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- Format: DVD
- Developer: Microsoft
- Minimum Requirements: 500MHz PowerPC G4 or Intel processor, Mac os X v10.4.9, 512MB RAM, 1.5GB hard disk space, DVD drive, 1024x768 display, Internet access (for Entourage and certain features)
- Processor Compatibility: Universal
- Retail Price: Student version: $149.95, Office version: $399.95, w/ Expression Media: $499.95. (Please note download discounts and upgrade prices at Microsoft's website.)
- Availability: Out now
- Version Reviewed: 12.1
As you probably have heard by now, Microsoft (via the Mac BU (Macintosh Business Unit)) has a new version of Office 2008, with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Entourage, and (what once was iView) the newly renamed Expression Media. Probably the biggest and most long-standing complaint against the Office programs has been that they suffer from software bloat, generating comments such as "more program than anyone needs or wants," "takes too long to learn," "one only uses a fragment of the program," etc. Well, not surprisingly, the bloat is still there, but Microsoft is doing what it can to make the program more "find-able," easier to use, and less overwhelming. They succeed in some areas, not so much in others. As far as upgrading, the answer may depend on how much of a power user you are, with the ironic twist that the better you are with the program, the greater the chance you will not want to upgrade. More on that later.
Mac users have always had a strange relationship with Microsoft. Despite the emotions, business is business, and the Mac BU is one of the largest developers of Macintosh software outside of Apple. Whether Microsoft likes the Mac or not is not the point: creating and selling Mac software makes Microsoft money, and having Office available on the Mac lets Macs enter business markets that would not otherwise consider having any computer that doesn't use the "industry standard" in their doors. It is a symbiotic relationship.
There are two big issues with Office 2008: a new document format and the loss of Visual Basic. The former will affect just about everybody, while the latter will only affect a limited number of users. I'll deal with the latter first because this is a major deal breaker to those who use this tool.
Let me say that I've never used VB, but I've seen enough clamoring on the web to know this is a major loss. Enough of a big deal that since I started writing this review, Microsoft has backtracked on this issue...partly. It has been confirmed that the next version of Office for the Mac will have VB replaced. That's the good news. The bad news is that this release will not have VB.
Instead of VB for this release, Microsoft has improved their capabilities with AppleScript and Apple's Automator. Unfortunately, neither can approach the level of control provided by VB. Regardless, for those who wish to try Office 2008, I did find a VBA to Applescript Transition Guide from MacTech.
The other issue that will effect EVERYBODY is that Microsoft has changed the document format type. From what I understand, this change was driven by government desires for a global XML formatting in all documents. I have no way to verify this explanation, but for those of you who share documents with Windows users (who are using Office 2007) have already had the situation where you cannot open a document saved in the new ".docx" suffix. Now, we Mac users can share in the fun of sending Word, PowerPoint (.pptx), and Excel (.xlsx) documents to friends and co-workers who will be unable open these documents in earlier versions of Office. Fortunately, not only can we save documents in the earlier ".doc" format, we can also make this our default format.
However, be advised that some of the new features of Office 2008, such as themes, can only be accessed if the document maintains its XML format. If you save the document in the legacy format, this functionality will be removed.
Additional good news is that either format (the legacy format or the new XML format) can be opened by Apple's iWork programs: Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, although any special functions available within Office will not likely be available from within iWork.
Installing Office 2008 is fairly straightforward, with options of new fonts and other items. Unfortunately, like Adobe and many other programs that provide a new collection of fonts, the installer places the fonts directly into the system instead of providing the user an option for placing the fonts in a folder at a location of the user's choice. This is a big issue for users of font management programs that software developers fail to appreciate.
One option of note is something that's becoming more common amongst "big" programs, and that's feedback options. More specifically, agreeing to this option lets (in this case) Microsoft see how you are using their software, and could potentially provide them guidance on how to improve the user interface and other dynamics of the program. This is defaulted to not share this data with Microsoft, and is entirely an Opt-in feature. Whatever you decide, you can change your mind at any time. Considering how much we are observed behind our back by our credit card purchases, Google/Yahoo searches, TiVo dynamics, and NSA/government investigations, your feeling about this might be "enough is enough," or "what the hell." Either way, the choice and option is yours, I'm just letting you know you will be asked.
Probably the most important and least obvious new feature with Office 2008 is that it is now a universal binary. That means that it is now running native on Intel Macs. Surprisingly, there is not all that much obvious difference one might see when exploring this issue. Both Office X and Office 2004 ran quite well on Intel Macs or Tiger or Leopard. Programs from within Office 2008 varied as to how fast they open compared to Office 2004. Generally, what I found was that 2008 opened within half to one-third the time that Office 2008 did, with the exception of Word; that took about two times longer to open than 2004.
One change that shows up in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint is a new document appearance. There are two ways in the world of software to present a document within a program: SDI and MDI. That stands for "Single Document Interface" and "Multi Document Interface." What it refers to is when you open a document, if each document has its own controls and interface as part of the document window, than it is SDI. If you open a document and the top of the document has no controls (with exception of things such as rulers and other directly related dynamics) than you have an MDI interface. Office now provides \an SDI throughout. This is similar to Acrobat. I'm not a big fan of SDI, but industry is moving strongly in that direction and this lowly reviewer is not likely to change the current industry tide. I'm trying to get over it, I suggest you do to.
As a comparison, check out the menus and top of a page in Word 2004...
...and compare that to the top of a Word 2008 document.
The thing to focus on is the location of Apple's document dots and the ruler. Notice also where the word "Document1" is located. What this shows is that the top part of the document now contains all the stuff that used to be in its own separate control strip. This means that for any given document there is always going to be a loss of screen space. It's gone. You can't compress or shrink it, you can't get it back...it is gone. We must move on.
Another new feature for Word, PowerPoint, and Excel can be seen on the series of tabs just above the ruler in the image above. This region is known as the "Elements Gallery." The ones that are consistent across all three applications are the last three: Charts, SmartArt Graphics, and WordArt. The other items in the image above (Document Elements & Quick Tables) are only in Word, and likewise, Excel and PowerPoint also have their own custom tabs. I will detail what's in these regions in each of the respective programs.
When you click on Charts, you are brought into Excel. If you don't happen to have any data currently available, Excel creates some data for you to play with. Strange, but rather convenient. Regardless, there are 73 different charting layouts from which to chose. You can either skim through all of them or look at just the line, pie, bar, doughnut, etc. types of charts. Notice how the region of the Elements Gallery increased in size to show you thumbnails of the various chart types.
In addition, when you click on a chart, if you already have the Formatting Palette open, the Chart Style option opens, letting you easily chose color options. One of my pleasant surprises in the selections was the grayscale option. If you know you are not going to be printing to a color printer, you will get better results pre-formatting any image in grayscale from the beginning as colors often do not automatically convert to good grayscale.
My only disappointment with this is that there is no way to "see" which graph option you have selected, nor can you have a chart selected on your document and have any indication in the chart region which chart was used (for example, such as a bold line around the chart type selected. The reason for such a simple thing is that there is no way to easily tell people to please use "line-art chart #3" or the like. As it is, the only way to state which chart to use (if there is a need for people to use a specific chart) is to say something like: "Use the 4th line chart from the left when line charts are selected." Rather cumbersome, and not very precise.
The SmartArt options are for anyone who's been in an office and needs to display organizational details, processes, stacking order—things of that nature. When you select a display, a Text Pane automatically opens for you to fill in the appropriate text. Curiously, there is no specific way to identify how many items are in a SmartArt, but there is a very easy mechanism to do this from the Text Pane; if you want more items (than the provided number), press the Return key and a new item is created. Want fewer? Press the delete key to remove a Text item. As in the Charts, you can go to the Formatting Palette to change the colors, styles, and effects. These changes can be global for the whole SmartArt or unique to one part of a SmartArt object.
The last common tab is WordArt, and it is—just as it seems—an opportunity to create a headline of text in an "arty" way. Provided are over 40 different ways to present the text where you cannot only alter the physical structure of the text, but the color, transparency, strokes and fills.
When you select WordArt, a box pops up for you to enter your text and select the font and font size (you can change the fonts size by dragging any of the handles you see around the WordArt you see above). However, the text in WordArt cannot be seen by the spell checker. If you tend toward being a rotten speller or are plagued by typos, you may want to copy text out of the body of your document after it has been spell checked and then place it in a WordArt.
Another new option across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint is themes. This creates colors, fonts, and visual effects that can be consistent across the three programs. Like Styles, you can change a theme and, across the three programs, the colors, fonts, and effects all change in a coordinated pattern. Face it, for those of us who are "design challenged," this is a good approach.
What you will find is that your default fonts in Word and the other applications are going to be different. Office 2008 will install over 125 fonts into your computer, and instead of seeing the proverbial "Times New Roman" as your default font, you will probably find instead the paired fonts Cambria and Calibri, where Cambria, a serif font, is established as the "Body" font and Calibri, a san-serif font, is established as the "Heading' font. Again, here is Microsoft guiding you to use correct font dynamics with san-serif fonts to be used for headings and serif fonts being used for body text. Plus, if you change the "theme" of your document, you will be changing the fonts globally on the document. [Note: This functionality is removed if you save your document in the legacy format.]
Probably the biggest problem with the new fonts will hit those who continue to use their computer like a typewriter. You know who you are, you tap the spacebar 23 times to get the title of a page to be in the center and tap the Tab bar 6 times combined with the space bar 3 more times to get a line of numbers to line up. If you send a document to someone who doesn't have the new fonts, your pages are going to look like a mess as all the formatting goes bonkers because the manual formatting you spent ages creating is now screwy because the font metrics of the substituted font spew words to new unintended locations. (Whew!)
Please, Macs have been around for over 20 years now; start using them as Macs, not as typewriters.
If you think you may need help, plan on looking for some third party books. There is a Help file that pops up when you click on the "?" in the menu bar or select Help from the Help menu, but I found it amazingly lacking. Sadly, there isn't even a PDF or Word document to help you either. Ironically the Help program has an option for you to write why a particular explanation was good or bad. If you take the time to fill this out, you may be helping users in the future. Unfortunately for now, plan on hacking through some of the new features on your own, as you will not be getting any significant help from Help. Without a doubt, this has to be the biggest failing of Office 2008.
Lastly, amongst the new properties and features in Office 2008 is the ability to create a PDF from within the "Save as..." menu. From everything I can see and have tested, this provides the exact same result as selecting the "Save as PDF..." from the Print dialog. Since the Print option remains (this is an OS feature, not from MS), this is a redundant addition. Again, a number of the changes in Office 2008 are to make features more discoverable. Any time I can be saved from being sent an office memorandum that was created in a "cute" font that doesn't exist on my system is good. [Remember: If you do something in a font that only exists on your computer, the best way to get that on my computer is to convert the document into a PDF.]
And lastly lastly, Microsoft support: In general I almost never require support. When you've worked on Macs for over 20 years and have used hundred of computers (I tend to do a lot of maintenance work on my computer because I do not want any issues being confused as problems with software), you generally do not need support. However, I've had two issues with MS Office where I needed to contact Microsoft. After installing Office, I started to have a lot of problems. After performing a lot of repair and maintenance on my computer, the indications seemed to focus on Word and PowerPoint. Microsoft provides two free calls or e-mails for a given purchase (subsequent support is $49.95). I called, and after a very short wait I got "Sherry." She was outstanding: patient, and careful. When we determined that the problem was in fact not the Office Programs, she provided me guidance to lead me to what it might be on my computer that could be causing problems to Word and PP. In other words, Microsoft takes the stance that they will do what they can to make sure their products will work on your computer even if the problem is not theirs. I was very impressed both with the stance and the performance. She also explained to me that support starts after you've installed Office, not getting it installed.
While I was working on this review, the updater for 12.1 was released. After I installed the updated, I started having a serious problem with Entourage. My attempts to resolve the problem were futile, and once again I contacted Microsoft, this time by e-mail. When you send a support e-mail to Microsoft, you are told it could take 24 hours before you hear a response. Within several hours, I got a response from Lorraine, who nailed the problem (you can read about this issue within my review of Entourage). However, as it was obviously a bug with the 12.1 updater that initiated this problem, I felt that I should not be "dinged" for a support from Microsoft. She wrote it was not in her capability to grant that and sent the issue to her Supervisor. My first contact with her Supervisor got me nowhere, but I responded with strong evidence that displayed the problem was a bug. What this Supervisor did was to change the status of my problem as "not resolved" which meant that I was not "dinged" for this support.
Lastly, it's not uncommon for suites such as Office to show signs of the future in pieces. That is, a change is brought forth in one or two programs before it has had a chance to show up in the rest of the programs. In this instance it's the Preferences for Word and Excel. What Microsoft has done is use the paradigm used in OS X's Control Panel. Below is the Preference for Word. Excel looks the same, albeit with features for Excel. Meanwhile PowerPoint's Preference is essentially the same as Office 2004, and Entourage is also similar to 2004. Expression Media is from outer space, and is dreadful. You can read more about that in the Expression Media's review.
While I found the technical support from Microsoft to be good and fair, I've found the Help with the Office programs less than stellar. It varies from fine to some of the worst Help I've encountered. There is no PDF support, but there is a floating Help program (shown below) where you can either type in a search term or dig around as best you can. The good news is that there are forums on Microsoft's website, and you might be able to get some support from there. Also good news is that there is no cute little Mac popping up asking if you want help all of the time (if you do not understand that reference, consider yourself lucky). If you are new to working with Office, I would strongly suggest you look out for third party books as they become available.
All of these issues notwithstanding, this is a good release of Office. If you have Office X, I would recommend you update. If you have Office 2004 (and do not need or use VB), I would recommend that you consider upgrading. If you are a new Mac user and do not have Office at all, I would recommend you obtain Office 2008. In addition, if you are in a situation where you will be interacting with Windows users who are likely to share their XML documents with you, you probably do not have a choice, you pretty much have to upgrade.
Now, on to the reviews:
___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.
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