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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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.
Member since:2006-09-21
Member since:2005-07-05
I never bought Office for the Mac because:
I hate Entourage (I've had to help too many people with corrupted email databases).
I like Numbers better than Excel (for what I do with both programs anyway).
I like NeoOffice, Nisus, or Scrivener for documents (depending on my mood).
Keynote kicks PowerPoint's butt all around.
Member since:
2006-01-23
If you consider that MS Office 2004 for Mac was bloated and didn't perform all that well on PowerPC machines for which it was developed, you can imagine how it ran through on-the-fly emulation.
Of course, MS Office 2008 has been selling well.
I wonder if the performance enhancements are truly good or about equal with the so-so job Adobe did. Are PowerPC users seeing increased performance as well? Do the applications actually go to 0.0 % CPU on idle?
Interesting to see that they're reviving VBA on one side. Does this mean that VBA for Windows will be re-written also?