Office '04 or '08?

[winterdude010]

Hello, in a few weeks I'll be buying one of those shiny new iMacs and I have a quick question. Should I buy Microsoft office 08 or just keep using 04? I still have unused license keys for 04 but am worried about it running slowly due to the fact that it would rely on Rosetta translating for the intel processor. Reviews online are extremely mixed so I'd like to hear some more opinions on whether I should get 08 or not. Thanks!

 

[Disarm]

I am going to be using 04 on the new iMac i am getting. I guess if it causes problems i will get 08, but i don't anticipate any.

 

[KingYaba]

On those new iMacs? Rosetta won't slow down your Office experience. Secondly, before dishing out the cash try OpenOffice and see if you like it.

 

[miles01110]

Get 08. 04 *will* run noticeably slower at times even on the new machine.

 

[HHarm]

Is it normal for '08 to be slow? The MS Office programs start slower than in Windows (and I have a SSD raid0 array!). And simple stuff like copy/paste is often sluggish. It's not terribly slow but not what I would expect considering that everything else on my machine is so snappy.

EDIT: oh right, there's a full thread about this!

 

[Gregg2]

You might want to wait for Office 2010

2008 took away a feature that 2004 has, and 2010 will restore it. I can't remember the acronym, or what it does, as I don't make use of it myself, but many people refused to upgrade to 2008 because of it.

 

[BornAgainMac]

Applying all the patches to '08 helps with performance. Windows version is still the best Office when it comes to speed. Just run under VMWare.

 

[swiftaw]

2008 took away a feature that 2004 has, and 2010 will restore it. I can't remember the acronym, or what it does, as I don't make use of it myself, but many people refused to upgrade to 2008 because of it.

2008 does not have VBA (visual basic) essentially meaning it wont run Macros. I have both 2004 and 2008 installed. 2008 is faster, so I use it for most things but I have 2004 in case I need an excel sheet with macros.