“How’s this for the ultimate digital-age, small-business irony: Want the best possible environment for Microsoft Office? Try running it on a Mac,” Jonathan Blum reports for Fortune.
MacDailyNews Take: Not just Microsoft Office: Apple MacBook Pro is world’s fastest Windows Vista notebook – October 30, 2007
“The Apple line of personal computers and peripherals offers the small enterprise a tantalizing – if frustrating – set of risks and rewards. Macs, used as they are intended in their full 64-bit glory, are blazingly fast. Integration of the Intel processing chips and other bits of electronics, the popularity of the iPhone and the iPod, and the emergence of virtual desktop environments such as VMware means the Berlin Wall between all things Mac and all things PC is nowhere near as treacherous as it was just a few years ago,” Blum reports.
Blum writes, “But turning the newly plays-nice-with-others Mac into a real ROI generator in your shop is no slam dunk, if you’re accustomed to working with Windows machines.”
MacDailyNews Take: Replace “accustomed to” with “handicapped with” an you’ll have a clearer sense of the issue.
Blum continues, “In several months of side-by-side testing of iMacs and PCs, I found that gains in speed can be offset by user confusion in mastering Mac’s approach to the Web.”
MacDailyNews Take: Again, Microsoft’s penchant for illogical, non-intuitive software – Windows was originally set up upside-down and backwards presumably in order to try to avoid legal action from Apple – has screwed up an entire generation of users. Have you ever seen a Windows-only sufferer trying to use a Mac for the first time? It’s painful. It’s tragic what Microsoft has done to hinder world productivity for so many years. Please see these related articles:
• Switching to Mac after 15 years of Windows, security expert says he’s ‘too stupid to use Macs’ – September 06, 2005
• Windows to Mac switch like repeatedly getting whacked in the face with baseball bat of common sense – September 01, 2005
Blum continues, “Earlier this year, the Macintosh Business Unit, one of the oldest teams at Microsoft, released Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac – not to be confused with Microsoft Office 2007, which runs on the Windows Vista and XP operating systems. The code optimizes for Macs the now-ubiquitous line of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and e-mail and calendaring tools (for the Mac, Entourage takes the place of Outlook). For the most part, Office 2008 for Mac simply emulates Office 2007 for the PC. But in my testing, this riff on the Microsoft flagship flourishes in the current Apple OS X Leopard environment.”
Blum reports, “If you see margins in being super-efficient in the digital domain, and you have to guts and the means to make it work, I would invest the time in seeing if Office 2008 for Mac is for you.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “JES42” for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Take: Do you really need Microsoft Office? Give Apple’s free 30-day iWork ’08 trial a try and find out for yourself.
Only for Microsoft Office?
A colleague of mine once said he found the Mac counterintuitive. Once you’ve learned all of Windows’ bad habits, they can seem intuitive.
Sorry..not true…I just completed my dissertation on my Mac. Life would of been easier with some kind of VBA. When M$ packages everything in the Mac version of office then I may change my mind.
just my $0.02
it’s called Applescript….learn it!
Sorry MDN, I love Pages, Numbers and Keynote but sometimes I just have to use Office with no other way to go.
“Would of been easier”…? What exactly does that mean? I sure hope it acutally means something by itself; otherwise, it puts a serious dent in credibility (completing dissertation – implying a PhD candidate), if the intent was to say “would’ve” or “would have”…
Personally, I’d steer way clear of any implementation of VBA, Windows or Mac.
I dunno… MS products…. I dunno.
“…the Microsoft flagship flourishes in the current Apple OS X Leopard environment.”
On Windows it has no sizeable competition, so has no need to improve, but has lots of competition on the Mac side, so has improved well. It is a worthy competitor on the Mac thanks to the MacBU.
“In several months of side-by-side testing of iMacs and PCs, I found that gains in speed can be offset by user confusion in mastering Mac’s approach to the Web.”
User confusion? Who IS this idiot? I swtiched from a lifetime of using Windows to an Intel iMac in early 2007. It took maybe two weeks to get used to different shortcuts and the UI, but I can’t imagine using Windows again.
Flourishes in the OS X Leopard environment? I need to know what cocktail of controlled substances this guy is on.
Apparently he doesn’t use Spaces. Office programs never stay in the space I have assigned them to. Palettes or toolboxes or whatever MS calls them open in random other spaces, and the computer bounces back and forth until you close and reopen them. And it would be great if we could place an Excel spreadsheet into a PowerPoint presentation without importing thousands of empty cells, making the few you’re using so miniscule in the upper left corner.
I could go into the myriad of other issues, but why bother? Office 2008, like most everything else coming from Microsoft, is unusable dreck.
MDN, call it both ways! OS X isn’t fully 64 bit. That’s one of the things that “Snow Leopard” is supposed to address.
Pedrag ‘Would of’ is a traditional English usage originally from the Viking influence I believe and therefore very common in the eastern counties still. It is unusual to hear an American use it but please respect a perfectly good use of the ORIGINAL language please.
…And you can even dump M$ Office and have StarOffice or OpenOffice…
@Jay-Z:
Roght. And the other day, while switching back-and-forth between multiple open Word, PowerPoint and Excel files, they froze Spaces, Exposé and the Dock. Their the only applications I know that managed to do that.
Unfortunately I do have to use Word (due to my book publisher’s only dealing with it), and I must say, Word 2008 SUCKS! It’s so much buggier and prone to crashing than Word 2004 was that it’s about twice as slow to work with….
Nice job, MS. I use Pages, Numbers and Keynote for all my personal stuff, but I still have suffer with your idiot program until some folks get their heads out of their collective asses…. sigh.
@Jay-Z: Word’s inability to play with spaces in one of those “you guys did QA testing for this app?!” things that would make me laugh if I weren’t crying having to use it all the time….
BUT WHY?
JUST BUY A COPY OF iWORKS AND GET BUSY AND THE HELL WITH M$ AND “OFFICE”!
This guy sure didn’t use Word’s spelling and grammar check functions.
I could not have written my Master’s thesis with Pages. It does not support:
table of content, figures, tables, etc.
cross reference
indices
etc.
Pages also lack grammar checking. While my grammar is good, my fingers’ are not – they type things I never meant to say. So a grammar check is a big help; not perfect but a big help.
I still use Office 04, so VBA was not an issue. Office 08 (an 07 on Windows) is too big a change for no apparent advantage.
@Jay-Z,
I have no problems with Word and Excel forgetting their spaces – if they do, it’s an Apple problem.
The other problems you cite are M$ problems.
Predrag is right. “Would of” is a misspelling of would’ve, would have.
Office bites. If I MUST use it, I’ll create a file in iWork ’08 and then save as an Office file and tweak as necessary.
At any rate, it’s good to see more reviews that skewer Microsoft and it’s bastard children.
You have to pretty stupid if you experience any problems learning how to use a Mac over Windows………period!
We’ve been here many times on this forum. Mac users who work in PC dominated work environments need MS Office.
However, if you’re thinking of “upgrading” from Office 2004 to Office 2008, stop and think for a moment. As far as I can tell, most users find Office 08 to be much slower than Office 04, even though the latter operates under Rosetta. Word and Excel wallow in treacle on my 24″ iMac. I don’t know how the MS MBU managed that, but they did.
And if you don’t want to spend megabucks, you’ll still need Entourage 04 to attach to an Exchange network. It seems like only the advent of Snow Leopard will fix that.
Most complain I heard from non-Mac advocates about how a Mac “does not ‘just work'” is how they don’t know how to save files or find their Windows workflow. Somehow Linux and Mac users have no problem picking up Windows. It’s always Windows users who have a hard time learning Linux and Mac. My only conclusion is that Windows, as used by the average computer users in general, breeds computer incompetency. And the only reason for that comes from the fundamental Windows design, inside and out, and stuns and deters user intelligence.
@qka
Try <a >Mellel</a> – no grammar check, unfortunately, but it offers everything else you mentioned, is very speedy, and can open and export to Word, rtf, and OPML files!