“The latest Macintosh edition of Microsoft Corp.’s Office suite does text, e-mail, spreadsheets and presentations with aplomb. Then again, so did its previous versions. The big hook for the new version, Office 2004 for Mac, is its improved business-friendly tools, so Mac users can share and manage data just as easily as people who run that other, more dominant operating system (hint: Microsoft also makes it),” Matthew Fordahl writes for The Associated Press.
“Office 2004 may be an easy sell to businesses, but it’s going to be tougher to persuade consumers who don’t run their homes like a project management office and can’t easily absorb the $399 full standard edition or $239 upgrade price,” Fordahl writes. “…The central collaboration tool, Project Center, is part of Entourage, which used to be little more than an e-mail program. Now, it’s much more like — and arguably better than — Outlook, which does much of the same stuff on computers running Microsoft’s Windows.”
“The strongest appeal [of Office 2004] will be to businesses that run Macs or combination of Macs and PCs,” Fordahl writes.
Full article here.
Related MacDailyNews article:
Mac users should not buy Microsoft software – May 16, 2003
Apple has to fix AppleWorks soon
Third post?
At least if you really need it, only buy the Teacher & Student version so M$ gets a little less $ out of ya…
I will buy nothing from Microsoft. I will not even use their free products. I might get an STD (Software Transmitted Disease).
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All the reasons to upgrade: Unicode support, long-file name support, Entourage finally has working Exchange support and finally formats phone numbers in contacts. But is Office 2k4 worth the $300 to upgrade for what are essentially bug fixes? I’m highly doubtful.
Apple has a lot to do with MS Office and makes money on it as well.
It took them 2+ years to work out that long-filename bug.
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i’m kinda looking forward to it…. i mean compared to appleworks, microsoft has apple beat IMO…. Appleworks feels old…. even compared to the old microsoft office…. i’m sure it is bloated…. but it doesn’t feel that way on a fast machine….
Unicode support ? Not for me. I can type Arabic alright, but the letters don’t connect, they’re shown as seperate letters.
Nisus Writer Express, OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle Pro get the job done for Me. Microsoft who?
I for one wont waste my money on buying the new version of office.
I havent even bothered updating office X on my macs at the moment.
What’s the point when all I use it for is opening up word documents and cutting and pasting text into idesign/quark 6 (I run a design company).
I’d sooner spend the company’s money on getting G5s!
At the end of the day a word processing software is exactly that!
To be honest, I am very satisfied with Office vX.
Word 2004 is soooooo slow compared to Word X check this out:
http://www.barefeats.com/quick.html#msw
IMO depends if you want features or speed but typical Microsoft in that all new software needs more computer power to run the same as an old version.
nice test sara, WAY slower in fact.
regardless of that, MS continues to make money cross platform. Pretty smart guy that Bill.
All true Joe, you can love or hate MS & Bill but yes he is smart. Wonder if they will make Office for Linux, maybe in 3-5 years. Time will tell, but would have to be cheaper.
This version of the Office understands Finnish too and three
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Language support with this version is much better than before so do upgrade if you need Office.
Importantly, Word 2004 seems to have broken “cite while you type” in EndNote, which is a real pain for thoes who were using this combo for academic work – now i have to re-install Office X
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I have the student edition of 2004, I love it. My wife fell in love with the new notepad word template, and the recording feature, entourage rocks. We bought Office v.X and this was free for us.
you can mix and match office X and office 2004 applications, so if word 2004 is giving you trouble, keep using word X (you just can’t run the same application of different versions at the same time)
the project management in entourage is worth it to me alone