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This is why iWork, and Mac in general, is not ready for enterprise because of these limitations. But iWork 09 is a great program and trumps Office and OpenOffice for the Mac in terms of its functionality and productivity for the average user (especially consumers, who Apple has seemed to focus upon the past 4 years)
 
This limitation existed in Microsoft Excel all the way until 03/04 and was finally lifted in 07/08 versions. Why would anybody need more than 65K rows? Because some people work with high throughput sequencing data and those big files are the norm.

Numbers 09 is barely catching up to 4 year old Excel and is useless for scientific applications involving sequence analysis.

So in this case, Numbers 09 would give Office 2008 a run for its money for being THE worst program.

In fairness, any scientific project involving large files and lots of rows of numbers will just work with the raw data and some sort of scripting language or C program to read it directly and not a third-party app.
 
Using Oracle or MySQL would be a better tool than Excel for large data sets. I am starting to use Numbers for work related tasks. For what I use it for, Numbers is better.

Excel seems so dated in comparison to Numbers. It compares to switching from Lotus 123 (DOS) to Excel (Windows 95) back in the 90's. Having independent Tables within Sheets is huge that I hope Excel adds that feature on their next version so I can exchange documents that represent how Numbers shows the documents.

The paid Office 2008 with all the service packs is stable. Probably the demo version is the original Office 2008. I expect Office 2012 to be Intel only and be as good as Apple's iWork '10.
 
i came to expect such poor programs coming out of Microsoft... hence my use of OSX
 
Hmm have you tried updating it? I had problems like what you were describing, but htey went away after I ran the updates.

I love Office 2008. Best program ever! i've never really had any problems with it.
So which is it? Problems or no problems? :D
 
I've had Office "palettes" "stuck" in certain Spaces. For instance I have a Word doc open in Space 1 with the toolbox palette thingy open. I switch to Space 2 using ctrl + 2. My Word doc moves to Space 2 but my toolbox palette moves as well, but inside is blank. The content is "stuck" in Space 1. Very irritating. When I'm multi-tasking, Spaces integration is very important to me.

Also, I had Safari and Word open. I opened a Word doc, but before it was open I shifted my main focus to Safari. I clicked on the Word doc when it finally opened, and it got "stuck". The window just won't come into the main focus. ARGH.

I'm using Pages for my genetic engineering research paper. I spend nearly half an hour fiddling around with Word alone.
 
Office 08 is fine just like Office 04 was fine and Office X was fine. Have you updated the versions as they came out with patches? The earliest releases usually have bugs.
 
I prefer Word over Pages, Excel over Numbers.

Only reason I bought the iWork suite is for the Keynote.
Far superior than PowerPoint :)
 
Have no problem with Office 2008. My only complaint is how long it takes to start up and the fact that they gutted it of features that were in the Windows version - with no explanation as to why...
 
office 2008 is the worst, dog slow, badly designed application on the mac.

Unfortunately iWork 09 is not powerful enough for anything more than casual spreadsheet use therefore I am now having to run Office 2007 on a vista VMWare instance.

The crazy thing is office runs 10 times faster on VMWare Fusion than it does native.
 
I find Office 08 acceptable, but merely that. When it works, it works fine, but the Spaces issue is aggravating, and yes I do know that it is Apple's fault. Regardless, such an issue is unacceptable and MacBU should be trying to sort it out. Also, it just feels like parts of the GUI still contain elements going back to Office 04 and don't reflect the newer look which just bugs me. I'm going to try out iWork 09 and see how it is though.
 
Also want to concur that this is why macs will never gain traction in business as the core office software is so bad/slow.
 
Office 2008

Office 2008 is slow and there are some posts as far as the project gallery and the fonts to speed up the software start up time. Once mine has started I can open further files fast. No crash issues. It is definitely not as good as i expected.
 
but the messenger not having AV, its f***ing stupid (sorry for my language, but it is) the corporate side has AV, why can't they give it to the personal >_<

Short answer: it's coming, and we'll have a public beta later this year (exact date TBA, watch Mac Mojo for an announcement when it's ready).

Slightly longer answer: The corporate server moved to a new audio/visual stack (that is, how we communicate with the server). The personal server is moving to that same A/V stack, but they're not there yet. They're in beta for the new A/V stack right now. Once they're closer to being done, we'll be able to release our own beta. If you were at Macworld, we were demoing our current pre-alpha code there. The most recent details are available in this blog post.

Regards,
Nadyne.
 
hi nadyne,

Can you explain why office 2008 is slower than office 2007 running on VMware Fusion?

Thanks
 
hi nadyne,

Can you explain why office 2008 is slower than office 2007 running on VMware Fusion?

Thanks

What do you mean slower. Opening up or just in general? It takes a long time opening up because of the fonts.
 
I'm considering putting Office 2004 back on my MacBook.

Damn Office SP1 update will not install. Downloads then Installer hangs. ANy suggestions?
 
I'm considering putting Office 2004 back on my MacBook.

Damn Office SP1 update will not install. Downloads then Installer hangs. ANy suggestions?



I ran into the same problem and realized that an AppleScript failed in the background behind the SP1 installer. Try moving the window and see if you come across the scripting error dialog behind it. Clicking away the dialog allows the installation to proceed.

Office 2008 has been completely unstable on nearly every Mac I've used it on. While Microsoft seems to have slightly improved performance and stability in these last few patches, it still blows...
 
MS Office bugs me. It is also buggy- the only application to ever make my Mac crash. I use it merely for compatibility issues: once these are no longer a problem I'll switch to iWork. I'm also having the SP 1 hang-up issue for MS Office 2008 for Mac (which is equally as bad as the Windows versions btw, I've run both). Does anyone know how to get around this?
 
Damn Office SP1 update will not install. Downloads then Installer hangs. ANy suggestions?

The most common reasons for problems with the update are:
* moving the Office folder out of the Applications folder
* running an app like Monolingual or Xslimmer
* manually deleting some portion of the Office install

Have you done any of these?

Regards,
Nadyne.
 
I've had Office "palettes" "stuck" in certain Spaces. For instance I have a Word doc open in Space 1 with the toolbox palette thingy open. I switch to Space 2 using ctrl + 2. My Word doc moves to Space 2 but my toolbox palette moves as well, but inside is blank. The content is "stuck" in Space 1. Very irritating. When I'm multi-tasking, Spaces integration is very important to me.

Also, I had Safari and Word open. I opened a Word doc, but before it was open I shifted my main focus to Safari. I clicked on the Word doc when it finally opened, and it got "stuck". The window just won't come into the main focus. ARGH.

This issue might soon drive me crazy enough to use Word'07 in Parallels...... :mad:
 
I've been very frustrated with the performance of Excel. I need to use it for my job but its performance is so slow that I can't use it. I can literally type then wait a beat before it appears. I've downloaded the newest updates which improved Word, but Excel remains awful. I just bought a Mac Book Pro so I can't imagine its the computers fault. I'm surprised that Microsoft would put out a product this poor.
 
Have no problem with Office 2008. My only complaint is how long it takes to start up and the fact that they gutted it of features that were in the Windows version - with no explanation as to why...

Cause it's a Mac? Maybe, for some reason unknown to us mortals, Microsoft wants the Window's version to seem faster to make the entire system seem faster?

As for Office, 2008 is really fast to boot (for me), and have yet to encounter even a single freezing/slow-down issue with it.
 
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