Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 10th Jan 2007 22:49 UTC
Mac OS X The Mac Macintosh Business Unit announced its intent to deliver the first Universal version of Office for Mac for PowerPC- and Intel-based Macs - Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac. Scheduled to be available in the second half of 2007, Office 2008 for Mac will allow Mac users to work smarter and more efficiently with new and enhanced tools that are simple, intuitive and easily discovered.
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Hope this one's usable
by eMagius on Wed 10th Jan 2007 23:43 UTC
eMagius
Member since:
2005-07-06

Let's be honest--on today's Macs, you're better off running Win-Office 2000/XP/2003 under Parallels than running Mac-Office 2004. Even on the PPC side, Mac-Office is vs. VirtualPC+Win-Office is at best a wash. You shouldn't have to run Windows on your Mac to get work done.

Office 2004 is inexplicably slow and clunky. PowerPoint--the only part I used regularly--was laggardly at opening even small, text-only presentations on my iBook. Add in some diagrams and things went down the toilet. Of course, if you copy-pasted images in Mac Office and then tried to open the resulting files in Win Office, you'd be in for a world of pain. It got so bad that I turned to converting everything to PDF (via Windows PowerPoint+CutePDF or just LaTeX+pdflatex) and using Preview to run the presentations.

With iWork 07 rumored to include a spreadsheet application, MacBU's got some actual competition this time around. Heck, OpenOffice.org is still unbearably slow and ugly, but not so much that Office 2004 is worth its price. I truly hope that MacBU gets their act together with Office 2008 and delivers a quality product that both matches (or exceeds) the usability of Office 2007 and fits with OS X.

RE: Hope this one's usable
by Thom_Holwerda on Thu 11th Jan 2007 00:32 in reply to "Hope this one's usable"
Thom_Holwerda Member since:
2005-06-29

Let's be honest--on today's Macs, you're better off running Win-Office 2000/XP/2003 under Parallels than running Mac-Office 2004.

Uhm, I am honest, and I like Office:Mac 2004 a lot/ It's interface is ten times better than that of the Windows version (and the Office 2007 ribbon is a million times better than both).

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 1

RE: Hope this one's usable
by PowerMacX on Thu 11th Jan 2007 04:39 in reply to "Hope this one's usable"
PowerMacX Member since:
2005-11-06

"Let's be honest--on today's Macs, you're better off running Win-Office 2000/XP/2003 under Parallels than running Mac-Office 2004."

No.

Long answer: It starts up in under 2 seconds on my MacBook, and runs perfectly, even through it is running under Rosetta (PPC emulation). Runin Office 2000/XP/2003 under Parallels involves running WinXP, wasting several hundred MB of RAM and all that while not gaining any interface advantages (the other way around, actually).

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 3

RE: Hope this one's usable
by Bob Slob on Thu 11th Jan 2007 18:10 in reply to "Hope this one's usable"
Bob Slob Member since:
2007-01-11

You should add more RAM to your iBook, and you should have no problem using any of office's functions ;-)

Its not that I'm a big fan of this particulare software, but I have been using it, and so has my girfriend, and we both had success on iBook G4/512 and G4/1.25GB. And some of my files were pretty big.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 1