Mac Office 2008 Hits Private Beta

[RogueWarrior65]

If (Partial solution = no solution) Then Quit

So how the F are you supposed to run stuff with macros in it?
Jesus H... I'm so sick and tired of the big software companies not engineering cross-platform capability from the start. Quickbooks is a prime example of Mac users getting versions that are years out of date. Now this. Dumb dumb dumb. And don't give me that whining line about marketshare...it's bull. That's a piss poor excuse for not thinking.

 

[EagerDragon]

Why do people vote this negative?

I'm getting sick of this mac user hypocrisy- to cry monopoly at microsoft when ignoring all apple's iPod indiscretions. And then to claim MS apps are unstable/bad despite having never used them.

Thank god MS ignores you and OS X can enjoy another industry leading application for a few more years. Office 07 is an excellent product for which there is no substitute.

People vote negative because the new office does not bring feature equality on the Mac Platform. The Mac version is crippled.

Adobe and others bring the same features to both OS's. Microsoft could do the same but they chose not to do so.

Why are you so angry, have you really tried to exercise the Mac version of Office?
A lot of the bundled pieces of the current office are crippled in many ways like pivot tables, no VB support, and many others.

Have you located Access for Mac?
Have you located Project for Mac?
Have you located Visio for Mac?
Neither one exist today.

Are you a Mac user or a Windows user, I wonder why you come accross so angry?

Yes, we sometimes are unfair to Microsoft, but the above are not unfair, they are real, Microsoft produces a windows and OSX version yet they are not the same features wise.

 

[superleccy]

To the dismay of many corporate and cross-platform users, however, Microsoft has said that it will not be supporting Visual Basic scripting.

I wonder if the "Get a Mac" ads have goaded Microsoft into making this move. For example...

Mac: Hello, I'm a Mac
PC: Hello, I'm a PC
Mac: I'm good at fun stuff.
PC: I'm good at Business Stuff.
Microsoft: You won't be needing VB Scripting, then. Stuff you, Apple.

I can't imagine that M$ thinks it owes Apple any favours.

SL

 

[EagerDragon]

What about LaTeX? Or InDesign? If you are making long documents surely you would use one of those programs not Word.

The above products are primarly document design, and do not cover the same functionality as any of the versions of office in either platform. They are dedicated products.

We are talking about having full and equal fuctionality on both platforms (Mac, Win). There are a lot of very nice dedicated products out there that will meet the needs for specific tasks but not for co-editing between the platforms. Not all specialized allow insertion of others document formats either so creating a graph, based on calculations, inserting a table look up and then making it all look pretty in the document takes a lot of different and sometimes not inexpensive products and the resulting document is not likely to be able to be loaded by Ms Windows office, be edited and the result brought back.

Is this co-editing between platforms that people want.

Macs can produce superior documents but does not allow the cros-editing without equal fuctionality between the platform.

 

[jaw04005]

Microsoft Office for Mac is a mixed blessing. Since the application is developed by a separate division of Microsoft, it tends to lack some of the features of the Windows version.

However, lots of features are exclusive to Mac. For example, "PowerPoint to QuickTime Movie" and Word's "Notebook View."

Some of the Mac versions (namely v. X and 2004) were even considered better than their Windows counterparts.

VB scripting was removed because its made up of legacy code, inherently insecure and Apple already provides a system-wide scripting service. Why reinvent the wheel? Office for Mac OS X should have taken advantage of Apple's built-in services all along.

Yes, I'm aware this is going to cause problems with corporate forms and other macro-heavy documents. But isn't it worth it for tighter integration with Mac OS X?

Hopefully, MacBU will also ship Office with pre-built Automator actions and a spell check that uses Mac OS X's system-wide dictionary.

 

[CoreWeb]

Microsoft Office for Mac is a mixed blessing. Since the application is developed by a separate division of Microsoft, it tends to lack some of the features of the Windows version.

However, lots of features are exclusive to Mac. For example, "PowerPoint to QuickTime Movie" and Word's "Notebook View."

Some of the Mac versions (namely v. X and 2004) were even considered better than their Windows counterparts.

VB scripting was removed because its made up of legacy code, inherently insecure and Apple already provides a system-wide scripting service. Why reinvent the wheel? Office for Mac OS X should have taken advantage of Apple's built-in services all along.

Yes, I'm aware this is going to cause problems with corporate forms and other macro-heavy documents. Ultimately, isn't it worth it for tighter integration with Mac OS X?

Hopefully, MacBU will also ship Office with pre-built Automator actions and a spell check that uses Mac OS X's system-wide dictionary.

And now that Mac OS X Leopard has grammar checking, Microsoft shouldn't need to add their own version of that either.

 

[one09jason]

Will it crash?

It sort of doesn't matter what they do to it, if it crashes like all the previous versions, it's still crap software. That's my only real beef with MS software: display anomalies like disappearing text and objects, crashes, "corrupt" documents, and on and on. There are bugs in office that have been there version after version. In my view, this is the damage that their monopoly power really does: they have no real incentive to improve the quality. How is this one any different?

 

[boffo]

Any scripting at all?

To the dismay of many corporate and cross-platform users, however, Microsoft has said that it will not be supporting Visual Basic scripting.

If it won't support VBA, will it support any other kind of scripting or user-defined functions? Perhaps AppleScript?

If it doesn't, that makes it significantly less useful to me.

 

[richard4339]

Just saw some over at TUAW

I must have missed the one comment above, sorry about that =/

 

[TheChemist]

Duff-Man says...I have always gotten freebies of Office since I had a friend that worked for M$...but now that he has moved on I don't think I would shell out much for a new version...if I could upgrade for say like $99 I might think about it but anything much more than that I'd say forget it...oh yeah!

Educational Discount my friend.

Full versions of Office Pro are 99$ + tx at school.

 

[Eraserhead]

I wonder if the "Get a Mac" ads have goaded Microsoft into making this move. For example...

SL

Well it was like this before, what about MSN Messenger and no video support (rolleyes at MS's badness not you )

Is this co-editing between platforms that people want.

LaTeX and Indesign both run on Windows too, though you probably can't edit graphs/charts.

 

[Object-X]

Why private?

Given how Microsoft for the last few years released beta after beta to the public, why is Office 2008 for the Mac a private beta?

 

[chuckzee]

Can someone tell me who is this Mac Office 2008? And why did he/she hit Private Beta?

 

[EagerDragon]

Microsoft Office for Mac is a mixed blessing. Since the application is developed by a separate division of Microsoft, it tends to lack some of the features of the Windows version.

However, lots of features are exclusive to Mac. For example, "PowerPoint to QuickTime Movie" and Word's "Notebook View."

Some of the Mac versions (namely v. X and 2004) were even considered better than their Windows counterparts.

VB scripting was removed because its made up of legacy code, inherently insecure and Apple already provides a system-wide scripting service. Why reinvent the wheel? Office for Mac OS X should have taken advantage of Apple's built-in services all along.

Yes, I'm aware this is going to cause problems with corporate forms and other macro-heavy documents. But isn't it worth it for tighter integration with Mac OS X?

Hopefully, MacBU will also ship Office with pre-built Automator actions and a spell check that uses Mac OS X's system-wide dictionary.

The lack of VB is the main killer, authomated documents / applications created with Application Visual Basic will not work on the Mac and Mac documents that use Mac related authomation (Script and authomator) will not work on Windows.

For users that do not need this feature, Microsoft Office for Mac is a great product. However the corporate world is not likely to adopt Macs or rely on moving documents between the two platforms without VB scripting capability.

Authomator actions while nice for Mac users will not port across.

 

[ogee]

Will this likely be the last release for the Macintosh?

I would doubt it as MS has rewritten the complete package for intel Mac. I doubt they would do that if they were going to drop it. There is a very interesting Blog from the MBU and one of its employees which goes into a lot of detail about why VBA for mac has been dropped and what would have been involved in re-writing it for intel mac. I can understand their point of view, but thats a real pain for me.

I was also reading the other day, that the MBU is the biggest single mac developer, except for Apple. I guess that programs like Iview Media pro and other products they have bought are included in that calculation

 

[Westside guy]

If it won't support VBA, will it support any other kind of scripting or user-defined functions? Perhaps AppleScript?

If it doesn't, that makes it significantly less useful to me.

It's a long read, but a ways down in that linked Mac BU post it explicitly says Mac-compatible scripting languages are supported.

Personally I think security wise this is a good decision; and it won't affect the majority of Office users. But it certainly may cause significant pain in those cases where Mac users are trying to co-exist in an environment where Macs aren't officially supported.

 

[Project]

Been using this.... some definite nods to Pages....

 

[matticus008]

What about LaTeX? Or InDesign? If you are making long documents surely you would use one of those programs not Word.

Certainly not. LaTeX is for writing, not for document formatting. LaTeX gives you content to feed into a real word processor. InDesign is for publishing layouts and printed copies, not for electronic exchange. Its files are far too large to be practical for filing and emailing, especially in cases where there easily could be in excess of 10,000 total pages associated with it. InDesign takes several seconds to load a 6-page brochure; I can't imagine opening a 200-page brief with it. Neither of those programs is a word processor.

Anyone who writes off Keynote as a child's toy in comparison to the Mac version of PowerPoint hasn't taken the time to learn Keynote. What can these professionals accomplish in PowerPoint than they can't do in Keynote? Keynote does lag behind the Windows version of PowerPoint in animation tools

Animation tools, flow chart design, embedding and scripting, drawing tools, layering, and text placement options are all lacking in Keynote compared to PowerPoint. If you're using basic pictures and text boxes with bullet points, none of this really matters. But if you're presenting a complex scientific data set, you often need to work more into a slide than Keynote currently will allow.

Like I said, I love Keynote. I use it for nearly all of my presentations, and everything it can do, I think it's both easier and superior to PowerPoint. However, it is not as feature-complete as PowerPoint in the corners and niches where 95% of people never go. It doesn't need to be in order to be a great product. But PowerPoint has its uses and benefits.

Can I ask what access offers that NeoOffice does not?

Sure. Microsoft Access, just as he said. You can't just switch database infrastructure willy-nilly. If you're connected to networked Access databases, you need Access. Would MySQL or Oracle be better? Maybe in some ways. If I have to enter client data into Access, though, there's not really a question of what to use. Same with financial data still running on AS/400 through terminal software and flight information systems running on Windows NT 4. It's not Microsoft's monopoly that does it, it's corporate standardization. Once you have enough data in a single application, you've put yourself into a situation where you need that application.

 

[bill4588]

what exactly is visual basic? i keep hearing people whine about it not being included and im completely lost.

 

[Eraserhead]

Certainly not. LaTeX is for writing, not for document formatting. LaTeX gives you content to feed into a real word processor.

This isn't really true, admittedly with LaTeX you can't change the font and stuff easily (but I'm sure you can if you want to), but it produces an output PDF, which you can then send off to be printed, or whatever you want to do with it. You don't use Word or something with the result, otherwise you might as well write the document in Word in the first place.

 

[NorCalLights]

Why should I download Neo 2.1? I keep hoping iWork '07 will improve dramatically. Keynote is my primary presentation tool now, but Pages is still limited IMHO.

Um... why keep hoping you'll get a full-featured word processor sometime in the indefinite future? Go download NeoOffice 2.1 (it's free, by the way) and be happy NOW.

 

[irbdavid]

Certainly not. LaTeX is for writing, not for document formatting. LaTeX gives you content to feed into a real word processor.
...
Neither of those programs is a word processor.

I entirely agree that LaTeX is not a word processor. I think it's best described as a markup language, and as such the formatting is implicit - 'this is a figure, this is a section heading, table of contents goes here' etc.

I think EraserHead was right though - I simply would not want to try and write up a thesis in Word (at least, in the 2004 Mac version - I haven't tried 2007+). There are several reasons for this - top three:

1) Equations in word are painful to write, and look awful. Having to use their little built in editor thing drives me up the wall as it requires you to click through tabs and drop down menus just to write a single mathematical symbol. With LaTeX no such fiddling around is required, and my fingers never need to leave the keyboard at any point.

2) Figures & Formatting them is also fantastically irritating. Throw an image into a word document (which seems to have some big bones about including most vector graphics formats), only to have them disrupt the text in horrific ways and move about the page of their own accord.

3) Cross-referencing within a word document is fantastically poor. Sure maybe I have to call pdflatex/bibtex a few times to get it to work, but the only way to get a reference to update itself in word, according to the documentation is to select it and hit F9 or something, and the only way to update ALL references in a document is to select EVERYTHING and do it. In a document that runs well into the hundreds of pages, this doesn't sound like fun. Spreading this across several .doc files... doesn't sound fun at all.

I could go on. LaTeX has a pretty tricky learning curve, it must be said. But once you've got over it.... well, I hope I don't have to go back to using Word full time...

As a final point, I am told that the Equation and referencing in Word 2007 is much improved over previous versions, and modelled on the way these things are done in LaTeX no less. Whether or not it is actually usable, we shall see.
</rant>

 

[phuong]

I like it, BUT, on a 12 or 13.3 laptop screen, that ribbon will take up a LOT of screen real estate...

the ribbon is collapsible. moreover, it can adjust its size according to the size of your screen so that it won't take too much screen space. the ribbon interface, although i can't say it's innovative, but there certainly are a lot of new and powerful features in it. please dont judge it if you haven't tried it.

what i've observed is that, people who haven't tried MS Office 2007 but only seen screenshots of its interface, especially "Mac" people, are usually the ones who complain the most about "ugly interface" or "unfriendly interface" and so on.. and talk about the superiority of the alternatives, and keep wondering why other people (who obviously is using or have tried MSO2k7) love it.

 

[SiliconAddict]

All my years as a Director/Producer - manager - I have never needed Microsoft apps...apple 'text' is as great as their word app, who really cares.

People act like this is a Final Cut Pro, Maya, or something that can do something of some significance...if your into writing, get Final draft.

Office docs...seriously...maybe people need to branch out and do something else for awhile.

Peace

dAlen

If you don't get what so special about Microsoft Office then you are either
1. Using the Mac version
2. Not using even a quarter of its features.

For all the complaining about MS office, and yes there are things to complain about, its a VERY powerful suite, as long as you know how to use it and know where kick and hit it just right when it acts up.

 

[phuong]

what exactly is visual basic? i keep hearing people whine about it not being included and im completely lost.

VB is powerful for automated tasks. imagine you're a book keeper and you have to enter thousands of journal entries every day. now imagine doing it with 1 click and with 10,000 clicks.