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Mac Office 2008 Hits Private Beta

the ribbon thing needs to be collapsible, but right now, Office 2008 is one damn nice looker.

however, i've moved to NeoOffice 2.1, and am finding it very good... i'm not sure i'll be upgrading to 2008 when it appears...
 
kainjow said:
TUAW has some screenshots here.
Click to expand...
Wow - thats an abomination! Its not a toolbar-based app and its certainly not a ribbon in Office 2007 style.

As someone who has been using Office 2007 at work every day since beta 2 came out, I love the ribbon over the old toolbar explosion ... but just looking at this Mac version makes me angry :mad:

Of course, the ribbon is intended to do away with the need for menus, which makes little sense on the Mac ... but this is still a pretty shabby hybrid.
 
jellomizer said:
I don't think so. Microsoft has enough Monopoly problems right now imagine the outrage you will get from the EU and DOJ if MS drops Office for the Mac.

Secondly if Microsoft stops Office for the Mac, A lot of the Mac people will switch to Linux. Normally if a person who doesn't like Microsoft will either go with Linux or a Mac. The reason why they go with Mac a lot of the time is because Office is there so they feel that they wont loose anything. But without office Next Upgrade cycle they may just consider Linux on a cheaper PC. What will not happen is droves of Mac users switching to windows. So better off keeping them on the Mac and make money selling your product to people who generally hate you.

Third Mac Users and office for the Mac are a good experimental base for the next version of office. They are able to try new things without a major public outcry, from companies.

Forth it is profitable.

Fifth, it will keep droves of people who know what good User Interfaces are from decided to contribute there effort in making programs like open office good.

...

Apples iWork suit is by no way close to office. It is at best closer to MS. Works.
Click to expand...

What would be the benefit of switching to linux? you have an even more huge dearth of popular applications.

Codeweavers will get Office 2007 running just fine a mac before too long if it is that big a deal.

Bottomline with open formats and improving web apps, Office is quickly becoming a dinosaur.
 
am i one of the few people actually looking forward to this?

i use Word. a lot. and i share my files. a lot. so i'm looking forward to an update to the app.
 
Westside guy said:
... I still run across occasional oddities with document formatting whenever I try to move away from it (be it with Pages, or NeoOffice, or Abiword, or whatever). MS Office is still the defacto standard where I work, so compatibility does matter.
Click to expand...

There is no reason why MS should be allowed to maintain their illegal monopoly merely because people like you need to stay compatible with their formats that maintain their monopoly. For this reason I feel totally morally justified in keeping a "borrowed" copy of office around so I can use my preferred apps and still be certain I can open any document I come across. (though the times my preferred app can't open everything I come across is almost never.)
 
motulist said:
There is no reason why MS should be allowed to maintain their illegal monopoly merely because people like you need to stay compatible with their formats that maintain their monopoly. For this reason I feel totally morally justified in keeping a "borrowed" copy of office around so I can use my preferred apps and still be certain I can open any document I come across. (though the times my preferred app can't open everything I come across is almost never.)
Click to expand...

Pirate ;)
 
Airforce said:
Pirate ;)
Click to expand...

I'm no pirate, I'm just a borrower! ;) Seriously though, I feel like if I'm not using the program, merely using it as an overblown format converter to be sure that I can open MS formatted files and transfer their contents into a different program. So I really don't consider it pirating since I'm not using the program.
 
motulist said:
I'm no pirate, I'm just a borrower! ;) Seriously though, I feel like if I'm not using the program, merely using it as an overblown format converter to be sure that I can open MS formatted files and transfer their contents into a different program. So I really don't consider it pirating since I'm not using the program.
Click to expand...

Don't try to morally justify your pirate antics :p
 
I think moving forward it's going to be BC/Parallels rather than an Office Mac product. I still hafta have Visio, Project, Access. Huge "Eeewww!" on all counts, but it's easier than fighting both my IT department and my customers.
 
office is needed as much as new versions of the windows os is needed... mostly for the large scale business world... but what i find humorous is that even the multi-billion dollar financial corporations and banks still use windows 98/2000 (in canada anyway), 'cause it's just too much to upgrade to xp, and forget about vista, and forget about office 2008... silly microsoft
 
so I read the comments, I looked at the screen shots..
There's some really cool things that I'll be looking forward to! Like, how you can more-easily edit the header and footers, and there's a dedicated button for a bibliography in word. Little things like that'll be AMAZING for any highschool/college students who are still up at 3am working on term papers.

I think that this'll be a must have upgrade, at least as much as you can have a must-have upgrade of Office :p
 
I say negative since it does not support the basic scripting, as such it makes it next to impossible to share some files between windows and Mac's.
 
To me, Office should have the same features and interface on both the Mac and PC. Many folks use Office on the Mac at home to be compatible with Office on the PC at work. If they are not the same, then why use Office for the Mac at home?

Lack of support for VB is terrible.

Makes me wonder about Microsoft leadership or lack there of.
 
Like other people in the forum, I've been using Pages and TextEdit exclusively for the past year and I've never really regretted it.

If I ever need to revert to a heavier word processor I will do my best to avoid Microsoft's and will consider every single Open Source alternative possible.

With a single exception: I need to use word once in a while because it is the only popular word processor interfacing well with Thomson's EndNote bibliographic manager... Too bad...
 
speakerwizard said:
most people 'THINK' they need ms office, others keep it as a security blanket, (remember a lot of people are making the os just, take it one step at a time) we all know neo office and iwork (if it gets excel equivelent will do), neo office supports macros, ms office 2007/8 for mac does not.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, I have lots of horrendously large Excel spreadsheets with functions that just aren't the same in other spreadsheet apps, so they fail to calculate properly. (Usually with data link errors.) No macros, just pure function calls. LOOKUP is one of those that I use that OpenOffice/NeoOffice doesn't handle correctly.

I converted ONE such spreadsheet to work correct with OpenOffice. It took me about 20 man-hours to do, and it wasn't even one of the bigger ones. That is just ridiculous, especially when I only need to look in some of these 'broken' spreadsheets once a year. It is much easier to just use Excel. (Not to mention that some of the errors aren't even obviously evident. Some errors are easy, a cell says "N/A" or something similar when it should have a number. Other errors just show the wrong number. In some of the larger spreadsheets, I *KNOW* I would miss this kind of error too often to be acceptable.)
 
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