Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 13th May 2008 20:34 UTC
Features, Office Microsoft has released the first service pack to Microsoft Office:Mac 2008. The company also said that sales of Office:Mac 2008 have "soared", and that it is "selling faster than any previous version of Office for Mac in the past 19 years". Microsoft also had a surprise announcement about Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) support.
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LobalSurgery
Member since:
2006-09-07

I'd attribute the success of Office 2008 to three reasons: Apple's marketshare is up, Intel Mac users have been waiting for a native version, and perhaps most importantly, a true Home/Student version can be found for $130. There was a Student/Teacher edition for Office 2004, but it was technically only for "qualified educational users". Otherwise, I believe it would have cost you around $300. Perhaps iWork's $70 price tag had a positive effect on Microsoft's pricing?

Word 2008 takes about 22 seconds for a cold launch on my dual 2 GHz G5 with 3.5 GB RAM. Subsequent launches take about 10 seconds. By contrast, Word 2004 took about 5 seconds and 2 seconds, respectively. Times for Excel and PowerPoint are similar. Can anyone comment on how fast it is on an Intel Mac?

Activity Monitor shows it taking 0.5 - 1% of CPU cycles at idle. However, it just feels absurdly slow, even when performing simple actions. I think I'm going back to Office 2004, especially since any macros will still work.

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