bit-tech Shopping: Microsoft Office: Mac 2008 Home and Student

• E-mail/Contact Manager
• Presentation
• Spreadsheet
• Word Processor

• Mac OS X v10.4 (Tiger)
• Mac OS X v10.5 (Leopard)

• PowerPC G4
• PowerPC G5

Rating: 6

Time with product: 1

Strengths: Word and Excel XML file support (XML is also used for Office 2007 for Windows)

Weaknesses: Excel no longer has Visual Basic.

Summary: Excel no longer has Visual Basic. Everyone complained, so Microsoft has committed to bringing it back in the next version. I think this was a calculated way to cut-down on Office 2008's development time and to use the reinclusion of Visual Basic as a seling point for the next upgrade! While the Mac Business Unit is better than the rest Microsoft, they still are just a part of Microsoft. Switch to Apple's iWork '08 which has full Word/Excel/PowerPoint support and is cheaper. You won't be sorry.

Rating: 6

Time with product: 5

Strengths: Native on Intel Macs, support for XML based file formats

Weaknesses: Loss of Visual Basic (though doesn't affect most home users), still buggy

Summary: I've been using this version of Office for almost half a year now, and there are still many times when I'm dissatisfied with it. I've used Office on Windows for years (up to version 2003, still can't warm up to 2007) and when I migrated to Mac a few years ago, I of course had version 2003.My biggest impetus for upgrading was to be the performance improvement by making it a Universal Binary/Intel native piece of software. I was sort of wrong as the apps don't seem that much faster or improved, in fact, sometimes even crash more than the previous version of Office for Mac, most notably in Excel.I'm not a heavy user of any office apps, but do need to constantly use the apps to share files with others. Excel and Word are my strongest points, and the former definitely lacks features compared to the Windows version. Microsoft is simply trying to make the product Mac pretty more than "office" pretty. I am glad they didn't use the ribbon from Office 2007 on the Macs, but that also basically means they didn't add a whole lot new features from Office 2003 either. In fact, many will complain about the lost feature of Visual Basic support.I've recently installed the recent Service Pack 1 and hoping it resolves many of the stability issues I've seen. I don't ever expect this to be a revolutionary product, however.

Rating: 10

Time with product: 60 Days

Strengths: Familar Office Suite, inexpensive price, 3 licenses

Weaknesses: None

Summary: If you're going to buy Mac Office for your Mac, which I think is essential, because who doesnt use Word or Excel, then Mac Office Home Student / Teacher Edition is the best value! It's cheaper than the other versions, and you get 3 licenses to use! There's no crippled software here folks! Full versions, plus exchange support for email in case you use (Entourage - I dont). I will admit, I am coming from as a Windows user, and it's not as intuitive as the toolbar isnt as prominent as it is in Windows. Nevertheless, everything is there that you need.

Rating: 8

Time with product: 1

Strengths: very easy to use and has everything you could possibly want.

Weaknesses: none

Summary: Was skeptical about this software because I was not familiar with it. Daughter needed it for school and we just bought a macbook. Price was right at officemax on sale for 129.99 and also had a discount coupon for another 20 dollards off. Decided to try it.She likes it so far!

Rating: 4

Time with product: 1 Months

Strengths: Powerpoint (the only solid improvement) has a lot more bells and whistles

Weaknesses: Entourage (Home & Student) does not support exchange server accounts. Overall Office 08 uses more resources so it is slow on machines that are older than negative 1 year old.

Summary: Excel is so-so. It has A LOT more space to work with, but it's meaningless without a powerful computer. Even Excel 04 is slow on my MacBook Pro (purchased new 8 months ago). It also does not appear to have a solver, which is very frustrating when working on statistics problems.Word is word. How complicated can you get with word?