First Looks at Mac Microsoft Office 2008

[b0ned0me]

The name bit about Entourage is bogus -- don't go there. Call it Outlook, plain and simple.

And why not rename Excel to 1-2-3 or Quattro Pro, since it can open and save *.wk4 and *.wb3 files? That would make just about as much sense.

While there are plenty of things to complain about in MS support for Mac (i.e. that stupid pasting of graphics thing) there's nothing particularly novel about part of one large company shafting some colleagues and customers by dumping a minor product that is peripheral to what their bonuses are calculated on in just the way the Exchange group did.
I needed Entourage because it was the only way to hook into my university email system and process invitations and so on. It took me about 5 minutes to realise that it wasn't a Mac version of Outlook, or anything close to it.

And expecting the MacBU (or any part of the microsoft empire) to invest lots of money purely to give customers the ability to not buy windows is just silly. Next you'll be expecting Sony to make the PS4 able to play Xbox and Wii games.

 

[pbbaker123]

A big F U from MSFT

Well,

it looks as though they are telling Excel power users to switch to Excel 2007 (Crossover or other means) or go buy a damn Dell if you need to run business software...

The spreadsheets that we use can't even be opened by Numbers or Neo/Open office because they are heavily laden with VB and Macros to run correctly.

Hey MSFT MacBU people, thanks a lot.


Please, NOBODY GO BUY THIS CRAP!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[J Radical]

For anyone who uses spreadsheets iWork is not an option- 'numbers' is a buggy POS.

The best thing about office 08 is intel support, though its sad we're getting jipped with macros

 

[Roderick Usher]

Hey nadyne - quick question:

Clearly, on a granular level, the user interfaces of the Office 2008 apps have somewhat different goals than those of Office 2007 (though the overall goal of exposing functionality remains the same). No doubt this entails boatloads of user testing and feedback, and I'm curious about how the flow of that data works between the MacBU and the rest of Microsoft - lessons learned on both sides that can be applied across the board, how often you consult with each other, that kind of thing.

 

[jettredmont]

To help mitigate some of the concerns about losing VBA, we've improved our already well-established AppleScript support, and have added support for Automator. We know that this doesn't fix all of the issues involved with VBA, but hope that it can go some way towards addressing them. If you haven't seen it yet, AppleScripting genius Paul Berkowitz wrote a massive VBA to AppleScript transition guide.

Regards,
Nadyne.

This is good, except that the semi-affordable version ($150 Student version) lacks all Automator support. To get this scriptability (which, again, makes you no more viable on the compatibility front than NeoOffice et al) you need to pay for the $300 version.

I really think you guys are being sunk by poor development management decisions (taking this long to move off Carbon/PowerPlant is just plain crazy, if those rumors are true), elongated development life cycles matched to exhorbitant pricing structures (software cost gets amortized in the home buyer's mind over six to twelve months; a $300 upgrade every three years seems significantly more expensive than a $100 upgrade every year), and apparent political decisions (that you guys are no more compatible with Office/Win is unforgivable; the one advantage which seems to be there on the surface disappears under scrutiny).

It's probably not in your power to change any of these things, and I certainly applaud the valiant efforts, but as a consumer as opposed to a developer, I have to look at the offering and its history and say, "Probably not."

 

[nadyne]

IMHO, very few Mac users would use Mac Office by choice. Most use Mac Office because they have Windows Office at work and need the compatibility.

Since you're an expert on our market, perhaps you'd like to join our team and help steer the ship? We've got some open positions, and I expect more to become available in the coming months. Check out Microsoft Careers, and select 'Mac Office' from the list of products. There's a few open positions right now -- including the opportunity to be my manager (job code 185499), a job I wouldn't wish on anyone. If you're going to be at MWSF, swing by our booth to chat with us and learn what it's like to work here.

That's nice to hear. But what is needed for the corporate folks are the same applications with Interface compatibility.

This is the part that I love about my job. An important part of my job is managing complexity, specifically in managing the complexity of what our vast array of users expect out of our user experience. Your opinion is one of many, the opinions out there about what we should do diverge wildly.

I think that I can safely say that we're never going to please everyone. One of the basic points where we're not going to please everyone is with respect to our user experience. It's something that I had to come to terms with when I accepted this job. There are always going to be some people who say that Office should be 100% Mac-like. A quick search for 'office cocoa' or maybe 'microsoft cocoa' in these forums should give you some idea for the number of people who want that. And there are people who think that Office should have a user experience that is platform agnostic. Those two viewpoints are diametrically opposed. If you think that there is a way to resolve them, as I said earlier: join the team, steer the ship on the right course. We've always got room for smart people who want to make a difference.

Clearly, on a granular level, the user interfaces of the Office 2008 apps have somewhat different goals than those of Office 2007 (though the overall goal of exposing functionality remains the same). No doubt this entails boatloads of user testing and feedback, and I'm curious about how the flow of that data works between the MacBU and the rest of Microsoft - lessons learned on both sides that can be applied across the board, how often you consult with each other, that kind of thing.

I have a good relationship with my user experience counterparts in WinOffice, as well as a few other people scattered around the various WinOffice application teams (product planners, program managers, a few devs, etc). I know what they're up to and where they're headed, and they know the same from me. I email/IM them when I have a question or am looking for a piece of information that I can't find on my own, and I get questions from them regularly. It's all pretty easy to manage.

Regards,
Nadyne.

 

[TexasPhoto]

I am still in a state of shock over MS decision to do away with VBA in Excel. All the work I have done over the past few years is wiped away. Usually in the past, I have not been concerned about people having complaints about MS; now I can understand the bitterness first-hand.

Compounding the total disregard of user, we only have vague statements as to why the elimination of VBA occured.

 

[uNext]

Wait ... really?! No macro or VB support in Office 2008?

This is a big gotcha for me, macros are used extensively at my place of employment. Crapola.

Investment banking?

 

[jettredmont]

I think that I can safely say that we're never going to please everyone. One of the basic points where we're not going to please everyone is with respect to our user experience. It's something that I had to come to terms with when I accepted this job. There are always going to be some people who say that Office should be 100% Mac-like. A quick search for 'office cocoa' or maybe 'microsoft cocoa' in these forums should give you some idea for the number of people who want that. And there are people who think that Office should have a user experience that is platform agnostic. Those two viewpoints are diametrically opposed. If you think that there is a way to resolve them, as I said earlier: join the team, steer the ship on the right course. We've always got room for smart people who want to make a difference.

Hmm. Okay, so there are two directions you could go, each of which would satisfy some number of customers.

How is not satisfying any of them the right choice here?

For the record, I strongly fall in the "Use Cocoa" camp. It's insane that, for instance, Services support is so spotty (I have a service which pulls any selected bug numbers and brings them up in our bug tracker database; works perfectly everywhere, except Entourage; in Entourage it works if the bug number is in the message body but not if it is in the subject line; guess where most bug numbers get sent to me?). It's insane that the built-in dictionary doesn't work in Office (only Microsoft's crappy dictionary can or will work). It's insane that on my larger second monitor I can't resize Word's window any larger than the floating toolbars on the main monitor would allow. It's insane that you guys have taken over two years to get an Intel native version of your product out. It's insane that the freaking paste-graphics/Windows compatibility bug is still in your entire suite of applications four years and dozens of updates later.

Cocoa (and XCode-based development) would fix, for cheap or for free, all but the last of the above gripes.

In any case, I could understand keeping a non-standard UI if it was in the name of cross-platform uniformity. I wouldn't like it, but I would understand it. Keeping a non-standard and non-cross-platform UI just so that you equally alienate your entire customer base I can not understand.

 

[Boxcar Edit]

Another No Macros Comment

Just in case someone from MS actually reads this, we also can't upgrade without Excel macros. Period.

Unless there's some great substitute, our biz couldn't perform many of the tasks we need to. We'll use our 2004 versions as long as we can and start looking for alternatives.

I'm personally just wanting a spreadsheet that doesn't decide randomly every 3 0-60 minutes that it can't save my documents unless I rename them!

 

[Digital Skunk]

What works for some

For anyone who uses spreadsheets iWork is not an option- 'numbers' is a buggy POS.

The best thing about office 08 is intel support, though its sad we're getting jipped with macros

I use spreadsheets and Numbers works just fine. I use it a lot more now that I have learned how it works, and have done some media integration as well, which is the one thing I needed in office apps that MS Office can and never will provide. iWork is on the consumer side of the spectrum yes, but it blows MS Office away when it comes to handling graphics and audio across every app.

 

[Westside guy]

If some of you don't mind responding, why are you using Excel for such large spreadsheets? Aren't there better programs for doing that kind of analysis in your field?

I've been out of the research loop for about 8 years now, but...

Did you hear about that "decisions are made by drunken lemurs" Dilbert strip? Well, my experience is that happens in research as well. Most of our research was done in collaboration with other universities; and groups of PIs (faculty) would make these sorts of decisions rather arbitrarily without consulting those of us (staff) that were having to do the actual data crunching. With younger faculty nowadays, they seem to be more technically savvy (maybe that's just the department I'm in now, though); but in the 80s and 90s that seemed to be less common.

Fortunately I didn't have to do much actual work in Excel; my boss tended to do his part of the research more or less on his own - so almost all of our analysis was done using tools I'd written (in good ol' Fortran), and it was the same for publication graphics. I only had to deal with Excel when we were sending data elsewhere, or receiving other groups' data.

 

[Schwieb]

I am still in a state of shock over MS decision to do away with VBA in Excel. All the work I have done over the past few years is wiped away. Usually in the past, I have not been concerned about people having complaints about MS; now I can understand the bitterness first-hand.

Compounding the total disregard of user, we only have vague statements as to why the elimination of VBA occured.

I wrote quite a lot about why we removed VBA: here and here.

Schwieb
MacBU Dev Lead

 

[jettredmont]

I wrote quite a lot about why we removed VBA: here and here.

Schwieb
MacBU Dev Lead

On the second post, you ask for feedback as to how people use VBA. I'd have thought that would have been obvious, but in case it wasn't, the comments thread makes it abundantly clear that the primary use of VBA is to keep compatibility with Office/Win macros. So, I'm sure you understand and have understood for a year and a few months that this is going to be a major major blow for Office users. I'm also sure your management team understands and understood this as well. Yet, if there were any efforts to mitigate the horrible costs of this, they certainly are not apparent.

IMHO, I'm glad you have explained yourself, but that doesn't change the fact that this is a major blow to the usability of Office/Mac, and removes the #1 market differentiator between your $400 app and "free". Expecting we'll just sigh and shrug and reach into our wallets yet again is a bit unrealistic.

In short, you blew it. You took something people were paying $400 a shot for and dropped it. Decisions which needed to have been made half a decade ago were shrugged off and your company appears shocked -- shocked! -- that there might be ramifications!

 

[Glenny2lappies]

Adding to the removal of VBA, there's the simple issue that there's very little reason to upgrade. There's few new features and a whole lot of fiddling around with things that weren't broken, e.g. the user interface. The new features I really wanted; interoperability with PST files, you've not bothered to add.

Quite frankly I'd have simply preferred a version of Office 2004 which was universal, thus would run faster and with a smaller memory footprint. I understand it's nowhere near as easy as this as there's a stack of legacy code that needs to be re-written. But that's what we pay our licence fees for.

So, in summary;

• few new features that are worth mentioning (XML documents maybe although most people still use .doc format as the converters were delivered late -- stupid decision on MS's part -- and the pointless my today widgety thing isn't worth mentioning)
• no new 'missing features' (e.g. no Access, support for PST, MAPI, etc.)
• a lot of pointless UI changes (which from all reviews I've read are best described as a bit of a mess)
• some existing features that have been removed (e.g. VBA).

Microsoft is not the incumbent supplier on the Mac platform so there isn't a default 'office suite' purchase decision as there is on windows. There is probably more competition in the Mac market with iWork (if not now, certainly within a couple of years), NeoOffice, etc.

All of this adds up to a pretty pointless upgrade. It has certainly devalued the value of the package.


On a positive note, I guess congratulations are in order for the good job you did on Office 2004. I've a feeling that it'll continue to be sold for a long time hence.

I massively sympathise with the Mac BU. It must be awful dealing with the Office group with their mess of a code base and complete Windows-centric focus (and the thought of sharing the same building as the person who thought the paperclip was a really neat thing must be horrid). It's such a pity that you didn't have the resources to rewrite the office suite into a proper modular architecture; properly separating all the layers which would really assist porting to other platforms.

It is wonderful that there is an Office for the Mac. I'm certain that if it weren't for the accident of history, we definitely wouldn't have it now.


On the "I use Office for" topic...
1) I use it because I use a Mac and have all my documents and presentations in Office format. I need complete compatibility with old versions.
2) It's more reliable than the Windows version of Office. I kid you not, but we have some very important manuals that simply won't work *reliably* in Office 2003! On the Mac, no problems.

 

[pbbaker123]

See the light of day

People,


They don't care about any of this... butt loads of people are still going to buy it because they are home or small business users...

They have a bunch of money tied up in Office 2007 and Vista that they need to get back of the next couple of years...

The want as many Mac users to use Office 2007 as possible... bottom line.

Edit: Spoon feed me crap and make me like it... mmmm....

 

[rockosmodurnlif]

The prices that you saw on the first page were from APC Magazine, which is an Australian publication. US prices are as follows:
Home/Student - $149.95
Standard - $399.95 ($239.95 upgrade)
Special Media Edition - $499.95 ($299.95 upgrade)

(This is the same information that was reported here on MacRumors earlier.)

Regards,
Nadyne.

Ahh, that makes sense. It's still not really in my price range but I'll still try it out if there is a demo available.

 

[mediaguyla]

No Macro support may stall sales

Wait ... really?! No macro or VB support in Office 2008?

This is a big gotcha for me, macros are used extensively at my place of employment. Crapola.

Agreed! If they remove Macro support I will HAVE to continue to use an older version of Office. If I decide that I can live without Macros I may become much more open to competitors to MS Office.

 

[worldwearyeyes]

looks like a great update.

 

[cliffjumper68]

Don't forget the home student version

"Microsoft has applied some of the Vista version magic to Office 2008 with regard to pricing. Thankfully, however it's a bit easier to follow. There are two main options; a basic Office 2008 for Mac standard edition ($649 or $399 for an upgrade) or an Office 2008 for Mac Special Media Edition ($849, or $549 for upgrade)"


Unbelievable !!

Unless you need exchange server (I use Tiger server) then the home/ student version is all you need at $149. That is not too out of line. The only time I use MS Office now is if someone sends me a file to work on, otherwise Mac iWork suits me just fine.

 

[cliffjumper68]

I wrote quite a lot about why we removed VBA: here and here.

Schwieb
MacBU Dev Lead

Funny how a open source project can succeed where the great MS fails.
http://reverendted.wordpress.com/2006/07/03/openofficeorg-and-excel-vba-macros/

Perhaps in the future you might want to ask the open office people to help you make a better program.

Just a question? How many people are involved in the Mac BU at M$? I am think ing there has to be at least 2 of you.

 

[canisreevus]

Before I started med school, I used iWork '06 and loved it. However, I now have to use and open many .doc, .xls, and .ppt files for my classes. I tried using iWork, but I got tired of having to allow each file to import and save it every time. I look forward to the new Office for Mac since it will give me compatibility without Rosetta. It was nice to get a new copy of Office for Mac 2004 for $50 and only have to pay $7 for Office for Mac 2008 (the most expensive version, too).

 

[walnuts]

I wrote quite a lot about why we removed VBA: here and here.

Schwieb
MacBU Dev Lead

I don't understand all of the programming implications involved, but it seems that you make a good case why you couldn't implement VBA now. Any chance if the demand truly pans out that you would continue to work on VBA support and add it on with a later update? You said:

None of this is work that we can’t do, it’s just work that would take away from everything else that we do want to do and would delay shipping Office 12.

Or, at the very least, does the update installer leave Excel 2004 intact so that those who use the macros could switch back if the need arises?

 

[HLdan]

I think the lack of Macro support is a BS move by Microsoft.

It took them longer than any major publisher--except Intuit which is a total disgrace of a company--to provide an Intel native version.

Anyway, personally, I have been an MSOffice fan for longer than I want to think about, but I am ready to leave. Too much bloat, too little innovation, too many games with file formats, and bugs, bugs, bugs...

I think Keynote is nothing short of awesome, and Pages is almost there. One more solid and major iteration on Pages and it will be home. iWork will be my ultimate choice since Apple just gets design and the creative process in a way Microsoft does not. Plus, the application just works the way I want it to 95% of the time and the little features and touches are magic.

iWork is about beautiful, effective documents. (Plus, the horrific software authentication on Microsoft products is a big to me. I pay for every copy of software I use, but I hate being treated like a crook when the real crooks easily get around these inconveniences.)

Sadly, Numbers is just not there. I could limp along with it as I did with Keynote 1.0 and Pages 2.0 but Excel for all of its many faults and interface headaches is the best application Microsoft makes and is pretty decent.

I hope iWork 09 sees a major update to the Numbers and a decent Pages update. Fill in the missing features, but not the kitchen sink, make it fast, fast, fast and bang out the bugs.

Then, my hard drive will be Microsoft free. First time since I have owned a computer, and I can't wait.

But I welcome Office 2008. It's good for the Mac platform. It's good for Microsoft. And I look forward to trying the new Excel.

Agreed. This is nothing but a way for Microsoft to jack the Mac users so we can't move into the corporate world since MS Office is the corporate standard.
The next time someone blasts Apple for monopolizing I am going to rebuttal back about MS purposely cutting off VB and Macro support in their overpriced Mac version of Office. MS prays on us Mac users thinking we are so stupid that we would buy Office and not know what it may be lacking. Once we've opened the box and realized that it's not fully compatible with the Windows version we are stuck with it and can't return it.

 

[DiamondMac]

My big hope for Office is faster load times and as someone else mentioned ending the wait for so many of their functions.

Thought it maybe was my MBP but I installed Office on my iMac with plenty of space/speed and had the same problems