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Qucik poll - Favorite Office 2004 thing
- Thread starter OldManJimbo
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
The uninstaller.
I checked out the test drive and put the results on my website. Here's the summary:
I got my hot little hands on a copy of Microsoft Office 2004. You can click the link to see a screenshot of my review and the Word program. If that's too much for you then here's the summary: Office 2004 adds no new useful features, but it does add some gimicky bloat. There is absolutely no reason to upgrade from Office x and few reasons that you'd need to use Microsoft's product in the first place. If you do need it then it's not bad software.
I checked out the test drive and put the results on my website. Here's the summary:
I got my hot little hands on a copy of Microsoft Office 2004. You can click the link to see a screenshot of my review and the Word program. If that's too much for you then here's the summary: Office 2004 adds no new useful features, but it does add some gimicky bloat. There is absolutely no reason to upgrade from Office x and few reasons that you'd need to use Microsoft's product in the first place. If you do need it then it's not bad software.
Notebook View
Really cool... I'm out of school, but for my wife it will be really cool when we ditch her POS Dell and get her an iBook.
Plus, the new transitions on Powerpoint are nice... too bad they don't work on the presentation PCs at my work!!! I guess I'll get to show them off when above mentioned iBook is purchased.
-alywa
Really cool... I'm out of school, but for my wife it will be really cool when we ditch her POS Dell and get her an iBook.
Plus, the new transitions on Powerpoint are nice... too bad they don't work on the presentation PCs at my work!!! I guess I'll get to show them off when above mentioned iBook is purchased.
-alywa
Thanks HorrorTaxi - This is the type of input I'm after. For my money Office X does the trick - lots of file sharing with PC enabled folks - and I was holding off the 2004 switch because I wasn't sure it was worth the hassle.
I appreciate your candor -
I appreciate your candor -
I use the project center a lot, and find it helps me keep better track of the various balls I have to keep juggling
Gotta agree with HorrorTaxi. Perhaps if I used Entourage I'd find some purpose for it. Glad I got it from my University for $8 instead of full price.
Well the only useful feature from that package may be a version of Excel that doesn't crash (doesn't happen heaps, but annoying nonetheless), and the ability to name files with more than 32 characters. This last feature is worth $50 to $100 CDN to me, but I'm not spending $199 Canadian on the student version if nothing else seems valuable to me.
I like the Presenter View in PowerPoint. It's a nice touch.
JOD8FY
P.S. - If you have Office X, however, I do not see any reason to upgrade.
JOD8FY
P.S. - If you have Office X, however, I do not see any reason to upgrade.
Agree with HorrorTaxi. Adds no significent new features, and crashes just as much as with Office v.X for me. If you use Entourage the fully integrated Project Center might be nice but it's not that great. I don't get the point of Notebook view at all, since notetaking went perfectly fine for me in TextEdit or just a plain Word document. The whole notebook page view is silly.
haven't used it yet, but i'm hoping when i get back to school notetaking in word will be worthwhile. i like the idea of being able to record lecture audio while i take notes.
Honestly, there is no reason to go from Office X to Office 2004.
It would be like going from Windows 2000 to Windows XP; just more eye-candy and bloat.
So I'd have to agree with Horrortaxi, the uninstaller.
It would be like going from Windows 2000 to Windows XP; just more eye-candy and bloat.
So I'd have to agree with Horrortaxi, the uninstaller.
MrSugar said:
You can do that for free with VNC. There are free VNC servers and cllients for almost any OS. That's what we use at work.
quackattack said:
That is the single feature that makes me want to buy it. If it works as advertised, it ought to be a god-send for classes. I can see it being most helpful in seminar classes. I've got lots of notes that are only a couple of phrases or sentencea scrawled under the date with no idea of what the context was.
Compatibility Report. I like that it tells me what additional Mac features will not show up with all the different versions on both platforms. And that it preserves the additional features so I don't lose them when they are edited on an old version of Office. Compatibility is the main reason I use Microsoft Office.
Project Center would be a close 2nd best feature for me. I wish Access was available for the Mac. It's nice having all your reports, forms, code, views, and data neatly packed into a single file and be able to use it as a front-end for SQL Server and Oracle and the ability to create nice data driven Word and Excel documents from Access.
The Excel graphics are so much better in Excel 2004.
Project Center would be a close 2nd best feature for me. I wish Access was available for the Mac. It's nice having all your reports, forms, code, views, and data neatly packed into a single file and be able to use it as a front-end for SQL Server and Oracle and the ability to create nice data driven Word and Excel documents from Access.
The Excel graphics are so much better in Excel 2004.
I made it through college (3.5 undergrad GPA) without recording lectures and without even having a computer. Even now that I do take notes on a laptop I'm not sure I see the use in recording lectures (and don't get me started on sound recording in a word processor--people who don't know what we mean by "bloatware", this is a prime example). To me it would just be a distraction--and I never would review the recordings anyway. I barely review notes except to refresh my memory--and it's my memory that gets me through classes.kant said:
However, different people acquire and process information in different ways so what works for me might not work for you. So whatever makes you successful, that's what you should do. Just don't get suckered into spending a lot of money for a gimmick.
got to remeber Horrortaxi hate MS so got to take down his ranting a few pegs.
I never looked at office 04. * i use Office 03 on a PC and it very close to office 04.
From what I read there is no real point to upgrade to it from office X. Same as there is no real point to go from office XP to office 03.
I have used office XP and I moved up to office 03. (Got them both for free though my school). I never really used Access or frount page but as for word, exceal and outlook.... There is noughting really new in them to make it worth moving up. The icons look better but that is about it. If you dont have MS office yet and you want it or need the power of it I say get office 04. There is a lot of stuff for school that it will make you life easier just to have it and it is quite a bit more powerful that appleworks
I never looked at office 04. * i use Office 03 on a PC and it very close to office 04.
From what I read there is no real point to upgrade to it from office X. Same as there is no real point to go from office XP to office 03.
I have used office XP and I moved up to office 03. (Got them both for free though my school). I never really used Access or frount page but as for word, exceal and outlook.... There is noughting really new in them to make it worth moving up. The icons look better but that is about it. If you dont have MS office yet and you want it or need the power of it I say get office 04. There is a lot of stuff for school that it will make you life easier just to have it and it is quite a bit more powerful that appleworks
BornAgainMac said:
Agree. I think project center is great for keeping things together across the different office apps. It will automatically file emails with chosen subjects which is really nice in terms of low maintenance organization. I haven't used compatibility report much yet, but that was one of the reasons i chose office 2004. I go to school on an all Windows campus and some of the classes have handouts and lecture notes available online, it's nice to not have to worry about formatting issues. Open it up and it "just works". Isn't that why most of us choose macs anyhow?
BornAgainMac said:
Here here, I miss Access sorely. I've no use for it anymore, but when I maintain projects that I created years ago I really appreciate how integrated and customisable it is, and the VBA debugger is actually OK.
Hadn't noticed about the Excel graphics, I'll fire it up.
Barefeats benchmarked Office 2004 to be much slower than Office v.X. It's on the "quick tests" page.
AppleMatt
OldManJimbo said:
Well I probably could have gotten away with using Office 2004 as an undergrad, but at this point I found that I just couldn't make do without using Endnotes citation software -- which worked fine with Office v.X, but is irrefutably broken with Office 2004. The answer I got from Endnotes -- "compatibility will be added in a future software version." Great. So for now I'm back using Office X, and to be honest, I'm not feeling like I'm missing anything.
I am annoyed that even in this day and age, they still haven't ironed out the bugs you run into when you try to position a graphic element in a particular place in your text in a Word document. I routinely have had that problem in both Office X AND Office 2004. I don't think you should have to own InDesign or Quark to be able to paste a picture or graph on the page and not have it jump everyone in the document except where you want it.
Speaking of jumping, I'm getting ready to jump the MS Word ship and start writing my documents in some flavor of TeX. I'm still getting used to it, but it definitely already feels like a much more professional alternative.