Microsoft office 08 for Mac?

Question

I have recently bought my first ever Mac. Standard version 13 inch 160GB hard drive, 2GB Memory. My college work requires me to create basic word and power point documents. I am very familiar with using office on windows but have heard mixed reviews about the Mac version. Is it actually any good and will it cause my Mac to start running annoyingly slow? Can anyone shed any light on the situation?
Thanks.

Answer 1

I tried Office 2008, and it did run very slowly (although back then I was running Tiger and it had only 1 GB of RAM, plus they have released updates that are supposed to improve performance). In any event, when you're not actually running Office, it shouldn't cause your computer to run slowly.



I personally use iWork 09. It's really fast, and it makes Word and Power Point documents as well (you just have to be careful to save-as or export to those formats). I personally like it much more than Office 2008 (and you probably will too, especially once you get to the point where you're making documents for yourself and can take advantage of the power of the native iWork formats and the cool templates), but to tell the truth either will do the job. Did I mention it costs a fraction of the price of Office, and that it works for an unlimited amount of installs (the DVD version doesn't even use a serial number)?



What I recommend is to download the trials for both iWork and Office (unless trials of those programs happen to have came pre-installed on your Mac -- check the Applications folder). You can then play around with and learn both programs, and you'll be able to come to your own decision about what you like best and what will get the job done best. You can also download OpenOffice.org and see how that is. It's not nearly as nice to use as the other two programs, but it may be able to get the job done and it's completely free.

Answer 2

It actually works pretty well. However, you have the following drawbacks:



- Office 2008 (for Mac) actually has less features than Office 2007 (for Windows). For starters, you have not Macro support. This is good for viruses, but bad if you need them. However, the next version (December 2009?) should have this fixed, apparently.



- You don't have Outlook, but instead you have Entourage. It's 100% compatible Exchange, but doesn't use the same PST format for storing data. So data migration is a pain. Once again, the next version of Office for Mac will drop Entourage and propose an Outlook version.



- Every Microsoft application start the Microsoft Database Manager. This is pure Microsoft bad architecture. Basically, Word, Excel and Powerpoint need this database manager to centralize data (apparently, Microsoft architects are unfamiliar with UNIX file organization...). This actually works okay if you database is small, but mine was relatively large (3 Gb), so it constantly crashed and I had to rebuild it every couple of weeks of so.



- Last, the layout is poor. Office 2007 uses a nice task-oriented menu at the top that once you get used to it, it works very well. Office 2008 uses the Inspector floating window which is terrible and always in the way.



Bottom line, if you need Office compatibility, it works great. But be aware of the "Microsoft" limitations...



Hope this helps! Good luck!

Answer 3

At one point, Microsoft Office for the Mac was actually a superior product than the same thing for Windows. But the MBU (Macintosh Business Unit -- all of thirteen people at Microsoft) was disbanded and Office has become something of an orphan.



I have switched to Neo Office, which was a Cocoa version of Open Office (which until recently required the X11 infrastructure). I have been very pleased with Neo Office's compatibility with Office's file and data structures, and have yet to think about installing Office back on my Mac.



Both Neo Office and Open Office are free projects. You can download them (why not try them? They're free!) from:



http://www.neooffice.org/

http://www.openoffice.org/

Answer 4

Two things you can do:



1) Look into Open Office For Mac - it works well.



2) Use Bootcamp to create a separate partition on your HD, and install Windows there. It is very easy to do, bootcamp will do all the work for you. You just need a copy of Windows to install. Then you can run Office on your windows partition.



I have Windows installed on a partition of Mac, via bootcamp and it works well for me, so far. I did this because I has spent a lot of money on CS4 for windows, then when I switched over to Mac, I did not want to re-purchase CS4 for Mac too.



So far, it works great. My computer boots up in Mac OS, but if I hold down the option key during boot, it allows me to pick Windows or Mac OS



The nice thing about bootcamp . . . is if you create files in your Windows partition, you can be logged in your MAC OS and reach through to the windows partition and pull the files over. That is a cool feature.

Answer 5

I strongly recommend Open workplace. that's like minded with MS workplace codecs plus some greater that MS workplace can't safeguard. it is likewise a unfastened acquire, that's good information for a school pupil. And that's pass platform, so it is going to run on any computing gadget OS. It has a spreadsheet kit and slide presentation kit besides. in spite of the undeniable fact that this technique that, IMO, is the terrific for formatting records is TeX/LaTeX. The presentation and format is spectacular. be conscious and different be conscious processor output look gruesome, amateurish and clunky in evaluation. LaTeX is likewise unfastened.

Answer 6

Try it with the free trial, if you dont like it then you havent wasted any money :)



http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/Office2008/default.mspx