The Other Office: Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Review
by Ryan Smith on February 5, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Mac
Closing Thoughts
So how does Office 2008 for Mac stack up in the end? As we stated when we started off this review, its components are now universal applications and that alone will sell the suite to the number of users who have purchased an Intel Mac in the last two years. Just the lack of Rosetta translation makes it a much better experience.
But how about for those users that can bear Rosetta, or those still on PowerPC, or even just as an academic exercise where Office 2004 and Office 2008 are comparable in speed and the difference comes down to features? Office 2008 isn’t a must-have upgrade, but as we’ve seen it’s more than capable of standing on its own.
The key to maximizing what Office 2008 is capable of is using it for more than the bare essentials. If all you do is the most basic of word processing, the simplest of spreadsheets, and the flattest of presentations, then you’re going to struggle to find much value in Office 2008. But once we begin talking about expanding functionality and improving usability is when Office 2008 begins to shine.
For home users in particular, Office 2008 is a massive set up. Word’s page layout features finally make it practical to put together documents more advanced than simple write-ups and the bibliography tools will be a boon to students. Similarly the graphical upgrades to Excel’s charts and to PowerPoint’s artwork will prove to be beneficial to those same groups. And Microsoft has found a solid feature to add to the whole suite with the element gallery, the various elements compliment their respective programs well and the ribbon has transitioned well to the Mac.
For business users the case is a bit different. Entourage is still hobbled by lacking functionality and old age, it’s much improved over past incarnations which will make Exchange users happy, but there’s still no reason to use it over Apple’s software if you aren’t using Exchange. Business users will have a harder time swallowing the rest of Office, many of the features we praise for home use aren’t notable for businesses, with PowerPoint being the only application outside of Entourage that has received an appreciable improvement for business users. And the lack of VBA support makes Excel makes Office 2008 impossible to recommend for mixed-environment businesses making heavy use of VBA. For those groups they will be in a pickle, Office 2008 adds OOXML support which is critical for maintaining parity with Office 2007, but the loss of VBA is painful. Those in the pickle will have a hard choice.
If nothing else everyone will appreciate the improvements to the GUIs of the Office 2008 components. Aqua is gone which is nice, the GUI has been streamlined and made more Mac-like, which is even better. It’s not a massive difference, but Office 2008 is definitely easier to use thanks to the cleaner GUI.
Ultimately Microsoft could have just made an Intel edition of Office 2004 and slapped the Office 2008 name on to it and still managed to move a great deal of copies, but they didn’t. Most users, business and home alike, will find something they like in Office 2008. Apple meanwhile still has an appreciable footing against Office 2008 with their iWork suite, but for now Microsoft has more than caught up and will continue to be secure in their de-facto position for office suites.
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Rankin - Monday, February 11, 2008 - link
Does anyone know the performance of Word '08 and Endnote? About 6 people in my office are running Word '04 (v. 11.3.8) and Endnote X02 with OSX 10.4.11 and the response is terrible. On any document with Endnote references, the CPU jumps to 100% and pretty much stays there, with the fan screaming away, until it's minimised for >5mins or closed. This is totally unacceptable - it makes it impossible to even scroll through documents. Apple tech support just shrug (they can't say if it will be rectified with no emulation), Leopard doesn't help and we can't change from Endnote because all our PhD references are in there.Don't suppose I can convince anyone to do some tests on this to add to the review?
Gandalf90125 - Saturday, February 9, 2008 - link
"iWork is ... leaps and bounds better ... enough so that for the first time ever Microsoft has some real competition for office suites on the Mac."This is a silly comment. I don't think you are aware of Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect for Macintosh. In the early to mid-1990s, both products were excellent and were serious challengers to Microsoft's offerings. In fact, when 1-2-3 was released, Excel (version 2.2 at the time) was clearly inferior to it. I don't mean to denigrate you or your review, but I think you ought not to make such comments unless you are familiar with the history of Macintosh business applications, a history that goes back almost 25 years.
Now, I expect that I will be challenged or flamed over this on the grounds that 1-2-3 and WordPerfect never constituted an actual "Suite", but that's just semantic baloney. Word processing and electronic spreadsheets have always been the workhorses of business software applications.
strikeback03 - Thursday, February 7, 2008 - link
These figures are great, esp. implying a connection between global warming and pirates. I'd guess the pirates being outrun by cruise ships is a bigger problem for them thoughhttp://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/africa/11/05/somalia...">http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/africa/11/05/somalia...
hiromizu - Wednesday, February 6, 2008 - link
There's no mention of this important feature of remote Exchange/Outlook integration.Yawgm0th - Wednesday, February 6, 2008 - link
The article talks quite a bit about business use and how certain features (caused by lack of VBA support) are missing, mostly from Excel. This seems like a moot point, or at least the point that some of the missing features should not affect more than a few dozen -- if that many -- potential end-users of Office 2008 for Mac.What kind of business uses a Mac for accounting or a similar function based around Excel spreadsheets? I mean, one could make the argument that few business use a Mac in any function that will have use for Office, but Excel is a big stretch. No business hoping to profit would justify the cost of a Mac for use with Excel.
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, February 6, 2008 - link
One of my jobs prior to working for AnandTech was IT at a company using Macs near-exclusively (as exclusive as they could be, anyhow). You would be terrified what these people did with Excel spreadsheets and VBA, there were certainly better ways to do it but it was quite literally a matter of the whole thing having built out of Excel over the years.And this company isn't alone.
There will be plenty of Excel-addicted accountants reeling from the loss of VBA, for this you can take my word.
Pirks - Wednesday, February 6, 2008 - link
doh, no biggie - they can just replace expensive macs with cheap office dell pcs and get all their loved vba back in the business, while saving money on expensive apple hardware at the same timeOmega215D - Tuesday, February 5, 2008 - link
Any chance of this office version being updated to be more like Office 2007 on Windows? I just bought the Office 2008 Home and Student and also have a Office 2007 but couldn't get an OEM of Windows Vista without having a processor, RAM or motherboard included in the purchase. So no BootCamp for now.slashbinslashbash - Wednesday, February 6, 2008 - link
I really doubt it. I mean, look how long it took for MS to update Office for Mac to Universal. Also, MS tends to release the Mac version a year after the PC version (Mac Office 98, 2001, 2004, 2008 vs. Windows Office 97, 2000, 2003, 2007) so I doubt we'll see any new Office releases for Mac for another 3-4 years, and there's no way they'll make major updates available between releases. In the past the only updates have been due to security and stability issues, and also to add compatibility with the new .docx/.xlsx/.pptx file types. In other words, nothing major.Personally, I'm just happy that there's finally a Universal version available, and they made the cheaper "Home and Student" version. The UI updates are handy, but hardly impressive IMO.
halfeatenfish - Tuesday, February 5, 2008 - link
"The other new layout in Word is the Notebook Layout, which turns Word in to a notebook. It’s an interesting concept in theory, and if we had a tablet Mac perhaps we could put it to use, but as it stands right now we’re not sure why Microsoft added it. It’s not a page layout feature, and we can’t find much use for it on its own."Notebook layout first appeared in Word 2004. It's actually very handy for doing outlines. Think of it like a stripped down and basic OmniOutliner...