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Office 2008 Compatibility with Lion

M

micb1

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 18, 2008
26
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Has anyone with Office 2008 installed in snow leopard, upgraded to Lion ?

Searching on the internet, it looks like the installer will not work, but if it is already installed that is not an issue.

I also kind of picked up that there might be an issue with Excel 2008 or with opening *.xlsx files.

Can anyone having done the upgrade confirm ?

Thanks !
 
Office 2008 installs just fine on Lion

I read about this too. But actually I did a clean install of Lion and installed Office 2008 from the cd and it worked just like usual. I haven't noticed any big bugs using office (mainly word and excel) yet. Although I'm not using Lion as my primary operating system yet so YMMV

I have noticed that the save as keyboard shortcut in word is gone (because Lion doesn't really do 'save as' anymore) very irritating but easy to fix for office 2008 (you can make your own keyboard shortcuts)

And the pill button that hides the toolbar is also gone but other than that it seems exactly the same as it was on SL
 
Sound promising !

Could you confirm you can open XML files like *.docx or *.xlsx ?

Thanks a lot !
 
I have not purchased Lion due to issues I am hearing about Office 2008 Compatibility. Microsoft found a way to decrease Lion sales at the moment :mad:
 
micb1 said:
Sound promising !

Could you confirm you can open XML files like *.docx or *.xlsx ?

Thanks a lot !
Click to expand...

I don't have too many of this format (I try to keep everything in .doc and .xls so I don't run into issues with compatibility) but I just opened up a simple .xlsx file and it worked fine.
 
I can confirm that it works perfectly fine !

Given your feedback, I went along and updated to Lion (from snow leopard and with Office 2008 installed).

All Microsoft Office Programs work just fine after the switch to Lion and I have no problem opening files of any formats.

:):):):)
 
micb1 said:
I can confirm that it works perfectly fine !

Given your feedback, I went along and updated to Lion (from snow leopard and with Office 2008 installed).

All Microsoft Office Programs work just fine after the switch to Lion and I have no problem opening files of any formats.

:):):):)
Click to expand...

I am going to do the install and will let people know my experience. I going from snow leopard to Office 2008 myself.
 
I am not having any issues with my first generation Aluminum MacBook from 2008 running Lion and Office 2008. I am really happy I made the upgrade because I am personally starting to like the changes and computing has been improved once again by Apple :)
 
micb1 said:
I can confirm that it works perfectly fine !

Given your feedback, I went along and updated to Lion (from snow leopard and with Office 2008 installed).

All Microsoft Office Programs work just fine after the switch to Lion and I have no problem opening files of any formats.

:):):):)
Click to expand...

Thank you, this is exactly the confirmation I needed. Again, thanks.
 
Saturn1217 said:
And the pill button that hides the toolbar is also gone but other than that it seems exactly the same as it was on SL
Click to expand...

I'm using Office 2011, and before the upgrade to Lion I had my toolbar (not ribbon) hidden in Excel. Since they removed the pill button in Lion, I can't figure out how to un-hide it. Anyone?
 
I did a clean install in Lion and then reinstalled Office 2008. Contrary to popular belief, the installer does not seem to be PowerPC only and worked fine. I was using Office 2008 Home and Student Edition (although I intend to update to Office 2011 anyway).
 
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Office 2008 works fine with lion.
 
striatedglutes said:
I'm using Office 2011, and before the upgrade to Lion I had my toolbar (not ribbon) hidden in Excel. Since they removed the pill button in Lion, I can't figure out how to un-hide it. Anyone?
Click to expand...

have you tried

view/toolbars/standard

standard should be checked to view
 
I've seen some problems with Entourage on Lion. I used to have it launch at login, but I think the "resume" feature is causing Entourage to re-open some already open database. After removing Entourage from the login list and launching it manually, I haven't had Entourage crash at startup yet.
 
I had Office 2008 installed on SL before upgrading to Lion. I can confirm that all of my .____x documents are opening up perfectly fine.

When I launched Office '08, I also went through the update process since I hadn't updated the application since June. The update process went perfectly fine as well.
 
Problems with Excel and Lion

My old MacBook pro (upgraded to Snow Leopard) crashed yesterday (but I got it going again with the install CD) . However decided to unpack my Lion Christmas present from last year and set it up.

Yesterday was a bad day! First the Migration Assistant wouldn't find the new MacBook Pro with Lion so I patiently copied all the data with a 8Gb jump stick from one to the other and then installed the applications I needed from the CDs I have and the Internet.

This morning I logged on to check my bank account for which I have a statement in Excel 2008 and found that when I entered a debit the amount showed on the left hand side of the column instead of the right. Then I saw a compatibility warning and rectified the Excel 2004 it said to 2008. After this I saw a "No Issues" message.

I've re formatted all the cells as numbers with 2 zeros and also formatted the date in European style (today = 24/05/12) in the custom area.
I've reinstalled Microsoft Office for Home and Student 2008 and when I tried to use the "1212 Microsoft upgrade" for which I received a message to the effect that it couldn't be installed as Microsoft Office wasn't installed!

I'm not completely stuck as my old MacBook Pro with Snow Leopard is still functioning but it would be great to have everything on one machine and my daughter would be happy to receive the old one too.

Any suggestions will be gratefully received.

Thanks for reading

Garoolgan
 
Last edited:
I've found one Solution and another problem!

Whilst out and running around today I had a brilliant idea! >> I've been using plain old .xls as extensions since I changed over from the Wonderful World of Windows years ago but thought that .xlsx might work and it did!

This evening I went back to my old MacBook Pro and saved my bank account with an .xlsx extension, transferred it with a jump stick to my new Lion MacBook Pro and now it works !

This is good but not all that good because now I must go back and re-save all my Excel spreadsheets as .xlsx onto a jump stick and then copy them onto the Lion MacBook, and I have hundreds of spreadsheets. At least it IS a solution.
----------------------------------
This evening's Lion problem is not being able to scan under Acrobat.
Yesterday I installed Adobe CS3 (the whole lot even though I only use Acrobat and Photoshop) suite onto my MacBook Lion. I can now scan with Photoshop but as soon as the Canon Twain scanning mask comes up in Acrobat it freezes. The only way to get out of this situation is to Force Quit from the Activity Monitor.

I'm almost at the point of taking my MacBook Lion and Leopard and Snow Leopard installation disks to a man "what knows" to have Snow Leopard installed on it.

Does anyone have any ideas for this scanning problem?

Thanks in advance

Garoolgan
 
My suggestion on Excel yesterday doesn't work

Yesterday I said that I'd found a solution to my Excel problem and that it concerned only files saved as .xls. This is only partially correct so I'm still stuck with the Excel problem and the scanning problem.

I'm now going to ring "the man wot knows" to see whether he can bring this Lion machine back to Snow Leopard.
 
Finally I found the Reason Excel wouldn't go in Lion

Two days ago I copied hundreds of Excel files (amongst thousands of others) from a Snow Leopard to a Lion MacBook Pro.

The numbers (amounts) when entered into Excel sheets transferred to Lion jumped to the left of a column like text does and didn't activate formulas etc.

I live in France, (not by choice, but that's another matter) and as an obedient soul, on setting up Microsoft Office I put my address down in France but specified that my preferred language was English.

Microsoft, the eternally helpful Microsoft, then unknown to me proceeded to format my numbers the French way, with a comma (not a dot) between the dollars and the cents on all the spreadsheets that I transferred from Snow Leopard!

My account sheets have very small numbers so as to keep as many columns on the screen as possible and as I'm what most of you guys would call "elderly" (a terrible adjective isn't it?) with slightly diminishing sight so I didn't notice that on the transferred documents the dots had been transformed into commas. On entering new data with dots I created the problem and couldn't work out why for quite some time!

Now you all know about this quirk in the ever (too?) helpful Microsoft and I hope that this little story will help others!

Garoolgan
 
I don't know if this is a stupid question: Can I install Office 2008 from a Snow Leopard machine to my new 2012 MacBook Air (Lion) using the shared DVD drive?

I have tried ten times, but right before the end, some 'software error' message occurs and the Installer quits.

I would just like to know if I'm doing something wrong or if both machines need to be on Lion to do this. Getting so tired of trying.
 
norneDK said:
I don't know if this is a stupid question: Can I install Office 2008 from a Snow Leopard machine to my new 2012 MacBook Air (Lion) using the shared DVD drive?

...
Click to expand...
As described, what you are attempting is software piracy. If you have more than one license, however, then you may use the Office 2008 distribution DVD to install the software on a new machine. Alternately, you may contact Microsoft and request that the license be moved to your new machine after you install the software from the distribution DVD.
 
MisterMe said:
As described, what you are attempting is software piracy. If you have more than one license, however, then you may use the Office 2008 distribution DVD to install the software on a new machine.
Click to expand...

I have my original Office DVD with three licenses - Home and Student Edition. It says it supports up to three Macs per household, so I hope to find a solution to make it work. So far no luck.
 
Update: It turns out that all my installation problems were because of a network error with the Wi-Fi and drops in the connection. I now have both iWork and Office on my new MBA, what a relief.
 
Here's something interesting I discovered. I have Office2008 which permits an install on one desktop and one laptop (not to be used simultaneously). In the course of setting up a new desktop with a fresh install of Lion and Office (a new MacMini, to replace my iMac), I had both machines set up on my desk. My old machine is to be wiped and sold.

My plan was to open Excel on both machines so I could compare settings as I set up the new one (not necessarily to duplicate the settings, but to learn from experience and improve as well). As soon as Excel opened on the second machine, Office immediately puked and said two copies were running on the same network at the same time, against the license. I had no idea they had that kind of detection built into the program. I wonder what mechanism they used to accomplish that.

At any rate, I just unplugged the old machine from the network and continued on with setting up the new from the old.

Here is the sequence of the install I have used now on three fresh Lion installs (old desktop, laptop and now new desktop), starting first with the install media:

Office2008Install.jpg

Most (if not all) of those updates are non-cumulative, meaning you have to do them pretty much in sequence.
 
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