The Other Office: Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Review

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.