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

[badlight]

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.

Nadyne, your input on Office for Mac is much appreciated, but the rationale for the restriction of the trial to US users for now is a bit thin. There are more than a few Mac users outside the States, who would appreciate a 30 day trial (though IIRC, the trial version of Office 2007 is for 90 days - is this to punish Mac users, or are they considered better able to assess the product quickly?).

Come on, get your colleagues to let the rest of us try it out!

 

[ravenvii]

I downloaded the Office 2008 trial, but the installer calls itself an update, and required me to put in a serial which I obviously don't have.

Is this download an epic failure or am I doing something wrong?

EDIT: The failure is me - I failed to read. I got it now.

 

[sdsvtdriver]

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

...

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.

Seriously, MS should just tell you arrogant macboys to "GFY" and leave you with consumer level iworks. Why do you people even bother to use MS products then bitch about how crappy they are? Use your iworks or openoffice and hush up.

nadyne is nice enough to interact with everyone directly on YOUR forums. Show her the respect she deserves as a guest on the forums.

on another note...

nadyne, Thanks for the heads up on the Office trial. I will definitely download and evaluate.

 

[mrkgoo]

QFT.

Seriously, MS should just tell you arrogant macboys to "GFY" and leave you with consumer level iworks. Why do you people even bother to use MS products then bitch about how crappy they are? Use your iworks or openoffice and hush up.

nadyne is nice enough to interact with everyone directly on YOUR forums. Show her the respect she deserves as a guest on the forums.

on another note...

nadyne, Thanks for the heads up on the Office trial. I will definitely download and evaluate.

Technically, she is a member of the forum just as much as anyone else. These forums don't belong to us.

Anyway, as stated before, I like Office 2008.

 

[sushi]

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.

Hi Nadyne,

Speaking of availability, why does Microsoft sell Office for Windows in Japan as follows?

Standard --> Word & Excel

Professional --> Word, Excel & PowerPoint

It would be nice to see the same package offered in Japan as in the USA.

 

[Ashka]

Could the Forum Moderators please change the misleading title of this thread to Microsoft Releases Free Office 2008 Trial for the USA ONLY.

At least it will save members from the rest of the World wasting their time and bandwidth reading all the posts only to find out that the trial is NOT available.

 

[stephen55]

iWork is a non starter without "save as...". 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.

First off, iWork09 (Pages09 at least) has a checkbox "Additionally save as ..." in the File/Save dialog box. No export needed. And honestly, I think this is an advantage. Consider:

• With a single click you can additionally save your files in MS Word format, while your original file is untouched and no formatting is ever lost. Disk space is cheap.

compared with the option of "saving" in other formats, including:

• the obligatory warning message about losing formatting when saving in foreign formats
• other warning messages when converting from and to formats
• people ignoring it and complaining that the document looks "weird" after re-opening with iWork 09

I did some computer support as a student. Seriously, there are *dozens* of such error and warning messages hidden in Microsoft Office, depending on what format you save *from* and *to*. And it always confuses users.

I think that this is rather an elegant way of making sure that people won't lose (parts of) their work - plus, as a bonus, saving on warning dialogs.

 

[erratikmind]

Sweet! Didn't know about the 2004 - 11.5.4 update. I'll take it.

 

[Airforcekid]

I perfer iWork thank you!

 

[aristotle]

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

Maybe you should stop flinging poo at other members and listen for once, you might learn something.

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 ([/i]

I don't know where you begin. Someone mentioned CALs already but then there are all of the arbitrarily low storage limits in Exchange which require you to either upgrade to Enterprise or buy an additional license to compress the datastore offline to reclaim space from deleted messages. You have obviously not a developer since you have not priced out MSDN license or the price of developer tools and even VS.NET is missing a lot of debugging functionality found in Apple's free tools. For example, did you know that if you wanted to debug internet functionality in the Windows mobile device emulator that you need a license of Virtual PC to gain access to a virtual network device driver?

 

[ravenvii]

Well after a few days playing with Office 2008 trial, I must say it's not THAT bad. I hear here about how horrible Office 2008 is, and so forth.

But it's not that bad. It renders .doc and .xls files a million times better than iWork does, obviously, and it's not that slow. I do use Spaces, but I don't use it with Office (because of what I hear about all the bugs).

I still prefer to do my work in iWork, but for viewing documents and Excel spreadsheets, it works pretty well.

Now, if you bring out OneNote for Mac, just like OneNote I have on Windows, I'll probably have no choice but to buy Office!

And no, don't give me the "notebook template, how does that compare" crap, I want OneNote!

 

[ruskiwi]

I'd like to see Quick Look integrated with Entourage so that I can peek at attachments instead of opening them. That would be nice.

Also agree that there are too many naive posters throwing out random comments that sound more than just a bit nasty. I thought you had to be at least 13 to use the forums..?

 

[erratikmind]

I perfer iWork thank you!

I have iWork '09, as well. It's a great program. However, Office compliments my day to day with the Word docs, which I exchange with everyone else at work. If it were not for the said, iWork '09 would the the perfect stand alone application. I really would not need much more than that.

 

[Hal1980]

Nadyne thanks for your participation on this forum and your help! It is greatly appreciated.

I do have a strong request/question? Any plans for msft to return vba (I never upgraded 2004 because I need vba) or to return access?

These are vital applications in the finance sector and it makes it extremely difficult to eschew the need of other computers and out of date software to maintain functionality.

Timeframe?

Thanks in advance

 

[nadyne]

Speaking of availability, why does Microsoft sell Office for Windows in Japan as follows?
It would be nice to see the same package offered in Japan as in the USA.

Sorry, but that's never going to be a question that I'll be able to answer with any degree of confidence. I'm completely the wrong person to ask questions about the differences between the various editions that are sold in the various countries. I'm a member of the technical team in MacBU, not the international marketing team for Windows Office, so that's totally outside my area of expertise.

I'd like to see Quick Look integrated with Entourage so that I can peek at attachments instead of opening them. That would be nice.

Since Office 2008 supports both Tiger and Leopard, we didn't include QuickLook support so that we weren't leaving Tiger users out in the cold. Folks tend to complain if Office works differently on Tiger than on Leopard, and there's still quite a lot of Tiger users out there.

I do have a strong request/question? Any plans for msft to return vba (I never upgraded 2004 because I need vba) or to return access?

Yes, we have already announced that VBA is going to return in the next version of Office. I don't have a firm date to share yet for the next version release (and we don't have an official name for it yet either), but we're aiming for a 2-3 year release cycle for that version, and my team is cranking away on it right now. The senior developer working on our VBA support has already given me a demo, so it's coming along swimmingly.

In the interim, you can run Office 2004 and Office 2008 side-by-side. This is useful for the times when you still need to use VBA, but also want to use the new features in Office 2008. Usually when someone cares about VBA, the new Office 2008 feature that they care about the most is "Big Grid" support in Excel, which brings a million rows and 16k columns. I know it's not a perfect solution, but I offer it in case you might find it useful.

Regards,
Nadyne.