Becoming a Mac

As I've mentioned before, Microsoft Office is a critical application that I am taking into consideration as I venture to become a Mac.  So I decided to start digging into MS Office for the mac right away to make sure I can work with it.  The latest release published on Apple's website is Office 2008 for Mac.  The Office 2008 for the Mac comes in several different versions but I will only give a brief description of them here.

• Home and Student Edition - Comes standard with Word 2008, Excel 2008, and PowerPoint 2008.  This edition also comes with Entourage 2008 and Messenger for Mac. For those of you who may also be PCs and aren't familiar with Entourage, it is essentially an email client.  Currently MS Outlook is not available for the Mac.  For my uses at home this is perfect as these are the typical applications that I use, and I really don't have to have MS Outlook.
• Other MS Office Editions include Standard Edition and Special Media Edition.  Find out more from Apple's site by clicking here: MS Office on the Mac! You can also check out Microsoft's website for their information here: Office 2008 for Mac

Office 2008 for Mac - Home and Student Edition

Now, as I'm looking at this and thinking "Great! I can work with this.  Perfect solution." My eye quickly draws to the the customer rating.  2.5 out of 5 stars... WTH?  How is that possible.  Well, here are a few of the negative reviews - just to get an idea.

I can work within PP for hundreds of hours on a presentation and then suddenly it will begin repeatedly crashing. Trying to change the way a chart is automated - too bad, crashes. Editing data in an underlying Excel spreadsheet - too bad, crashes. And so on. Don't any of the product developers at MS read our reviews and aren't they professionally embarrassed? MS must be the only software firm in the world that actually reduces functionality with future releases. But wait, let's give them due credit for their dancing paperclip module. That must have taken some thought.

I've used Microsoft Office for a long time on Mac and PC. Unfortunately, I still need to keep a copy of Office 2003 in Windows XP in VMWare because this new version of Microsoft Office is so slow and unstable. 

I bought this thinking that I'd rather have Microsoft Office as it is the "standard" - right? Wrong. It doesn't work properly. Little things are buggy. It doesn't work with spaces properly, it shifts windows around, throws toolbars ever. It's a total mess. Furthermore, it's as cluttered as every other piece of software ever written by Microsoft.

I am disappointed with this product... that's all I'm going to say.

Yikes!!!!  That certainly was not encouraging.  Not to mention a co-worker also mentioned they had a negative experience with MS Office on the Mac.  I do have to say that there were alot of negative remarks around the fact that not everything was included in this version when compared to the PC version.  That I can live with.  But an Office version that crashes... um, maybe not.  That's part of the reason for becoming a mac in the first place.

Once again, more homework to do...  But let me end on this note - a couple positive remarks with 5 stars included with the product reviews:

I don't know why this product is getting such a bad rap. I am a long time windows user and recently converted to all Mac. I love it and this version of office works very well. I would recommend this to anyone that has a lot of windows files and needs to continue using them after the Mac switch.

I have been using Microsoft Office on my 2.16 GHz MacBook since September 2008. In the beginning it had its problems, but the software updates fixed them, and now its perfect. I promise, get it, install the updates and it runs beautifully! Microsoft Office 2008 is a pleasure to use, although I always stick with Keynote '09 for slideshows because it has more options, which make the slideshow look very professional.

 

Update on Monday, April 6, 2009 at 8:09PM by John

Some good research websites- 

• Office 2008 vs. iWork vs. NeoOffice vs. OpenOffice

• Office 2008 vs. iWork ’08: Can they get along?

• iWork '09 vs. Office 2008 vs. Google Docs

Ok, so based on this research, I've decided.  I will add Office 2008 for Mac when I purchase.  So... that also means that I'm adding $149.00 to whatever I do decide to buy.  

Well, at least that's a small step forward.  ;-)

Update on Tuesday, April 7, 2009 at 6:10PM by John

I couldn't resist...