Mac Office 2008 Preview

[Oh-es-Ten]

iWork and not looking back

We have always ran out office using Macs and it has always been the case that we needed to purchase Office with every Mac. Initially it was not just for documents, but also for Entourage. Slowly we realised that Entourage was a little bloated and complicated for our needs, and used the Mail.app client instead.

More recently I have been using iWork 08, and I am now recommending that we phase out Office altogether here. I was very impressed with iWork overall and it runs very well and is quite a powerful Word Processor, Spreadsheet and Layout and Presentation App.

I am sure we will get a copy or two of Office just to have for compatibility emergencies, but I agree with the person who was saying that 99 percent of people don't use 90 percent of an Office suite's features. Already I am using styles and templates better in Pages than I ever have in Word, due to a much better layout and approach to using them.

 

[miniConvert]

Whatever, Microsoft, just get it out already!

 

[k2k koos]

What a bag o' ***** website. Took ten minutes to draw the frames then the video freezes after about two seconds. How very Microsoft. Sheesh.

same here, had to reload the page a few times before it started playing (sloooowwwwwww) not a good indicator if this is what will be coming for Mac Office 2008....
don't like the interface, don't like the ribbon, please MS, you have so much money, has nobody in your enormous organisation any idea about making decent, flowing, logical interfaces, can't you afford them, or are you soo big now, that there are too many people involved in everything, each putting in something (personal job protection programs) that makes everything, through and through sluggish, it seems that way by the products you release.....

 

[k2k koos]

We have always ran out office using Macs and it has always been the case that we needed to purchase Office with every Mac. Initially it was not just for documents, but also for Entourage. Slowly we realised that Entourage was a little bloated and complicated for our needs, and used the Mail.app client instead.

More recently I have been using iWork 08, and I am now recommending that we phase out Office altogether here. I was very impressed with iWork overall and it runs very well and is quite a powerful Word Processor, Spreadsheet and Layout and Presentation App.

I am sure we will get a copy or two of Office just to have for compatibility emergencies, but I agree with the person who was saying that 99 percent of people don't use 90 percent of an Office suite's features. Already I am using styles and templates better in Pages than I ever have in Word, due to a much better layout and approach to using them.

I agree, I have office for Mac (the very first version), and I only use it for compatibility reasons from time to time. I live in the real world, and the majority of people have some form of office on their machines. I agree that they probably use less than half of what the program is capable of, but that is also it's strength, one person may use a completely different feature set from the other.
For me however, I've experimented with NeoOffice, and iWork, and I'd say that iWork is probably all I would need in 99% of the cases.

 

[weckart]

According to the website we are getting the same four programs again as the previous 2 releases.

On the Windows side, you can get Word, Excel, Powerpoint and One Note on the Student/Home 3 licence deal for £100 retail, which is all that most users will need.

As One Note is not being ported albeit elements will probably be included within Word, will there be a similar package for non-students, possibly excluding Entourage, for the same amount, or will we be required to stump up the best part of £200 to upgrade for a single licence? This sort of useful info is missing from the flashy preview site.

 

[majordude]

It took to post 80 before someone finally mentions that this will be a universal binary.

Geez... this is late 2007. Isn't that a GIVEN? Even for Microsoft?

 

[igazza]

office

i rather give my money to steve jobs than bill gates so its iwork for me

 

[Virgil-TB2]

Are you talking about My Day? My Day is a little app that sits on your desktop. It reads data out of Entourage for your calendar and tasks. It isn't related to Windows Mobile (or any other particular mobile device) in any way. It's just a quick way for you to see what you've got going on in your day.

Well yeah, I did mean "My Day" which as you note uses OS-X sync services. Using the OS-X sync services however is pretty much a given unless the developers are insane enough to try and re-invent that wheel.

What I was referring to is the fact that "My Day" is basically just the "today" screen from Pocket PC (now Windows Mobile). It's the same idea, the same format, and floats on your desktop looking for all the world like you glued your iPaq to the screen.

I would argue that the "My Day" feature has no real utility on a regular desktop as one would tend to have the calendar and email already open and "right there."

As a summary of all your email, contacts appointments, to-dos and calendar appointments "on the go" or on the web it has some use but I don't see this feature as having any real-world functionality beyond being a sort of heads-up display for mobiles. I would bet that in the very near future we are going to be seeing the "My Day" feature, appropriately formatted in Ajax or XML or something so we can "view it at a glance" on our iPhones or better yet...

Windows Mobiles.

 

[AJsAWiz]

I personally can't wait. iWork doesn't cut it for me, and Office, despite being made by Microsoft, is actually a very solid app.

I agree. I also think that including Elements is a great idea

 

[MikeTheC]

I don't know about anyone else, but I, for one, have some questions for the Microsoft MBU guy...

1. Why do you give us Mac users Entourage instead of Outlook? You know the feature gap between the two programs puts Mac-using office workers at a disadvantage.

2. Why have you not put out VB for Mac OS X? You folks have had years and years to do this, but have not. Again, it puts Mac users at a disadvantage.

3. Where is OneNote for Mac OS X? Or a fully-cross-platform compatible PowerPoint? Or FrontPage (sorry, guys, but it is a part of Office). Or Visio? Again, without these apps, in companies which make use of them, Mac users are put at a disadvantage.

Some people like to think that, just because "Office" exists for the Mac, it's a panacea for compatibility, but in a number of instances -- most obviously where we have dependencies as yet unmet due to lack of porting -- we have an imperfect compatibility at best, and a brick wall in the way at worst.

Microsoft is one of the biggest -- and probably the oldest -- developer for Apple's Mac platform. Several of the core Office apps had their start on the Mac. In short, Microsoft has been doing Classic, Carbon and Cocoa coding for a long time, so it seems a bit embarrassing -- at a minimum, though some might describe it as inexcusable -- we don't have the remainder of the Office suite here.

 

[psxndc]

3. Where is OneNote for Mac OS X? Or a fully-cross-platform compatible PowerPoint?

Ding ding ding!! No OneNote == FAIL.

Although, to MS's credit, it did get me to buy Office for Students (to run under parallels). OneNote is a brilliant program. It's a shame more people don't use it/know about it.

Once you realize there is no Ctrl+S, you will see the light.

 

[CWallace]

Office 2007 for Windows takes some getting used to, but once you do, it is nice to have a sense of "commonality" across all the applications.

Adobe's various apps used to be a pain because none of them had a common interface, either, until the latest versions. I am sure those who lived in Photoshop were honked-off when Adobe changed the UI so it was the same as InDesign or Illustrator, but for those of us who use all the applications in Creative Suite, it's nice to only have to learn one UI for all the apps.

From what I have seen, Office 2008 for Mac looks good. It takes the "ribbon" interface for Office 2007 and cleans it up and organizes it better, so hopefully it will be easier for Office v.X and Office 2004 users to adapt to.

While I use a Mac at home, I use Windows everywhere else, so it's easier to stay with Office for cross-platform reasons even if iWorks is as good or even better.

 

[EagerDragon]

Very close to a waste IMHO.

Microsoft removed the macro capabilites, so if you import documents into the Mac that have macros, they do not work. If you convert the macros (some what painful), when you send the file back to windows, the Apple macro features don't work in windows.

If we are instead going to concentrate in being able to move the files back and forth and edit the files, then we are really talking about straight files conversion between the two platforms, so OpenOffice, Neo, iWorks, and others will do the job fine.

iWorks for me, no MS products if I can help it.

 

[bdkennedy1]

As I recall, Office 2004 was slow under it's naitive PPC processor, so you have nothing to talk about, know-it-all.

It took to post 80 before someone finally mentions that this will be a universal binary. Seems that all the complainers don't do any serious work, because they would have mentioned it already.

 

[ct-scan]

Poor Copy

Office 08 looks to be a poor copy of the latest features in iWork 08.

Give in to Pages and Numbers and you won't be disappointed.
And we know that PowerPoint doesn't even hold a candle to Keynote!

If you don't believe the hype...then just download the Trial if iWork 08 for free and see what you think. Don't let your impression of iWork 06 influence you, much has changed and all for the best.

 

[hayesk]

The Ribbon is only a replacement for a badly designed menu bar. Mac users have been using the menu bar for years - yes, that is because most Mac applications put thought into where the menu commands go and the titles of each menu.

Windows menus have been a hodge-podge of commands poorly categorized and poorly ordered. Worse yet, MS had those changing menus where the most used commands would move to the stop. One of the biggest advantages of menus is exploiting muscle memory and MS destroyed that. Consistent and well thought-out placement of menus beats a screen space wasting "ribbon" any day.

 

[Papajohn56]

Anyone saying iWork, iWork isn't as featured when it comes to spreadsheets, and many of us are science and engineering majors that require that sort of thing.

 

[72930]

Looks like there is a new player in the game for a free office suite...

IBM just came out with Windows and Linux versions of Lotus Symphony, with a Mac version planned

 

[benspratling]

What a bag o' ***** website. Took ten minutes to draw the frames then the video freezes after about two seconds. How very Microsoft. Sheesh.

Yes, terrible website.
The office they present in the demos on the website is also not very cool. I didn't think I would, but I actually kind of like the ribbon (runs and ducks for cover under iWork '08, which I already have and use.)

The new mac version of office just looks like microsoft has found yet another way to add another bar and slowly chip away at screen real estate providing stupid, duplicated functionality in a way that nobody will use or expect. (though I like the template dealio's, hey it's just like in iWork!)
Yeay for the iWork '08 Inspector palette!!! (Though I don't like needing a separate font box just to choose a font name!)

 

[spydr]

What a pathetic "preview"?!

They should've done themselves a big favor - by not putting up that crap and calling it a feature preview.

Seems to be a total waste of time.

Anyway, I think,

iWork + NeoOffice ± Google Docs = Goodbye M$

 

[gauchogolfer]

Anyone saying iWork, iWork isn't as featured when it comes to spreadsheets, and many of us are science and engineering majors that require that sort of thing.

Hopefully science and engineering majors aren't using Excel for data analysis either.

 

[packgrad2000]

i rather give my money to steve jobs than bill gates so its iwork for me

Ummm not sure what you mean here. I prefer iWork and Apple just like the rest of us, but it has nothing to do with Steve Jobs. From everything I've read Bill Gates gives way more of his money away than Jobs, and I truly like the guy, nerdy as he is, I just don't like his products.

I only use Excel in Office for Mac now anyways and much prefer iWork (I have 06) when I can use it, especially Pages. One of the ridiculous things about PowerPoint is it doesn't play MPEG-4 or .mov files (unless it's a really old version of Quicktime) I could understand .mov files, but why not MPEG-4???

And count me in as one of those who prefers the Windows version of Office over Office for Mac, even if it is uglier.

 

[kingtj]

In all fairness....

I bought iWork '08 with high hopes for it, and yet I still don't think the "Numbers" application is anywhere NEAR usable for a serious spreadsheet of any type.

As someone else pointed out in a discussion on Ars Technica, Numbers seems more like it's a tool for doing the layout of sequences of numbers, vs. doing a lot of CALCULATION of numbers.

(People putting a lot of calculations into formulas inside it end up with LONG pauses while everything processes, even on a high-end Mac. We're talking stuff you'd get instant results back for if it were done in Lotus 1-2-3 on a 66Mhz PC from over a decade ago!)

It's conceivable they might eventually just roll the whole application into Pages at some point, so creating tables would give you the functionality it has.

Hopefully science and engineering majors aren't using Excel for data analysis either.

 

[nadyne]

I don't know about anyone else, but I, for one, have some questions for the Microsoft MBU guy...

MacBU girl, not guy.

1. Why do you give us Mac users Entourage instead of Outlook? You know the feature gap between the two programs puts Mac-using office workers at a disadvantage.

This question is answered in detail in a post in the Entourage Help Blog: Why did Microsoft replace Outlook for Mac with Entourage? It's a long post, but it's a pretty complete history.

2. Why have you not put out VB for Mac OS X? You folks have had years and years to do this, but have not. Again, it puts Mac users at a disadvantage.

This was a very hard decision for us. It's a technical issue. Porting the code to Intel is a big development hit for us, and would have further delayed Office 2008. We know that this is a big pain point for some of our users. We also know that we need to get a Universal Binary out there. We had to decide whether we should ship Office with VBA later, or Office without VBA earlier. We spent a lot of effort trying to figure out if there was something that we could do to meet both needs in a reasonable timeframe, but we couldn't. If you'd like to learn more details about this decision, one of our lead developers wrote a very long, but very thorough, blog post about it: Saying goodbye to Visual Basic.

To try to address the scripting needs in Office 2008, we have improved our AppleScript support, and we have Automator support forthcoming as well. Additionally, MacTech magazine made a fantastic resource available: their VBA to AppleScript Transition Guide. We know that this doesn't fully solve the problem, but it will help some of our users make a better transition to AppleScript.

3. Where is OneNote for Mac OS X? Or a fully-cross-platform compatible PowerPoint? Or FrontPage (sorry, guys, but it is a part of Office). Or Visio? Again, without these apps, in companies which make use of them, Mac users are put at a disadvantage.

We constantly revisit our Mac application portfolio to determine whether we should add applications to it. For adding new applications, there are three major questions to ask: what user need would the application solve, what other applications are available that might meet the same need, and how difficult is porting the application from the Windows Office team.

As for PowerPoint, we have invested a lot of effort into improving our cross-platform issues. We're well aware of the Red X problem, for example. Cross-platform compatibility is very important to us.

If you guys think you have it bad as a one of a few Mac users in a big Windows organisation, just imagine what life here is like for those of us in MacBU -- there's 180 of us, Microsoft as a whole is over 70,000. I don't think that anyone's in a more Windows-using environment than we are!

Regards,
Nadyne.

 

[nadyne]

Well yeah, I did mean "My Day" which as you note uses OS-X sync services. Using the OS-X sync services however is pretty much a given unless the developers are insane enough to try and re-invent that wheel.

Since Sync Services was only introduced in Tiger, users who are still on older versions (older cats?) don't want to be left without a synchronising solution. That's why Entourage 2004 both has its own solution and added Sync Services support in our second service pack.

What I was referring to is the fact that "My Day" is basically just the "today" screen from Pocket PC (now Windows Mobile). It's the same idea, the same format, and floats on your desktop looking for all the world like you glued your iPaq to the screen.

Ahhh, thank you for explaining that! I misunderstood your first post.

I would argue that the "My Day" feature has no real utility on a regular desktop as one would tend to have the calendar and email already open and "right there."

Well, maybe it's not a feature that you'll find useful. Different strokes for different folks! Other users have found it to be quite useful so far. When we demoed it at Macworld Expo in January, we got a lot of great feedback from people who said that they wanted to use it immediately. Personally, even though I do have Entourage open all the time, not having to re-open it from its minimised state (or get my iPhone out of my purse) to see where my next meeting is located is really quite nice. If you're coming to Macworld this year, swing by our booth and check it out (and say hi to me if you like) to see what you think about it when you've had the chance to see it in action.

Regards,
Nadyne.