Skip to Content

Macworld video: TUAW looks at Microsoft Office 2008

by Victor Agreda, Jr. Jan 24th 2008 at 1:00PM



If you do any work in Office you've probably been waiting for the latest update for a couple of years now. Especially if you're on an Intel machine or have struggled with Entourage's funky interface (or is that just me?). Last week Microsoft released Office 2008 for the Mac, and it's a doozy of an update. Being a universal binary is really the least of the changes. This is a complete overhaul, with a ton of UI changes and workflow improvements. Amanda Lefebvre takes us on a whirlwind tour of some new features, and explains the difference between the three different editions of Office.

View Tags
 

Add a Comment

Sign in »
*0 / 3000 Character Maximum

22 Comments

Filter by:
ryan

also, I can't seem to get the custom dictionary to work. That is really annoying.

February 14 2008 at 7:02 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
ryan

The autorecovery does not auto recover anything. But it does autosave every 10 minutes. I was able to locate my lost document with spotlight very quickly by searching "recovery". Not that surprisingly, it was located under my username>documents> Microsoft User Data>Office 2008 AutoRecovery.

If I still had my old office disks, I would downgrade as well. Everything everyone said about it above is true. It is very glitchy in spaces, enough so that I had to quit using spaces. So far I can't see anything good about it. I would have expected it to be pasted on my Intel, I would say it is actually a bit slower. Most notably when cutting and pasting. You can't tab around it easily.

I would hold out until they make some nice patches for it. I am college, and I am terrified of using as of recently....

February 14 2008 at 6:58 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Fritz Laurel

To those who have Office '08, please tell me about Entourage.

Is it "better?" Does it beachball? I use Entourage 2004 constantly, but since it's not intel native, it sucks the life out of everything.

If Entourage '08 is "better," I'll consider upgrading just for that.

Thanks,
FL

January 24 2008 at 5:08 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
2 replies to Fritz Laurel's comment
nsinsinsi

Entourage 2008 is better than 2004, but it's still disappointing mess for those of us in Exchange-based corporate environments. I just wish MS would do Outlook for the Mac and kill this malformed piece of crap.

Some detail:

- It's faster, and yes it works and behaves better than 2004. Keep in mind though, E2004 is one sorry piece of Mac software.
- It still chugs and pauses every now and then, and has weird expose/spaces behavior. it's not Cocoa, and it shows.
- Slightly improved UI from 2004, but still riddled with issues. For example, the "My Day" window makes little sense, is not configurable at all, and simply put, should be a widget. Email preview pop ups are poorly designed and only display email title instead of a real preview like the Win version does. Alerts window is nice though.
- Another lousy UI artifact is that you can't permanently open the Calendar in a separate window, and switching between mail and calendar takes ages (sometimes up to a minute). Stupid. Windows version can do this.
- The REALLY big issue is this though: it's a second-class citizen in corporate Exchange servers. It will still not sync notes or tasks, which is vital to a lot of workflows. It doesn't seem to be able to sync email on the fly like the Win version does, but rather has to download everything locally and actively - it took 5 hours to download my corporate email when I first set it up, and it will only download emails on a specified period (i.e. every 5 minutes) instead of the instant-push of the Win version. Frustratingly, it refuses to check email unless it's dictated by that period, so everyone in our company has had to set the period to 1 minute - stupid. It's generally finnicky with downloading email. Also, it doesn't allow booking of facilities in the corporate schedule.
- Another big issue: it's very dumb about links. We routinely send network share links over email to each other, and those are of course on a windows network. These links can't be opened on the Mac, and Entourage makes zero effort to make this possible, which it absolutely should.

Still waiting for a decent version of this thing, or better yet, kill this thing dead and make a real Outlook 2007 for the Mac. In the meantime, I'm forced to keep VMWare at hand for Outlook emergencies.

January 25 2008 at 3:17 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Andy Ruff

@nsinsini

- My Day is not a widget because in doing testing we actually heard from users not to make it a widget. Why? Because My Day is about getting your work done--whereas when we had it in widgets, it suddenly competed with a whole number of distractions and lowered user productivity. My Day is configurable as well, press the Preferences button.

- You can get an e-mail preview in the new mail notification, check your Notifications preference in Entourage.


- You can do this, just hold down on the "Calendar" button in the view switcher and select "Open Calendar in New Window"

- Entourage doesn't sync on a schedule--it is "on the fly." The Send/Receive schedule has nothing to do with Exchange. Changing it to 1 minute has no impact on Exchange sync. Entourage's Exchange sync mechanism is nearly identical to Outlook's. Ther server sends a UDP packet to Entourage telling it to update when new mail is waiting. If UDP is blocked, then Entourage will automatically check every minute for changes.

January 25 2008 at 11:56 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
nadirsh

Does anyone know if docx files are gonna be supported? And will msn finally get a video/sound chatting option as well?

January 24 2008 at 4:09 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
skyhawkmatthew

... and where have we seen the pre-made ledgers, etc before?

I think it was Numbers last year. :-)

January 24 2008 at 4:04 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Stuart

I'm not sure why nobody can make a decent office suite for Mac, but that this isn't. Have been test-driving it for the past few days and find it as worthless as 2004. Office 2003 for XP is a refined and useful tool, and both 2007 for PC and 2008 for Mac are a bit less useful. 2007 has is nicer looking out the gate, but the ribbons are useless. 2008 relies on those mutlitab toolbars which are awful. Also, why does the mac Excel default to paged view? Does anybody ever use that view?

I'll stick w/ 2003, thank you very much.

January 24 2008 at 4:02 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
dagamer34

Office 2008 and Spaces do not play nicely together. When you tab to another space, the documents window likes to either follow you or completely disappear.

Many bugs indeed.

January 24 2008 at 3:41 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to dagamer34's comment
nate

Ditto here. How the does a bug this obvious and asinine make it past QA into a shipping release? I mean I'm not surprised, but every other application I've used on Leopard has played fine with Spaces -- including a few Jaguar-era sundries. Ridiculous.

January 24 2008 at 9:15 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Podymouth

I have leopard, and this makes expose act, for lack of a word, retarded. Yes it will switch to the window you click while expose is activated, but another window will be highlighted, or no window at all will be highlighted. (This is especially bad in notebook view) This has been a problem since the beta.

MS definitely has us students pissed, as this did not happen in 2004, and I would definitely go back if it were not for the fact that entourage actually runs decent in 2008.

January 24 2008 at 3:16 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Ian

For more details on VBA being dropped thus the resultant removal of analysis toolpak etc: http://www.schwieb.com/blog/2006/08/08/saying-goodbye-to-visual-basic/

Basically, they chose to focus resources elsewhere as getting VBA intel friendly was technically challenging. But hey folks, Vista + 2007 will run your VBA add-ins just fine! This will hammer a pretty large nail in the coffin for Mac adoption in the Corporate world, mission accomplished...

For normal users, actually the Applescript interface is pretty nice, more Macish than VBA ever was. You can read more here at www.microsoft.com/mac/developers

If you need to do statistics in Excel 2008:
http://www.coventry.ac.uk/ec/~nhunt/oatbran/
http://www.deakin.edu.au/~rodneyc/XLSTATS.HTM

And for those who are stung by the fact Endnote is not working in Word 2008; Bookends by Sonny software has recently added full compatibility with 2008, and is a much better reference manager to boot!

Yikes, quite a lot broken. By the way Office 2008 also installs lots of duplicate fonts which you may want to clean up (Linotype FontexplorerX will help here). And startup times are still pretty sluggish even on Intel. Sigh.

January 24 2008 at 3:08 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Opera

Thank God they took two years to release it, I mean, imagine how bad it could have been.

January 24 2008 at 2:54 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Buy an ad here

Hot Apps on TUAW

Tweets

© 2012 AOL Inc. All Rights Reserved.