international marketing team for Windows Office, so that's totally outside my area of expertise. :)

I'd like to see Quick Look integrated with Entourage so that I can peek at attachments instead of opening them. That would be nice.

Since Office 2008 supports both Tiger and Leopard, we didn't include QuickLook support so that we weren't leaving Tiger users out in the cold. Folks tend to complain if Office works differently on Tiger than on Leopard, and there's still quite a lot of Tiger users out there.

I do have a strong request/question? Any plans for msft to return vba (I never upgraded 2004 because I need vba) or to return access?

Yes, we have already announced that VBA is going to return in the next version of Office (http://www.schwieb.com/blog/2008/05/13/saying-hello-again-to-visual-basic/). I don't have a firm date to share yet for the next version release (and we don't have an official name for it yet either), but we're aiming for a 2-3 year release cycle for that version, and my team is cranking away on it right now. The senior developer working on our VBA support has already given me a demo, so it's coming along swimmingly.

In the interim, you can run Office 2004 and Office 2008 side-by-side. This is useful for the times when you still need to use VBA, but also want to use the new features in Office 2008. Usually when someone cares about VBA, the new Office 2008 feature that they care about the most is "Big Grid" support in Excel, which brings a million rows and 16k columns. I know it's not a perfect solution, but I offer it in case you might find it useful.

Regards,
Nadyne.