Microsoft has released Office:Mac 2008. “The suite is a major step forward for those who prefer to use the Redmond company’s applications for the Mac platform. Since its last update in 2004, much has changed on the Windows side: this effectively brings Apple customers up to speed.” Ars sat down with the Mac Business Unit at MacWorld.
if you use vbscript you’ll have to convert them to applescript(there’s no vbscript support in office 2008)
Edited 2008-01-16 23:17 UTC
Yes, I can’t believe they asked nothing about this. Just a random chat around a cofee.
I just can’t understand why they didn’t at least port the vba part under rosetta. Emulation of something vital is better than nothing.
It was not ported because VBA is deprecated. It will not be available in Office 2009 for Windows, either.
they are going to use CLR instead (windows only?)
MS and Novell have been doing some work together on Mono and Moonlight, maybe they are planning to leverage that. Mono already runs on the Mac, and supports everything back to Panther
Not so: http://blogs.msdn.com/access/
Check out the entry for the 17th.
This is very good news for me. I have been running Mac Office 2004 on Intel Mac 10.4 by emulations. As a result office has been extremely slow and keep crashinf all the time. I hope that Office 2008 for Intel Mac will be much more stable and faster than the previous Offices’s on Mac.
Edited 2008-01-17 00:06 UTC
Office 2008 (Mac) is a nice program but it will face some stiff competition now. It has dropped visual basic scripting macros and been shuffled around like Office 2007 (PC) – reducing it’s competitive edge. Many users who needed those features will be moving to apps like NeoOffice. Office has improved in the graphics area but iWork still blows it away – so people who find graphics very important will use iWork. And now that iWork has Numbers and it will get Numbers 2 at MacWorld 2009, Office loses it’s excel edge. I doubt this will sell as well as 2004 did (well, it will probably lose Mac market share but the number of macs sold every year has multiplied many fold). Overall nice, but it will face stiff competition.
“and it will get Numbers 2 at MacWorld 2009, Office loses it’s excel edge”
Dream on… No serious user of Excel is going to switch to “Numbers 2”. No wait, Numbers 2 doesn’t even exist. Quit smoking Jobs’ crack rocks!
“I doubt this will sell as well as 2004 did (well, it will probably lose Mac market share but the number of macs sold every year has multiplied many fold). Overall nice, but it will face stiff competition.”
Mac versions of Office represent a tiny percentage of the revenue for Office products. As far as Microsoft is concerned, they have no competition when it comes to Office… Office for Mac will continue to sell well and Mac users will continue to buy it.
I agree. I know quite a few Mac users myself and they are ALL going to upgrade. They didn’t even care about VBA support being dropped.
The question is, how many users actually use VB macro’s to such a degree that Office 2008 will not be a viable upgrade? The simple fact of the matter, yes, there are those who do use VB, but the numbers are few and far between.
No they won’t. NeoOffice feels more sluggish on my Macbook with 2 GHz RAM than Office 2004 running under Rosetta. I can only imagine what Office 2008 is going to do to NeoOffice performance wise.
Well, I suppose that’s what OpenOffice for Mac native is for:
http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/index.html
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Porting_-_Native_…
Of course, when the final version of that will be ready is anyone’s guess….
I’m not that optimistic. OpenOffice isn’t exactly a speed demon on Windows or Linux.
Office 2008 seems to run just fine on my PowerBook G4 1.25Ghz with 768 MB of RAM. Looks rather dashing too.
If by some silver tounged magic I persuaded my boss that we NEEDED macs in the office then that alone would be a feat. Trying to persuade him we didnt need office either would get me a new job :-p
Why must office on mac look better than office on windows??