Office 2008 for Mac versions and pricing announced

I'm a recent convert to the Macbook Pro. I still need to be a heavy user of Word and Excel and need to share documents with PC users. Given the prices (and the fact that I have students in my household that will be using these apps as well), is there a reason I would not want to use the office student edition?

I would also like to know when it may be coming out to purchase? I'm getting frustrated with Office 04, it's slow and tends to crash a lot. If anyone has any idea of a release date...please let me know.

ok,ok, i must rip the curtains from your eyes.

iwork is amazing. a wonderful piece of software that I love.

but please, do not say it is cheaper than MS Office, if anything it costs as much if not more!

Office 2004 = 339 on amazon right now

iwork 04 = 80
iwork 05 = 80
iwork 06 = 80
iwork 07 = 80
iwork 08 = 80

this = 400 dollars. so it is not cheaper. if apple offered upgrades, sure, but they do not. if you factor in the student version, you pay for it in 2 years of iwork releases.

with that said, i do not use ms office. I use iwork and I love it. for everything else, theres openoffice and textedit.

but please, hate on office all you want, but do not hate on it because it is so much more than iwork.

Pages, at least the '06 version, has cross compatibility issues with .docs. Which means people working in a mixed environment, where they have to share .docs, really need to spring for Office anyway.

I am a real "power" user of the type of software in MS Office. When I switched to the Mac, I also tried out iWork '06 and I have since updated to iWork '08. I had great expectations for the spreadsheet program Numbers to replace Excel, but unfortunately it does not come close to Excel in almost all respects. However, if you accept that Numbers is in fact NOT supposed to replace Excel, then it is a great program on its own. In summary, here is my summary of MS Office vs iWork & Mac, and I doubt that MS Office '08 will change my views (on a scale of 1 to 10):
Word = 6.0 vs Pages = 9.5 (there are still some bugs in Pages)
PowerPoint = 7.0 vs Keynote = 10.0 (unbeatable)
Excel = 9.5 vs ......... no comparison
.......... vs Numbers = 8.0 (for what it is supposed to do)
Entourage = 7.0 vs Mail = 10.0 (scary unbeatable)

So I just wish I could buy Excel by itself.

"The US versions have been priced at $US170 for Home and Student, $US460 for standard and $US570 for Media Edition. There is currently no price list for Australian customers.

Microsoft is promising customers who purchase the current version of Office between now and February 29, an upgrade to Office 2008 for $27."

quoted from: http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/microsoft-previews-office-2008-for-mac/2007/09/26/1190486364172.html

As a grad student in the natural sciences (chemistry), there is no better friend than EndNote.

Unfortunately, EndNote and Pages (what a joke it is for scientific writing) do not get along.

Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't be caught dead using Powerpoint- its Keynote all the way. And there are plenty of better options for data analysis than *barf* excel for scientists.

The reality is that tiddly-wink opensource stuff is fine for most everyday things and pages is great for making a flyer for your open-mic gig at the local coffee shop, but I can't keep up with hundreds of references over 200 some pages with either of those.

Now, were that ability available in these other alternatives, I'd be all over any of them. But until then, i just got one question: When does it come out and give it to me.

When the new iWork came out, I grabbed the demo. I bought it the next day. It replaced both the old PPC Office I had installed as well as Office 2k7 running in Parallels. Sometimes the import of Office files is a little flakey but all-in-all they aren't big issues. I won't even consider Office 2k8 for Mac unless it gets sub-$100 (it won't).

iWork 08 does more than what I need to do at home. Office 2003 on Win XP is doing the work stuff at work. I'm all set... I've been transferring documents from iWork to Office 2003 just fine for those few times that I have to work on something at home.

Hm the total cost of 3 versions of iWork is still less than the cost of one upgrade for Office, and iWork has been updated each year. It just proves itself to me over and over that deciding not to have Microsoft products on my machine is the right decision.