Filed under: Macworld, Enterprise, Education, Software Update
Macworld video: TUAW looks at Microsoft Office 2008
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.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
MorrowLess said 1:16PM on 1-24-2008
The lack of VBA support didn't sink in until I finally got my hands on Excel 2008. Solver is no longer available, which means I can't use Excel 2008 for my MBA statistics class. I guess I'll be reinstalling Excel 2004 or loading up VMware Fusion. My hope is that Microsoft receives enough feedback about this issue and patches it soon.
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unteins said 1:23PM on 1-24-2008
Yup, I have the same issue. Of course, most of the useful Stats plugins don't work on the Mac at all, so I've been using VMWare for my MBA classes.
The bigger issue is, you can share even fewer documents between Macs and PCs now, because the two platforms have even fewer features in common than before.
This is the sort of anti-competitive behavior that Microsoft is famous for. They break the office suite on one OS to force you to buy their OS.
Raghu said 1:54PM on 1-24-2008
I guess this will too late for you guys, but I am just waiting for the suites using Open Document format to either get good enough (feature set-wise) or stabilize.
Right now Lotus Symphony looks promising on the PC side, and they are supposed to launch a Mac version soon. One of the two reason's I am not switching over yet is that it is not very stable now in its Beta 3. The other is as you guys have mentioned, how in-grained Excel (and Office) is in the psyche of American business users.
Greg said 1:23PM on 1-24-2008
I've been using Office 2008 for about a week now, for eight-ish hours a day, primarily in Word and Excel, with some Powerpointing, after upgrading from Office 2003. I'm not impressed.
It's still very unstable, with an average of two crashes, per application, per day. The after-crash recovery feature appears to do absolutely nothing - I have literally never seen it recover any data.
It's very resistant to any sort of multi-tasking - each time I switch away from and then back to any Office app, I get beachball'd. It does not play will with Spaces at all - I've got Word assigned to space four, and every so often it'll just move itself to space one. I'll be writing an email in Mail, which lives in space one, and all of a sudden, boom, here's Word.
The new user interface deserves a post unto itself, and as it has had many, all over the internets, it should suffice to say that whoever designed this will burn in GUI hell for ever and ever and ever.
All said, I would not recommend this as an upgrade for anyone. If I could find my Office 2003 disk, I would probably be downgrading right now.
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Matt said 1:31PM on 1-24-2008
If you found that disk, you might be suprised to find that Office 2003 doesnt run on Mac.
Perhaps you are talking about the POS that is Office 2004?
Greg said 2:08PM on 1-24-2008
That is of course what I meant. As poorly as 2004 ran on Intel systems, at least Word and Excel were more or less stable, and the UI made sense.
DJCarbon43 said 10:57PM on 1-24-2008
lol, if you substitute ass backwards for "made sense" your post might have more truthiness ;)
Word 08 is definitely a step in the right direction UI wise (though for long time users of 04 I don't doubt it'll take some getting used to)
But yes, I agree that the stability is horrible, and I hate that whenever I have word open it decides that IT is the one and only thing worth command tabbing to....
frogbat said 2:39PM on 1-24-2008
i don't use either long enough to have such bad grievances but i do have a few... namely the breaking of expose in tiger on leopard it seems to behave ok and it appears that i can't copy data from word or excel directly into dreamweaver - somethin i have yet to test under leopard
otherwise i can live with lots of the interface quirks since i'm used to dabbling in tonnes of apps i find it not worse than many other guis. would be nice to get rid of the ribbon but what truly irks is the tonne of green on my screen when running excel
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DrWho said 2:48PM on 1-24-2008
I don't think I even want to see what the new UI looks like. Fortunately my office type usage is light and iWork works great for me (and at a fraction of the cost too!)
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Opera said 2:55PM on 1-24-2008
Thank God they took two years to release it, I mean, imagine how bad it could have been.
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Ian said 3:11PM on 1-24-2008
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.
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Podymouth said 3:17PM on 1-24-2008
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.
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dagamer34 said 3:42PM on 1-24-2008
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.
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Nate LaCourse said 10:21PM on 1-24-2008
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.
Stuart said 4:03PM on 1-24-2008
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.
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skyhawkmatthew said 4:08PM on 1-24-2008
... and where have we seen the pre-made ledgers, etc before?
I think it was Numbers last year. :-)
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nadirsh said 12:30AM on 1-25-2008
Does anyone know if docx files are gonna be supported? And will msn finally get a video/sound chatting option as well?
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Fritz Laurel said 5:08PM on 1-24-2008
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
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nsinsinsi said 3:18AM on 1-25-2008
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.
Andy Ruff said 11:57AM on 1-25-2008
@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.