Microsoft Releases Free Office 2008 Trial and Updates for Office 2008 and 2004

[staccato83]

Same issue as well... ??

EDIT: seems to be monolingual or any other things that tamper with the code... trying a fix from last time here:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/543237/

let you know how it works...

I just found that exact thread and the above fix works.

 

[Kar98]

Switch to iWorks o9

As soon as it becomes usable in the real world, not just for "found puppy" flyers.

 

[iphonematt]

The Spaces issue isn't ours to solve. It's Apple's. We've shown them our code and they can't suggest a complete fix for it. For the deep gory technical details of the problem, check out this blog post from one of our senior developers: risks and rewards.

Regards,
Nadyne.

Well it is somebody's. Most mac apps seem to work with spaces so i would say Microsoft better get their code changed to work with spaces or something. Apple could care less if office works... they have iWork as a competitor so why would they change spaces?
I think this is just a lame excuse from MS to now have to change office.

 

[Aqueus]

I did the update for 2008 today.. got rid of my 'CGBitmapContextGetData : invalid context' issue.. but I'm pretty sure that was addressed in a previous update..

However it opens MS Word documents just as slow as with the errors lol

YAY MS

 

[Shadow]

nadyne, I've said this before to other MacBU people on this forum (I can't remember any specific names), but I'd like to thank you for personally responding and providing support to us. I'm not an Office:Mac user myself (I respectfully prefer iWork and I think that it suits my needs better than Office:Mac), but it's refreshing to find a company that actually (or appears to) care about its users.

Also, will the Spaces issue be fixed in the next version of Office:Mac? What about a native Cocoa version of Office?

Just a few points i would like to rase.

1. When is open document format planned.
2. Will we see performance improvements in load times be a key issue for the next version.
3. When is a messenger public beta due for personal video chatting.

I'd also like to get some answers to these questions. Adium is good, but if the native Mac client has feature-parity with the Windows client (as well as tabbed conversations), I'd switch in an instant.

 

[nadyne]

Can anyone help me out here?

The most likely causes of not being able to update are:
* moving Office 2008 out of the Applications folder
* manually deleting something from the Office 2008 folder
* running an application like Xslimmer or Monolingual

If it's just the first one, you can move it back to Applications and it should be fine. If it's the others, though, the best solution is to uninstall Office and then reinstall it. If your concern is saving disk space, make sure that you do a custom install and only select the items you need.

Just a few points i would like to rase.
When is open document format planned.
Will we see performance improvements in load times be a key issue for the next version.
When is a messenger public beta due for personal video chatting.

I don't have anything to share with regards to ODF support.

Performance is an area that we continually work on, and we've already made huge improvements. Go back and look at the thread here for the 12.1.5 release to check out the reports from others here who installed it and reported seeing better improvements. We've got more in the pipeline. This update was specifically focused on the recent exploits found in Excel, and we wanted to get that out as soon as possible to minimise that.

The public beta for Messenger is coming later this year.

Also, will the Spaces issue be fixed in the next version of Office:Mac? What about a native Cocoa version of Office?

I can't say when Apple might fix their Window Group code to fix the problems that are found in Carbon apps. Cocoa is a part of our future plans. We've got 30 million lines of code, and a lot of other big stuff planned for the next version of Office, so Cocoa isn't going to happen overnight.

Regards,
Nadyne.

 

[Cabbit]

I don't have anything to share with regards to ODF support.

Office is kind of a non starter without support for ODF.

 

[Kar98]

Office is kind of a non starter without support for ODF.

iWork is a non starter without "save as...[common freaking format, especially when the document you opened already WAS in that format]". Instead one has to _export_ every time you want to save something in some of the most common formats of the industry. Yay! 4 clicks instead of one flick of the left hand.

 

[mrtekkid]

Ha Ha, Yeah it's "Apples" fault.... Vista is probably Apple's fault too...

Nah Vista is Bush's fault...

 

[BBCWatcher]

Office Wishlist

Office 2008 has some very annoying limitations within Microsoft's control that I hope get addressed quickly. Here are a couple more:

1. Cannot open password-protected Powerpoint files. Microsoft Office for Windows has supported password-protected Powerpoint files for years, and Microsoft Office 2004 and 2008 can't seem to open them. This is silly: Office incompatible with Office.

2. Office 2008 recently acquired (via a "security" patch) less function: it cannot open certain older formats. (So much for our digital history.) There's a registry setting for Office 2007 that restores the function. What's the hack (at least) for Office 2008? And considering that Office 2008 doesn't even have the VBA engine that could execute "malicious" code, why shut this off anyway? There's no "security" reason whatsoever, and, once again, Microsoft is incompatible with Microsoft.

3. Microsoft needs a Visio viewer for Mac. Why can't Office 2008 import Visio files to include in documents? Microsoft incompatible with Microsoft.

 

[Cabbit]

iWork is a non starter without "save as...[common freaking format, especially when the document you opened already WAS in that format]". Instead one has to _export_ every time you want to save something in some of the most common formats of the industry. Yay! 4 clicks instead of one flick of the left hand.

I have not used iWork to comment on that. In my view i want all of my documents in ODF so if i send a college a document i know that he/she can read it without formating issues and that in the future if someone decides that say .doc is dead long live .docx and tuff luck if you want to open .doc.
When using a open format anyone can use the document is still the same as day one and it will work on any platform without failure. People that can get by on Works will still be able to read and edit these documents just not as well as the ones that choose to buy MS Word for more functionality. There is more to the application than the document; spell checkers, auto complete, automatic document recovery, and mail merge are but a few and though not the best examples good programs will stand out on there own merits they don't need lock ins to ensure they get used.

For the Office developer heres a we wish list.

ODF
Visio
Feature party MSN messanger
WMA/V quicktime plugin for protected media
And i hear some moaning about why Onenote a excellent student product is not available on the most used student platform.

 

[FoxyKaye]

The Spaces issue isn't ours to solve. It's Apple's. We've shown them our code and they can't suggest a complete fix for it. For the deep gory technical details of the problem, check out this blog post from one of our senior developers: risks and rewards.

Regards,
Nadyne.

Too bad this doesn't fix the NO MACROS issue as well, not that M$ was aware this was going to be a problem in 2006 or anything.

Oh wait, the no macros issue will be fixed - by selling us the next version of Office.

Thanks but no-thanks - my entire organization is already moving over to Open Office.

 

[twoodcc]

very glad to see this. should help Office 2008 sales

 

[cguerin]

Entourage EWS Beta

Nadyne

It appears the 12.1.7 update overwrites the Entourage EWS beta. I just tried reinstalling the beta, but it would not install. Any ideas?

 

[nadyne]

It appears the 12.1.7 update overwrites the Entourage EWS beta. I just tried reinstalling the beta, but it would not install. Any ideas?

If you're using the Entourage for Exchange Web Services public beta, you should not install the 12.1.7 update. The beta is tied to 12.1.5. If you go back to the readme that we included with the beta, the first item in there tells you that you can't update. To continue using Entourage EWS, you're going to have to go back to 12.1.5.

Regards,
Nadyne.

 

[SnowLeopard2008]

Nadyne

I haven't updated in awhile so AutoUpdate wanted to download 12.1.0 update. I did and it froze. I force quit and downloaded it again. This time, nothing happened after it finished downloading. I downloaded again. Nothing happened... So far I wasted my time and HDD space and got nothing. Congratulations Microsoft.

I think Microsoft is just too big and slow. They release a trial OVER ONE YEAR after the software release. Have they ever heard of this new technology called expiration? It's based on the principle of time. Go R&D that Microsoft!

I don't really care who's at fault for the Office/Spaces issue. How can Apple be at fault for a product that their "competitor" (Microsoft doesn't even bother competing) developed?

 

[asphyxiafeeling]

WOW you sound Crabby , Maybe you should go work for apple.

how did that sound crabby? they explained the issue and gave a link explaining the details.

 

[Purdin]

Exchange and Task

I was very happy to see Office 2008 as a free trial download because I had been debating on whether or not to purchase it. I upgraded to iWork 09 and I love Numbers but I'm not to fond of Pages. Plus I was looking forward to trying out Entourage and Exchange support. But a huge feature that was missing for me was support for having Task and Notes sync from Exchange to Entourage. If that feature was working, I would buy Office 08 in a heartbeat. I'm currently using a beta version of Plaxo that I got directly from the company to sync tasks from iCal's To-Do list to my PC running Outlook but that's still kind of buggy and was hoping for direct sync'ing with Entourage. Has anyone heard of when this might be coming out?

 

[Tommigun]

You guys are such lambs that it truly blows my mind...

If there is a bug in Apple's API then every application using the buggy functionality will suffer of the same problem. How can you bash Microsoft for stating that the bug is not on their side? Insinuating that Microsoft is wrongfully accusing Apple is just silly.

Microsoft will of course eventually migrate to whatever new APIs Apple is providing, but rewriting applications on the scale of Office is a TREMENDOUS task and will of course warrant it's own revision (just think about the magnitude of the beta testing).

You are such a hostile group that it never ceases to amaze me how companies even bother supporting you. I *love* my iMac, I like checking out the news and occasional postings here, but you are by far the worst community ever.

You surely don't make me feel welcome to the Mac world. Think about that.

 

[yoyomaster]

nice of them to offer it, now...

 

[daneoni]

Some people on here make me ashamed to be a Mac user. Someone from MBU comes to a provide assistance even though they don't have to (try getting your beloved company that doesn't even provide detailed descriptions of its updates to do that) and you jump on him/her and start insulting/bashing...i mean come on!!!

The spaces issue has been beaten to death, i mean do you really think MS wouldn't have fixed it if they could?...seriously?. THINK!

Im not the biggest Microsoft fan but that doesn't warrant unnecessary uninformed/fanboyish attacks either.

 

[TheNorthWaves]

I have been waiting for a spaces fix since day one, but I agree with some of the previous posters that it's nice to at least have someone from the mac bu community who actually hangs around in each macrumors office 08 update thread.

We can all agree that this problem would be solved by now if it were that easy - we've had what, five upgrades? I think they'd have done it by now.

 

[franchex]

Hey, now Word and Excel Load faster than ever before.

Good work Msft!!

 

[nadyne]

I haven't updated in awhile so AutoUpdate wanted to download 12.1.0 update. I did and it froze. I force quit and downloaded it again. This time, nothing happened after it finished downloading. I downloaded again. Nothing happened... So far I wasted my time and HDD space and got nothing. Congratulations Microsoft.

Hmmm, not sure why the auto-updater isn't working for you, assuming you haven't done anything like run Monolingual or Xslimmer. You can always download the updates manually.

But a huge feature that was missing for me was support for having Task and Note sync from Exchange to Entourage

I've got (potentially) good news for you. If you're using Exchange 2007 SP1 RU4 or later, the next version of Entourage will give you task, note, and category sync, as well as a host of other improvements. This version is in beta now, and will hit final release later this year.

Additionally, Safari is going to be a fully supported browser for Outlook Web Access in the next version of Exchange, so you'll get the full experience of OWA when you move to Exchange 2010 -- so now you'll be able to see your tasks and notes there, too.

Regards,
Nadyne.

 

[JAT]

There was a free trial ages ago. It was called Office 2007 Free Trial. It sucked, still on 2004/2003 here. I'll upgrade when there is good reason. (kinda like when Excel/Word 6.0 came out)

That's great news about Safari. Course, I'd still have to get my office to upgrade.