Microsoft Unveils Mac Office 2008 Packages, Pricing

[deadkenny]

Localised to Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. So there will be only four language versions: American English, Dansk, Norsk and Svenska? No German, Francaise, Italiano not to talk about Japanese, Chinese etc.
Microsoft: We suck and if you ain't believe it we'll prove it.

I've heared that Steve Ballmer sais his own kids are stupid like all kids but in one thing he has washed their minds: You don't use Google and you don't use an iPod.

I would love to see his kids come into their puberty shouting at their dad: You know what's important to us? It's iPods, iPods, iPods, iPods.
Or maybe they'll "C'mon dad ALL my friends have a Wii and all I got is this lousy XBox."

 

[jettredmont]

I think Word is made for those writing a Thesis or working on a manuscript for their latest Novel.

Hmm. Actually, on both counts Word is a second-class choice next to specially-purposed alternatives.

For instance, writing a thesis is generally (depending on the discipline of course) better handled by something like TEX (BibTex or LaTex). Writing a manuscript is far better done in Scrivener or Ulysses.

Generally speaking, Word is a multi-function tool that does a million different jobs, and at least a thousand of them passably well. But, if you need tweezers, you don't pack a swiss army knife just because it has tweezers that slip in the side. Everything else just gets in the way.

Word is not for "serious" writing - by which I mean writing which is going to be reshaped and remolded prior to printing. It is for super-light desktop publishing. This is a massive industry, of course, and Microsoft will sell several orders of magnitude more copies of Word than will ever sell of, say, Scrivener. But if I were writing a novel, I know I'd not choose Word to do it (or, for that matter, Pages or OOo's word processing module).

 

[Orng]

I use MS Office at work a lot and it is a very good package - but when I get home I use OpenOffice through X11. It serves me very well and files have always transferred ok between the two platforms.

Office is good but would be simply too expensive for me!

You should try NeoOffice, it's actually OpenOffice but someone has taken the trouble to port it to Cocoa (or some such technolanguage, I don't know) so that it plays nicer with Mac OSX. It's basically OpenOffice with Mac Sensibilities, and no mucking around with X11, and no mucking around with that weird Windows95-esque save dialog.

Failing that, I'm finding Google Docs and Spreadsheets to be pretty good. Well, so far I've only used the spreadsheet to make a MBP vs MB vs iMac feature/price comparison. But hey, it worked.

 

[72930]

I use MS Office at work a lot and it is a very good package - but when I get home I use OpenOffice through X11.

Maybe you know about it and don't want it for some reason, but NeoOffice is an Aqua (read: No X11) port of Open Office

 

[hayesk]

Oh. Right. So I'll need to spend at least £800 then as I do "for profit" work... Hmmm... or just stick iWorks for less than a tenth of that.

Hard choice.

If iWork meets your needs, then you should absolutely use it.

But if you are deciding on price alone, then you are doing yourself a disservice. Office may have a feature that saves you hours of time. If so, Office, even at £800 will quickly pay for itself. Spend money to make money.

Maybe you have already made that evaluation, I don't know. Your post implied that price alone was reason not to use the product.

 

[SiliconAddict]

Thank god for virtualization. Cost: $50ish buck vs a new copy of office. I already own office 2003\Visio\Project which is by far good enough.

 

[Don't panic]

So what functionality am I missing out on using X rather than the newer 2004? X has done everything I have ever thrown at it and more with not a single problem. I really wish the 'document view' was on the main tool bar and not buried under a menu. Other than that, it is great. Having to not verify it or use a key is quite nice as well. I hear only great things about iWork and wouldn't mind using it over having to emulate X on a Intel machine if I ever give up on my Powerbook.

you can costumize the bars, so just put it there.

is there anywhere a feature comparison of X vs 2004 vs 2007?

 

[jettredmont]

Been there, done that. I ditched Word. Why? Because... it kept crashing and losing work on my valuable thesis. Switched to LaTeX. A bit of a learning curve (boy, did I feel geeky "compiling" my thesis) but it made managing the work SO much easier. I could completely focus on my content, one chapter at a time, and it took care of all the formatting for me. Especially the math stuff (equations etc).

If you really want geek thesis-writing cred:

1. Write your thesis in LaTeX
2. Check it in to CVS (or Subversion) to give revision diffs

Beats the pants off Word's "version" and "track changes" features!

In any case, Word's crash-pronedness drove me away from using it for my thesis way back in 1995. All it takes is one hour's work in Equation Editor to go up in a puff of smoke to convince you that Word is not the right choice there. Of course, at the time a Word document could stably hold no more than one equation or picture at a time (add a second object and it would start doing weird things and was likely to corrupt the document file), and the only way around Word's shortcomings were to chain multiple separate Word documents together (one per sub-chapter) and try not to use those silly equations. I imagine Microsoft's improved embedded-object stability by now, but I have had it crash often enough in recent history to not trust it.

 

[VaDor]

I don't care about the price... I will use torrents shop where m$ office is cheap

 

[Roadstar]

Localised to Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. So there will be only four language versions: American English, Dansk, Norsk and Svenska? No German, Francaise, Italiano not to talk about Japanese, Chinese etc.
Microsoft: We suck and if you ain't believe it we'll prove it.

Sigh.

All versions have been further localized to Danish, Finnish & Norwegian (the "Nordic Pack".)

(emphasis mine)

They're just offering the three new languages in addition to the ones they've had this far.

 

[Poll Smoker]

Localised to Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. So there will be only four language versions: American English, Dansk, Norsk and Svenska? No German, Francaise, Italiano not to talk about Japanese, Chinese etc.
Microsoft: We suck and if you ain't believe it we'll prove it.

I've heared that Steve Ballmer sais his own kids are stupid like all kids but in one thing he has washed their minds: You don't use Google and you don't use an iPod.

I would love to see his kids come into their puberty shouting at their dad: You know what's important to us? It's iPods, iPods, iPods, iPods.
Or maybe they'll "C'mon dad ALL my friends have a Wii and all I got is this lousy XBox."

No offense, but are you retarded?

 

[imikem]

I use NeoOffice frequently. MS Office would have to regress to near 6.0 status for your statement to be true. MS have plenty of faults, but a blanket statement like this makes you look like a blind fanboi.

Of course, for a free software suite, Neo is infinitely better.

Rubbish, Neo-Office is 5X better,

 

[johncallen]

NeoOffice works for me. Besides who wants to infect their Mac with MS software anyway?

 

[daveporter]

Of course you can save in previous formats. Use your brain man.

You need to use your brain man...read the post.

What I was talking about was the ability to set the old file formate as the default file format so that I would not have to "save as" or "export" my documents just to have them in the old file format.

Dave

 

[BTW]

I don't know why it is, but I just cannot get excited about Office 2008. Now, if they had a Halo 3 version then I'd jump out of my seat.

 

[rashdown_online]

M$ Office 2008 vs. iWork08

Microsoft are being greddy as usual, obviously iWork 08 doesn't shake them! I think for my needs iWork 08 is fine!

Totally.

I was using Office 2004 for my MBA dissertation, and then with 4 weeks to hand in, I got hold of iWork08; realised how much easier it was to use for my needs and converted the whole document including sheets & graphs and graphics, etc.

A bit risky with a 17k word paper (+ appendix of 200 pages) with 4 weeks to go, but it flew through the document, changes were quick, layouts so much better, adn the document file size dropped BIG time to just over 1.5Mb!

Only bad thing about Pages was no Endnote support. but I took the refs, put them in Numbers and sorted them that way. Worked a treat. iWork08 is very very good. (shame no external data source links, but hey...)

 

[daveporter]

Totally.

I was using Office 2004 for my MBA dissertation, and then with 4 weeks to hand in, I got hold of iWork08; realised how much easier it was to use for my needs and converted the whole document including sheets & graphs and graphics, etc.

A bit risky with a 17k word paper (+ appendix of 200 pages) with 4 weeks to go, but it flew through the document, changes were quick, layouts so much better, adn the document file size dropped BIG time to just over 1.5Mb!

Only bad thing about Pages was no Endnote support. but I took the refs, put them in Numbers and sorted them that way. Worked a treat. iWork08 is very very good. (shame no external data source links, but hey...)

That is a great post and a great testament to Pages.

Did you have charts that required statistical analysis features that were part of your dissertation paper? If so, how did you create them since Numbers does not support error bars, linear regression plots, etc.? Did you use another program to prepare the plots and then import them into Pages? If so, how well did them import?

Thanks for any info you wish to share.

Dave

 

[notjustjay]

Been there. Done that. Pages export works just fine. The layout folks have not reported any problems over the last year .

You've got better luck than I do, then. Whenever I try to export something from iWork into Office, what I get is a document that is, best case, "something doesn't quite look right" or worst case, it doesn't work at all. Sometimes it causes strange things to happen with frames or anchors or whatever, so the converted version is essentially read-only -- change it, and all goes to hell.

I made a nice presentation in Keynote and exported it to PowerPoint, and was horrified. It looked "almost right" but my beautiful transitions became a cheezy mess, the graphics were dithered and lost some of their anti-aliasing effects, and the PowerPoint file was huge because every instance of a graphic seemeded to be converted into a separate bitmap. It was an embarrassment to hand that out. Everyone else said "Eh, good enough" but I lost a lot of pride of ownership -- call me arrogant but I like to think that I can produce work that's a notch better than average (seems to me that's the whole point of Apple products), and this conversion turned it back to average.

I also worry about future compatibility. For an organization I volunteer with, we keep having to reinvent the wheel because previous editions were done in software that's not available to the person currently taking on the task. (We're all volunteers, and sometimes the guy with the great software can't do it this year, so another guy takes on the task but has to make do with what he's got.) Some documents have moved from WordPerfect to Word to MS Publisher to Visio to Pages to AppleWorks and back to Word again as a result, and each time the person has to start from scratch.

I continue to seek out a Windows PC with Publisher to update our yearly forms because I don't relish the work of redoing all the layout in another program (it's just easier to find a PC with Publisher, change '2007' to '2008', save, print, and be done). I don't want to similarly enslave someone else by, say, using Pages to make a slick document, but then force them to seek out a Mac with Pages every time it needs to be updated, or -- worse, in my view -- converting it to a sub-par Word version. Might as well just use Word in the first place and make it look nice to start with, and propagate that.

But, again, everyone works differently.

 

[julianps]

I'm sure it's been said before but...

.. in the kingdom of the blind the one eyed man is king"

Eh?

Okay; in the kingdom of "real work" Office is an essential (a bit like water-cooler gossip and coffee, really) but that is, as all neoffice / openoffice / geffice / myoffice / youroffice / iworkoffice junkies know, only in the world or "real work".

Great that it's now universal, great that it's up to date, great that it comes with functions that excite (can I wangle student pricing?) and annoy (but I'm a student yet need exchange support at college) in equal measure. In-a-nut-shell; long on marketing, short on reasons to buy.

And please (please, please, please; don't ya just lurve dowz buttoms?) ignore Expression Media - MS has totally crudded iVMP and all long-term users are trawling da'web for alternatives.

Keep saying to yourself "but I only really use Entourage and now that there's Action Tracker 1.13 and Leopard [Mail|iCal|Address Book] or Daylite Productivity Suite 3.5 I can't actually remember why".

4 years between upgrades?

No competitors?

Yeah, right....;-))

 

[grappler]

meh. Why pay anything at all for an office package? You can get openoffice or staroffice for free these days. And you can use Google Docs and Spreadsheets or other similar tools online.

I don't even use any of the above, but if for some reason I needed to do an office app type task, I sure as hell am not paying actual money for the software to do it.

If more people thought this way, Microsoft would have a serious problem on their hands...

 

[-hh]

"Buyers of Office 2004 from here on out will be eligible for an upgrade to Office 2008 for only the cost of shipping and handling."

That's one thing Microsoft typically does better than Apple.

Apple does do this with hardware sales just before OS releases, but the problem is that they usually do it "too late" and "too quietly" - - it usually is around only 30 days in advance and then its never a clearly made announcement.

What they both should do is offer to sell you software with a 90 or 120 day free upgrade offer so if anything comes out during that time you are covered. Without this no one buys during the last few moths of an older version.

Exactly right, and this should be a clearly announced Apple policy that applies universally, not a piecemeal 11th hour quiet footnote.

Case in point: Leopard is now (a lot) less than 60 days out, yet there's no 'free upgrade' policy that's been announced.

(shifting gears)

... Excel is by far the best application for it. Now that VB is going away in the mac version, the windows version is king. There really is no substitute

The selective elimination of VB from just the Mac variant is simply another example of how Microsoft strategically hamstrings the Mac OS to prevent it from getting a foothold in the corporate environment. MS-Access is the prioer example.


-hh

 

[ppnkg]

great, this is something I won't be buying - and certainly not if apple make those small necessary improvements to iwork. I really enjoy my msoffice-free life at the moment.

 

[BWhaler]

It's odd, and I certainly am no Microsoft hater--which would be hard to do nowadays anyhow with Apple spitting out flawed products and horrific big company decisions--but I find this release of Office a milestone.

The reason why it is a milestone is because there is a 50/50 chance it may be the first time since I have owned a computer, which is sad and scary long time, that I will not have Microsoft software on it.

I'm not saying it's a sure thing. If I had to guess, this may be the last version I buy because Numbers is just not there yet. Numbers is great, but it is really a 1.0 product, another revision or two (hopefully one iteration, and I'll dump Excel.)

iWork 08 is a fantastic product, and I hope Apple sells a ton of them so they invest even more into the product.

I think competition is good, and I want Microsoft to stick on the Apple platform pushing out great products.

But in a few months, I may find myself without any Microsoft products. Wow...

 

[paulbaker]

I have this notion that this is the last development attempt from the land of Redmond (after this thats it).

Does anyone know if that is true or not?

 

[DakotaGuy]

Correct; they're dropping the silly pretense of the specially priced student and teacher edition. That's why it's called "Home and Student" instead of "Student and Teacher"...

Not sure what to do, personally...$149 is a lot for something that doesn't strike me as a total necessity with all the choices we have.

Scrivener + iWork might be enough for me...

Actually $149 is a pretty good deal when you consider it comes with 3 licenses. I believe that iWork is $79 for only 1 license.