Office 2008 Requirements

[wesg]

I'm considering getting Office 2008, and my dad is currently using a PowerMac G5 with Panther. The MS website says Office 2008 requires 10.4.9. Has anyone tried installing Office on Panther? If 2008 won't run at all, I suppose an upgrade to Leopard is in the future.

 

[ColinEC]

I would think it requires 10.4.9 or higher because of the graphic effects it uses.

 

[ksmith80209]

I've found the biggest requirement to be a high tolerance for frustration!

 

[Glenny2lappies]

I'd suggest you don't bother. It's a buggy application that is a huge resource hog and I've heard it brings PowerPCs to their knees.

Use Office 2004 instead. Maybe you could get a second-hand copy off of Ebay.

 

[vanmacguy]

I'd suggest you don't bother. It's a buggy application that is a huge resource hog and I've heard it brings PowerPCs to their knees.

Use Office 2004 instead. Maybe you could get a second-hand copy off of Ebay.

I would have to agree with this statement.

Honestly, I'm running a very current MacBook Pro with lots of memory and word takes nearly 2 minutes to open.

As Glenny said, stick to Office 2004.

Cheers.

 

[ColinEC]

It takes two minutes for Microsoft Word to open on your computer?

The program loads pretty quickly for me, I'm on a first generation Intel iMac.

The program does feel a bit bulky though, it feels like Microsoft discovered how to use 3D effects in Mac OS X and went crazy - adding effects to everything possible.

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There are also alternatives to Office if you really don't want to use the 2004 version, such as NeoOffice.

Another nice word application is Bean; it doesn't have very many features but is lightweight and gets the job done.

 

[vanmacguy]

It takes two minutes for Microsoft Word to open on your computer?

The program loads pretty quickly for me, I'm on a first generation Intel iMac.

The program does feel a bit bulky though, it feels like Microsoft discovered how to use 3D effects in Mac OS X and went crazy - adding effects to everything possible.

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There are also alternatives to Office if you really don't want to use the 2004 version, such as NeoOffice.

Another nice word application is Bean; it doesn't have very many features but is lightweight and gets the job done.

Yeah, almost. And I've disabled the stuff that we can disable, like the template previews and the WYSIWYG font previews. It's a bear on my machine.

 

[wesg]

Thanks for the advice, everyone. The problem is that the Open XML file converter only works for Tiger, and still outputs .RTF instead of .doc.

Looks like we'll have to find another solution until we upgrade to a Mac Pro.

 

[Hmac]

I'm surprised to hear that some people are having trouble with Office 2008.

Well...not surprised, exactly...it is a MicroSoft product. However, I've loaded it onto both my Mac Pro and my 2.4 gig MBP and it runs fine. It's just the default install, and on the MBP Word opens in about 15 seconds (just measured it) if it's not cached, and in about 5 seconds if it is. Very similar for PowerPoint and for Excel. Those times are actually pretty similar to my Intel Mac Pro 3.0 gig quad core with 9 gig RAM.

I've not had any particular problem with the Office suite. I use PowerPoint a lot on both machines for writing the presentations and the MBP gets heavy use for displaying them connected to a projector. Compared to the ThinkPad X40 I was using for that purpose before the MacBook Pro, Office 2008 on these machines runs exceptionally well in my experience.