I’ve been testing Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac for a couple of days in real world situations (for me).
As you should know by now, I’m no great fan of Microsoft products, but they are unavoidable in my line of work. I receive dozens of Office documents from my clients every week.
The new version of Office for Mac finally runs natively on Intel Macs, and it reads the new formats introduced by Office 2007 for Windows (I’m starting to receive some of those, unfortunately).
On the face of it, these are 2 good reasons to upgrade.
But let me tell you. On anything less than an Intel Mac, don’t bother. On my first-generation iMac G5, I can take a nice nap while Word or Excel launches, and I can out-type them both with disheartening ease.
Both programs have choked on any biggish documents I have fed them. For example, in one case, Word’s spelling and grammar checker gave up in mid-document and informed me it couldn’t continue due to some internal error. Before it stopped working though, it missed most of the errors that Office 2004 for Mac caught without hesitation.
As for Excel, I tried feeding it a big .csv file. It took a while, but it finally loaded. When I tried to save the resulting file in Excel format, the program just hung. I eventually gave up waiting and had to force-quit it.
Not the most auspicious of beginnings.
I might keep the new Office on the Intel-based MacBook for those presumably rare situations when Word for Windows 2003 (with the 2007 file filters running on Windows XP running in Parallels Desktop) isn’t an option.
I’m quite certain that I’ll be going back to Office 2004 on the iMac G5. On that machine, Office 2008 is just a huge waste of space (close to a Gigabyte in fact).
There certainly aren’t any new user interface « enhancements » that would make me regret such a decision. I can’t even get used to how ugly the new application icons are.