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

[thejadedmonkey]

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.

Or maybe you're just too ignorant to read the link that Nadyne provided.

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.

QFT.

We all have our opinions. My opinion is that Microsoft is a better company then Apple, because they don't charge an arm and a leg to "buy in", and they don't nickle and dime you for functionality that should be included (Mini-Display port to DVI or Display Port adapter, anyone?)

However, you don't see me making personal attacks to the very people who developed the Mac, do you?

This post was written in Firefox on Windows XP. I would consider myself a recent un-switcher, thanks in part to people like nadyne

 

[paulmoscow]

they don't nickle and dime you for functionality that should be included

Have you ever heard about Client Access Licences? You need to pay for everything twice when using MS Server products. First buying a server itself, later paying for every single client computer. It's a thick layer of caviar on top of MS' bread and butter.

Server operating system products require a Client Access License (CAL) for each user or device that accesses the server software. CALs are version specific. They must be the same version or later than the server software being accessed. CALs permit access to servers licensed by the same entity. They do not permit access to another entity’s licensed servers

Microsoft Windows Server Client Access Licence
Microsoft Exchange Server Client Access Licence
Microsoft SQL Server Client Access Licence
Microsoft Office Live Communications Server Client Access Licence
Microsoft Office Project Server Client Access Licence
Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server Client Access Licence
Microsoft Windows Rights Management Server Client Access Licence

 

[psxguru]

I wish they would fix the record narration bugs in powerpoint

 

[macaliseme]

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.

How do I report a bug: I have my language setup to British English and my locale set to New Zealand and yet in Word the language selected is Australia.

I want Office to respect my language selection and instead use the British Dictionary.

Another annoying this is when I receive documents where it ends up using the dictionary of which the document was constructed with rather than my own - please add a setting so that it overrides the documents setting and instead uses my own preferred dictionary.

 

[Macmel]

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.

Maybe because iWorks is a competitor of Office only on Mac fanboys minds. Maybe because in the real world, outside Cupertino, 99% of computer users actually use Office and not iWorks. Maybe because if people, which in their vast majority want to use Office, find it unusable on Macs, they might consider switching to PC instead of switching to iWorks.
Office is the standard, both in the user and professional worlds. iWorks is absolutely unknown in the PC world (90% of the computers out there, don't forget) and almost unknown in the Mac World (I've been working in science for ten years where, as opposed to real life, more than 50% people use Macs and I have only seen once a presentation made with Keynote. Never ever I have seen a document, or a manuscript writen in Pages nor anyone I know using it. Even journals don't accept text documents in formats other than .doc or .pdf)

 

[MrCrowbar]

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

I'm currently writing a small thesis on it. My only real grips are:
- it doesn't support citations at all (only supports a commercial 3rd party citation library plugin
- Paragraph Styles are buggy. Have to do workarounds to make correct subheadings
- Can't generate Table of Contents for figures, formulas, tables and/or citations.

On the other hand, it handles fonts correctly and style changes are easy to apply to the entire document. Does anyone know a way to export Pages documents into LaTeX files? LaTeX is awesome for theses and books but I haven't found a decent editor yet that doesn't look like an HTML editor. OpenOffice is broken in so many ways it's not even funny anymore...

 

[jc1350]

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.

Unfortunately I leaned about the beta after it was closed. Does "later this year" mean "summer" or does it mean "more of a Christmas present?" I'm soooo waiting for a "real" Exchange client for Mac OS.

The EWS features in the Entourage 2008 update should help a lot (and it will be free according to Macworld magazine)!

 

[aristotle]

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.

Sorry but that is a problem for your team to fix. You are using a depreciated API which is no longer fully supported by newer releases of the OS. There has been a lot of lead time to rewrite your frameworks in Cocoa. If smaller developers can do it, then your developers should be able to as well.

I have a couple questions for you:
1. Are your teams using Agile practices?
2. Do you keep your teams to 10 people or less?

If you are using waterfall development or even trying to develop with teams larger than 10 people then that might be part of your problem right there. I don't see why you should not be able to rewrite smaller portions of your code at a time in short iterations. If some code is difficult to translate into Cocoa, think about a redesign. Sometimes it is better to just throw away code and start from scratch than trying to translate old code to a new API.

 

[iSee]

Sorry but that is a problem for your team to fix. You are using a depreciated API which is no longer fully supported by newer releases of the OS. There has been a lot of lead time to rewrite your frameworks in Cocoa. If smaller developers can do it, then your developers should be able to as well.

I have a couple questions for you:
1. Are your teams using Agile practices?
2. Do you keep your teams to 10 people or less?

If you are using waterfall development or even trying to develop with teams larger than 10 people then that might be part of your problem right there. I don't see why you should not be able to rewrite smaller portions of your code at a time in short iterations. If some code is difficult to translate into Cocoa, think about a redesign. Sometimes it is better to just throw away code and start from scratch than trying to translate old code to a new API.

Wow, this is an amazingly extreme oversimplification of what would be required to port Word to Cocoa.

 

[Tommigun]

Sorry but that is a problem for your team to fix. You are using a depreciated API which is no longer fully supported by newer releases of the OS. There has been a lot of lead time to rewrite your frameworks in Cocoa. If smaller developers can do it, then your developers should be able to as well.

I have a couple questions for you:
1. Are your teams using Agile practices?
2. Do you keep your teams to 10 people or less?

If you are using waterfall development or even trying to develop with teams larger than 10 people then that might be part of your problem right there. I don't see why you should not be able to rewrite smaller portions of your code at a time in short iterations. If some code is difficult to translate into Cocoa, think about a redesign. Sometimes it is better to just throw away code and start from scratch than trying to translate old code to a new API.

Oh thank god! You solved Microsoft's problems! WHY didn't they think about all that earlier?

Great when random Joe on a random forum thinks he knows his stuff better than a very large team of experts.
Get a grip of reality, please.

 

[Biolizard]

Sorry but that is a problem for your team to fix. You are using a depreciated API which is no longer fully supported by newer releases of the OS. There has been a lot of lead time to rewrite your frameworks in Cocoa. If smaller developers can do it, then your developers should be able to as well.

I have a couple questions for you:
1. Are your teams using Agile practices?
2. Do you keep your teams to 10 people or less?

If you are using waterfall development or even trying to develop with teams larger than 10 people then that might be part of your problem right there. I don't see why you should not be able to rewrite smaller portions of your code at a time in short iterations. If some code is difficult to translate into Cocoa, think about a redesign. Sometimes it is better to just throw away code and start from scratch than trying to translate old code to a new API.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!

Welcome to the real world of software development. If it isn't value for money, it doesn't get done.

 

[TheScavenger]

The only complaint I have about 2008 is that it takes too long to load on my early '08 MacBook.

- 320GB 7200 RPM
- 2.4GHz
- 4GB RAM

Not sure what else I can do to speed it up.

 

[nadyne]

The only complaint I have about 2008 is that it takes too long to load on my early '08 MacBook.

Other than making sure you've got the latest and greatest (since we've been continually improving launch time, as well as performance across the board, in the updates), one thing that often improves performance is to disable the WYSIWYG font menu. This especially helps if you've got lots of fonts. You can do this in the Preferences.

Regards,
Nadyne.

 

[Valmor]

Get a SSD and Office will start very fast.

 

[pimentoLoaf]

Downloading update as I write this ...

Though I have automatic update, it's easier to control when it happens ...

 

[Old Muley]

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...

Thanks for the link and advice. I had "monolingualed" my system and was having the same problem too. Just a word to the wise; be sure to follow the instructions in the above linked discussion carefully or else you'll be unsuccessful.

 

[TheScavenger]

Other than making sure you've got the latest and greatest (since we've been continually improving launch time, as well as performance across the board, in the updates), one thing that often improves performance is to disable the WYSIWYG font menu. This especially helps if you've got lots of fonts. You can do this in the Preferences.

Regards,
Nadyne.

thanks for the tip.

 

[bigandy]

As nobody in my organisation uses Spaces, none of us have experienced the issues presented there. It's great to know the real reason why there is an issue though - but doesn't point to entirely being an Apple thing. It's more of a "well you should think about moving your codebase to Cocoa" in place of "Apple should be updating the Spaces code to support Carbon, despite the fact they're getting rid of Carbon APIs".

For us, the main issue with Office 04 and 08 the Exchange support provided. It's always seemed unreliable and flaky, and unfortunately now we're just getting to the point of deciding to deploy iWork across the company when Snow Leopard and Mail.app with Exchange support is delivered.

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.

I couldn't agree with you more. Then again, the general attitude of many users of MacRumors has become progressively less acceptable in recent months.

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)

Office 2007 was a Windows version, not a Mac one.

Wow, this is an amazingly extreme oversimplification of what would be required to port Word to Cocoa.

Absolutely!

 

[goosnarrggh]

Sorry but that is a problem for your team to fix. You are using a depreciated API which is no longer fully supported by newer releases of the OS.

Oh really? Here is Apple's developer reference website for the Carbon Window Manager API. Note that some of the entries listed on this website are marked with a note "Deprecated in Mac OS X v10.5". Also note that none of the entries under the Window Groups category, which is where Microsoft has identified the bug, are marked as deprecated. Therefore it is perfectly reasonable for the developer to proceed under the assumption that Apple will provide support for their use. The onus is on Apple to make its published APIs, not marked as deprecated, work as advertised.

There has been a lot of lead time to rewrite your frameworks in Cocoa. If smaller developers can do it, then your developers should be able to as well.

I have a couple questions for you:
1. Are your teams using Agile practices?
2. Do you keep your teams to 10 people or less?

If you are using waterfall development or even trying to develop with teams larger than 10 people then that might be part of your problem right there. I don't see why you should not be able to rewrite smaller portions of your code at a time in short iterations. If some code is difficult to translate into Cocoa, think about a redesign. Sometimes it is better to just throw away code and start from scratch than trying to translate old code to a new API.

If the only possible solution is to abandon the Carbon API, then I can give you a 100% guarantee that the affected versions of Office in question will never see a hotfix to mitigate this bug, because such a hotfix would essentially boil down to completely rewriting the entire application.

Moving forward, newer releases of Office may migrate to Cocoa in which case they will be unaffected by the bug.

 

[mrkgoo]

I just got done with a presentation in powerpoint and viewing a 300 page document in word. First time I've significant;y used the suite since I moved on from my PPC G4 and Office 2004 for quite some time.

I'm really liking Office 2008. Powerpoint has made leaps to catch up with Keynote (I don't use keynote, so it's probably still not as good as most would say, but it's very easy and straight forward to use). Word is impressive how it can now handle my file with ease. I suppose a dual core intel with 4GB ram helps too.

 

[TheMissingBite]

Can anyone help me out here?

What hardware? No problems on my iMac.

 

[Bye Bye Baby]

Better late than never.

 

[Tonden]

Not for us here in Europe

The trial is not available to European customers!

This is what Customer Support wrote to me:

Dear Customer,

Thank you for contacting the Office for Mac Online Store.

We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you. At this time
the program is only available for U.S customers through our online
store. Please contact Microsoft Support at the link below for further
information on how to purchase Mac for European customers.

URL: http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/Office2008/default.mspx

Thank you, Microsoft.

Tonden

 

[nadyne]

The trial is not available to European customers!

You're right, it's not available outside of the US yet. It's roughly the same reason why the available songs/movies/television shows/applications in the iTunes Store aren't the same in every country. The US has the most Mac users, we didn't want to wait until we got the other countries lined up to get the trial out there.

Regards,
Nadyne.

 

[Bye Bye Baby]

Patch works well.