[Infowarrior] - Readers' comments on: MS Office 2008

[Richard Forno]

For the most part it has been a significantly better user experience for me
with one giant caveat: the new way entourage handles flagging emails.

It used to just create a task linked to an email which was more than
adequate. Now there's an in between stage where you can flag an email
without creating the task.

Sounds great right? Well the implementation is kind of a nightmare as it is
slow to flag and check off in email view, and god forbid you want to switch
from email view to calendar view and you have a lot of those flagged emails;
there's a bug (feature?) which delays the switch, in my case it took 7
minutes every time I switched views. Seriously.

So, I just keep two entourage windows open at all times to avoid the
switching: one for email/contacts/memos and another just for calendar.

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In my experience, it's been worth updating to 2008. By a nose. I work in a
(officially) Windows-only environment and use an Exchange server for email,
calendar, and address book. My main reason for upgrading was Entourage.

On my MacBook (2GHz Core 2 Duo, 1GB RAM), Office 2008 performance
(especially under Leopard) seems slightly better. This could be due to 1) my
imagination or 2) the fact that Rosetta is no longer required. Activity
Viewer suggests that resource consumption is similar, though I did no
scientific test. (I saved a before (2004) and after (2008) Activity Viewer
screenshot to compare.)

Stability is definitely better, though not perfect.

New features are mainly cosmetic or not of use to me.

Bottom line: If you keep your expectations low and you pay the upgrade price
(as opposed to retail), you'll consider the upgrade worth it after the
initial experience of being underwhelmed.

For reference, my experience running iWork and Apple's included apps (Mail,
Address Book, iCal) at home far exceeds my experience running MS Office at
work both in terms of performance and application usability. And iWork comes
with a much smaller price tag. But for many (like me), iWork is not an
option at work.

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I have about half-a-dozen Mac Office 2008 users here and they are perturbing
the rest of the folks using Office 2003. The 2008 apps eat older Windows
Office documents, making arbitrary and silent changes in fonts, headers,
footers, styles, and so on. Items cut-and-pasted between PC Office 2003 apps
(e.g., an Excel chart in a Word document) can be summarily destroyed.

Effectively, I cannot allow any complex Office 2003 document to go to a Mac
Office 2008 user for editing and hope to get it back intact.

I suspect the same would happen between our consultants and our customers,
which could be something of a nightmare scenario for a consulting company.

We are moving our PC users to Office 2007, but that won't happen for a
couple of months. I've seen a few problems between PC Office 2007 and Mac
Office 2008, but small things only.

Also, the problems seem to occur more when saving from Office 2008 to Office
2003 formats. If you save from Office 2008 to XML formats and make all the
Office 2003 users employ the free translator plugins from Microsoft, things
seem to be a little better.

< -- >

Word and Excel have been very solid for me. I'm waiting for Outlook so I can
punt Mail.app. It has some known issues that make me think I am losing
email. Even though I'm not, having to manually sync it is annoying.

< -- >

I use apple mail still, i fear remote MS bugs with Entourage, however
mail.app is just as scary.

anyway - i was a long time MS Word 2004 user, and i tell you - going
to 2008 was the best MS investment i've made in years!

word uses much less memory, its much much more efficient, the
graphics handling is much improved (inserted images etc), the styles
no longer crash randomly when editing them etc.
word 2008 is a big big improvement on word 2004, so its almost worth
it just for that.

sorry - cant comment on entourage though.