I was recently given access to a full installation of Office 2008 for Mac at my job and was interested in checking out what new features and functionality were included in the new version. Since it’s the first in the Office line to be installed as a Universal Binary I was very excited to ditch the Office v.X copy that’s been languishing on my laptop for a few years. After the 30 minute install I was a little disgruntled to find that a new set of Office Aliases were copied into my Dock without an obvious choice to do so during the setup, but, that aside, I started Word to see what new stuff awaited.
I find, to my horror, that the Word 2008 for Mac looks damn near exactly like Pages ’08 (in fact all versions of Pages). See below:
The screen capture on the left is Word 2008 and the one on the right is Pages ’08. Apart from some minor differences in the interface, you’d have thought that these two programs were part of the same family or even the same software with a different configuration. Now this isn’t a full review of the software, I really haven’t had a chance to play with Word too much to give a proper assessment of its capabilities. It looks very powerful and from what I’ve attempted it functions very well and uses a lot of OS X features that were ignored for so many years. Of them, Spotlight support in Entourage, realtime options, but no CoreImage rendering. It seems Microsoft is choosing to go with their own engine for visuals over what’s readily available to any OS X developer.
Details aside, it’s very difficult to pay attention to this new application as it has so much in common with a bundle of applications you can buy for 80 bucks! Namely, iWork ’08. And is it just me or does Entourage 2008 look like shit? For something that you have to look at everyday, it sure needs some work in the usability/visibility area. Messages are clumped together and attachments are either exposed in this bulky pane with vertically stacked buttons that take up nearly all of the reading pane, or are collapsed into a read-only view where the files can’t be right-clicked or interacted with. The folder, to the left, hierarchy looks completely fucked together. Cluttered and confusing, with a series of view options visible by default which add nothing to average user. I know what you’re saying, “Leopard comes with default search views in the finder that I don’t use”. Well, I happen to use a least one of those search views daily, and there’s not fifty of them filling up the screen.
All I’m saying is that if I had to make the choice between buying Office 2008 for Mac and iWork ’08, I’d go for the $80 package that does 90% of what Office does and maybe a few things that it doesn’t. You can keep Entourage.
February 5th, 2008 at 11:35 am
I agree with you on the monetary front, if they both look alike and perform alike, then buy the cheaper of the two.
But, how different are two word processing programs really going to look nowadays, when certain feature sets are standard?
We’re not talking about the difference between two game engines…
February 5th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
Well you’ve seen Word. How it is in 2003 and probably how it is now with 2007. 2007 Office for Windows has all sorts of different design elements, the ribbon is something that springs to mind.
Now with 2008 Office for Mac, they moved away from the ribbon idea that they put forth on the Windows platform in favor of this “inspector” layout you see in the screen shot. It’s fairly obvious that they had the design concepts of Pages ’08 in mind when building this thing, because the functionality and user interface are followed to a T. There are places were Microsoft did there own thing (chart selection bar, etc) or reverted back the bad old days (modal dialogue boxes), but the main impression of the software is something less Microsoft Word and more Apple Pages.
As far as game engines, I’m sure I couldn’t tell one “specular bump” or realtime light from another.
February 5th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
I can’t stand Microsoft Office 2007. The ribbon is the worst idea known to man. Why take and easy thing called a drop-down menu that is EASY, and above all else, COMPACT, and replace it with something spead-out and “tabular”? So stupid.
March 22nd, 2008 at 12:16 am
the major selling point of Office (at least for me) is Outlook / Entourage. 2008 has full Exchange support (though, how good it is.. time will tell). I seriously say FUCK that Exchange over IMAP bullshit they did in 2004 and all the other lesser email clients out there (cough*thunderbird*cough). i’m sorry to say.. i’ve found nothing better than Exchange in terms of an enterprise communication/collaboration tool. while it remains to be mostly broken on Macs.. its works semi-beautifully on Windows-based computers.
but yeah.. FUCK that ribbon bullshit they introduced in 2007.
and from the Did-You-Know department… the Mac MS Office team is different from the Win MS Office team. thats why nothing is really similar between the two versions of Word, Excel, etc… they don’t even collaborate… at least from what i hear. which would explain why 2008 is behind in features from 2007.
March 22nd, 2008 at 10:19 am
Hey Dang! You have been given the authorship rights!!
Yeah I heard that the MS Mac crew are free to dilly in the dally. I have to say though, Outlook may perform well but the design, layout, and problems that Microsoft refuses to fix are unbelievably frustrating for someone in support. Adding a mailbox to Outlook is a ridiculous affair (for as structurally simple as request that is), cutting and pasting between 2003 Outlook and 2000 office programs locks up both, why did they remove animated GIF support in Outlook 2007? Oh and undocumented and unspecific folder and OST size limits?! Data file repair when Outlook crashes in 2003 (ugh), and “Detect and Repair” (the whole concept is flawed). And why have error events that are undocumented? Event 1000-1100 or so are like empty vessels of hopelessness…
Sorry to vent, I just hate working with Outlook because I spend more time looking at the bad stuff than enjoying the good stuff, I guess.
…And why all the goddamn submenus?! What’s the difference between Other, Options, and Advanced Options that you can glean from the titles? Could these assholes be any more nebulous in their option box design? Outlook is like that guy in seven who they fed until they kicked his stomach open…bloatwear.
But I guess it’s not all that bad. The email, calendar, and such are pretty bullet proof. Like I said I just see all the crap on constant basis.
March 22nd, 2008 at 1:09 pm
In 2007, adding a mailbox isn’t that far out (to me at least), but maybe that’s because I didn’t mind the way it was handled in 2003. For adding multiple Exchange mailboxes, it kind of makes sense as the offline cached files are locked when in use [ don't get me started on desktop search software
]. I often ran into the copy/paste issue of 2003 .. but I haven’t seen that in 2007 yet. But that was more of an Office issue rather than something that was limited to Outlook. While I agree Office as a whole isn’t really well executed, but I still say Outlook is one of the best things Microsoft has given us [ the best thing was their "unsupported" tool for mounting ISOs in WinXP ]. I’ll admit Outlook doesn’t handle gigs and gigs of data very well… but in their defense, what software does?
Coming from a support perspective… I’d rather deal with Outlook issues than some other random mail client issues. I guess after dealing with these other random mail clients, I’ve learned to appreciate Outlook a little more.
At our company, we do not stick to one platform … so anything goes. MacOS [ Tiger / Leopard ], BSD, RHEL, WinXP, Vista… and so do the mail clients. We have reduced our mail platform down to two [ from seven ]… so now we’re on Exchange 2003 and IMAP [ IMAP makes me cry ]. Supporting seven different mail platforms and seeing every mail client out there have made me come to love Outlook+Exchange.