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Office 2008 goes 'gold' (RTM)
- Thread starter mwxiao
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No doubt they'll sell zillions of copies, but I am so pleased to be able to say that since the release of iWork 2008, this will be the first version of Office (PC & Mac) that I won't be buying, and this from someone with the original WinWord and DOS Word 3.x and 4.x before that! Bbye Office! 
Office 2008 and Leopard or versus Leopard?
Anybody know if Office 2008 will work OK with Leopard? Or is it likely to suffer from the printing and display problems that some of us are getting with Office 2004 and Leopard?
Anybody know if Office 2008 will work OK with Leopard? Or is it likely to suffer from the printing and display problems that some of us are getting with Office 2004 and Leopard?
For anyone who has ordered the Super Suite upgrade online, how do they verify that you are eligible? I tried to find out by going partially through the order process, but it wants my credit card before saying anything about verification of the required Office 2004 purchase. No, thank you!
The reason I ask is that I recently purchased Office 2004 for only $20 through Microsoft's Home Use Program - it's basically a deal with your employer that lets you buy software for home if you also use it at work. I'm not sure if I'm eligible for the Super Suite deal since this is not a "normal" purchase. (Even if not, presumably it'll show up sometime under the Home Use Program for another $20 - not too shabby.)
It will not. I called Microsoft about that since I was able to get the educational version of Office standard. According to the person I talked to, it actualy must be a retail version.
I didn't have any issues with 2004 in Leopard, but I can also report that I don't have issues with 2008 in it either. I'm sure that MSFT will sort out any 10.5 problems by the time it is released.
I hope 2008 is decent, by which I mean that I hope it works like 2004 only not so dog slow.
If Apple would get off their proprietary high-horse and let reference manager programs interface with Pages, I could get rid of Office all together!
If Apple would get off their proprietary high-horse and let reference manager programs interface with Pages, I could get rid of Office all together!
I disagree. We've deployed Office 2007 to almost three-quarters of our ~8,000 laptops here, and user response has been, by and large, positive. After the initial training bump, people are finding that things flow more naturally in the "ribbon" interface, much more so than in 2003's obtuse barrage of pull-down menus. I've seen this account mirrored in several forums, and it's also worth noting that 2007 is selling at a far more brisk pace than 2003 or 2002. It seems that Microsoft really hit that interface revamp out of the park - a rare accomplishment in software design.
Clearly, the MacBU has the same goal in mind with Office 2008, and what I've seen so far looks promising.
For those of you who are complaining about the auto-numbering and auto bulleting features of Word (I hate them too), you can turn all of that off in the AutoCorrect options.
It works much better that way...
It works much better that way...
For anyone who has ordered the Super Suite upgrade online, how do they verify that you are eligible? I tried to find out by going partially through the order process, but it wants my credit card before saying anything about verification of the required Office 2004 purchase. No, thank you!
The reason I ask is that I recently purchased Office 2004 for only $20 through Microsoft's Home Use Program - it's basically a deal with your employer that lets you buy software for home if you also use it at work. I'm not sure if I'm eligible for the Super Suite deal since this is not a "normal" purchase. (Even if not, presumably it'll show up sometime under the Home Use Program for another $20 - not too shabby.)
After your credit card is processed for the shipping and handling charge (they say it is actually charged upon shipping) you recieve a receipt and instructions.
Your order/eligibility is processed when you send in 1) a copy of the receipt they just printed for the upgrade; 2) a copy of the receipt showing the date and store that you purchased Office 2004 and 3) ORIGINAL box top from Office2004.
Obviously, to be eligible you needed to purchase Office 2004 after Nov 1, 2007.
So I suppose if you don't have a proper receipt or box top you would have a problem with eligibility for the upgrade.
Can't you just turn all those off? I turn them off on every machine I work with and don't have any problems ... See Tools | AutoFormatting in the menus and uncheck everything in the "AutoFormatting" tab of the dialog that comes up (this is 2004, not X, so dialog may be different in X).
Runs too slow? In what fashion? On my iMac it's up and running within 10 seconds. After that, but I confess I'm not working on 100 page docs or heavy Excel macros, it's all smooth sailing.
I think it was just last year the MS MacBU committed to five more years of developing Mac Office. I think there will be at least one more version after 2008..
Runs too slow? In what fashion? On my iMac it's up and running within 10 seconds. After that, but I confess I'm not working on 100 page docs or heavy Excel macros, it's all smooth sailing.
Just to add I have run it with a 250 page document with embedded spreadsheets/images etc and it was fine.
The new office runs it more smoothly and starts up more quickly and uses less system resources, so it is better but the old one is fine for most uses.
I've been using the beta version of Office 2008 for a while, and aside from the fact that it'll crash if a polar bear farts in the Arctic, I really like it. It looks far better than any previous version of Office and is nice and easy to use.
I've had to keep using it past the test end date (Nov. 18) as it would only let me save in the new Office XML formats, trying to save in .doc or .xls would crash the beta.
I've had to keep using it past the test end date (Nov. 18) as it would only let me save in the new Office XML formats, trying to save in .doc or .xls would crash the beta.
Entourage 2008 better...
Entourage 2008 better get with the program. Ever since its release 8 or 9 years ago it has relied on a very old fashioned monolithic approach to data. While it incorporates a Database Utility to rebuild the database, once the database reaches a certain size, and you attempt to rebuild it, it will crash, and leave your database in shambles, meaning all your addresses, e-mails and calendar entries go with it. This all-your-eggs in one basket approach has got to go. My FAQ http://www.macmaps.com/entouragemigration.html helps people move out of that, but it shouldn't even be necessary for people paying money for an e-mail, addressbook, and calendar program that costs more than an operating system which includes all those functions, and be less able to handle large contact lists, and e-mail databases. Every other vendor keeps their files in separate components. Even Microsoft Outlook did. But not Entourage. I hope they learn from this past mistake, and separate the data files for all three again. IM me if you have a copy and can tell me that it has been separated. I'm not touching Office again until they do.
Entourage 2008 better get with the program. Ever since its release 8 or 9 years ago it has relied on a very old fashioned monolithic approach to data. While it incorporates a Database Utility to rebuild the database, once the database reaches a certain size, and you attempt to rebuild it, it will crash, and leave your database in shambles, meaning all your addresses, e-mails and calendar entries go with it. This all-your-eggs in one basket approach has got to go. My FAQ http://www.macmaps.com/entouragemigration.html helps people move out of that, but it shouldn't even be necessary for people paying money for an e-mail, addressbook, and calendar program that costs more than an operating system which includes all those functions, and be less able to handle large contact lists, and e-mail databases. Every other vendor keeps their files in separate components. Even Microsoft Outlook did. But not Entourage. I hope they learn from this past mistake, and separate the data files for all three again. IM me if you have a copy and can tell me that it has been separated. I'm not touching Office again until they do.
Right on man - I'm a huge Mac fanboy I have to say, but I use Bootcamp on my MBP for work, and I have Office 2007 on it. Apart from being a little hungry on the resource side, it is by far the best office suite I have used, especially Outlook - I hope that they can make Office 2008 as good as they have with the 2007 suite - then I can kiss XP goodbye (esp. if they make CorelDraw X4 for the Mac!).
I'm with you, brother. WordPerfect is the best for long and complicated documents. I just wished the fonts rendered better on the Mac though. The whole program looks very Windows 3.1, but I'll put up with anything for stream formatting and WP's ease of use.
My dream would be to have this ported to the Mac and updated for full integration with Mac programs.
Count me in as well. WP simply is a better word processor for long, sophisticated documents. Even its macro and merging capabilities are significantly more potent than Word. I can only assume that the underlying structure of Word do not allow it to cop WordPerfect's more advanced features. Conversely, it looks very unlikely that Corel is up to the task of making a new version for OS X. I may just step backward and switch to Word as a result. Oh well.