Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit (MBU) “has been hard at work on the first new Office for Mac release in four years, and one that’s been designed to take on Apple’s iWork apps. Although the programs are still Carbon, rather than Cocoa, they now combine the look-and-feel of OS X 10.5 with some of the innovations Microsoft introduced in Office 2007, like the ribbon,” Jonathan M. Gitlin reports for Ars Technica.
Gitlin takes a look at the Mac Office 2008 versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage:
• Word: New features are in keeping with Microsoft’s aim of allowing users to create better looking documents more easily and, combined with the new Publishing Layout View, points to Microsoft taking a careful look at Pages and deciding that they liked what they saw. I might add that I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing; anything that makes an oft-used software tool better is a good thing, even if the idea was poached from somewhere else. Word also now supports OpenType, meaning that fonts finally look like they should with no need to mess about.
• Excel: It’s not all roses. Microsoft has removed support for Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) from Office 2008, despite leaving it present in Office 2007, the Windows version. While this might not worry the casual spreadsheet user, anyone who uses highly customized files with lots of actions as part of their daily grind will be very poorly served by the transition to 2008. Perhaps the easiest workaround would be to run Office 2007 via Parallels. At a guess, this would be Microsoft’s preferred solution, since it means a sale of both Windows and Office 2007, but that kind of defeats the point of having a Macintosh version of the suite if you ask me.
• PowerPoint: As with the new additions to Word that suggest the MBU has been paying attention to iWork, PowerPoint 2008 also shows the signs of lessons learned from the competition.
• Entourage: Apple’s Mail, iCal, and Address Book have many fans, but Entourage isn’t as bad as it’s often made out to be. And if you need to use Exchange for your e-mail, then really it’s your only choice for an e-mail program… Integration with Exchange might not be quite as feature-replete as our PC-using cousins enjoy via Outlook, but I’ve found the experience utterly painless. Shared calendars work perfectly, and global address books show up, although I’ve found that these can take some time to display.
Gitlin reports, “The Mac Business Unit has looked at what others, notably Apple, have brought to the table with competitor applications, and they’ve incorporated some of the best elements into Office. And if they haven’t consciously done that, then the end result is still the same. The applications are better looking, and produce better looking documents too… That it does that in just the way you’d want a great Macintosh program to behave is good news for Office workers.”
Much more, including reams of screenshots, in the full article here.
I use iWork ’08 and like it- particularly keynote (this app rules!). My MAJOR gripe with Pages in the seriously sad lack of an equation editor. Really. How can something so fundamental be overlooked? Given that MANY iWork/Pages users are students/teachers/others who need to insert equations into documents, this is a MAJOR, MAJOR shortcoming and serious ANNOYANCE in Pages. Otherwise, its not bad. Nevertheless I will never buy another copy of iWork until it is fixed.
Neooffice/open office are good, free alternatives. They’ll do about 99.9999% of what you want 99.9999% of the time.
“It is the core animation stuff that Apple created that once added to Office, makes it palatable. How ironic is that?”
Are you sure Office uses Core Animation? Is Core Animation even accessible from the Carbon APIs?
I didn’t see anything in the article, other than a few visual style differences, that Office 2007 for Windows doesn’t already have.
“Wow, Microsoft is finally coming out with Office for MAC.”
I just flashed back to 1985.
“The only problem I haven’t solved is password protecting Numbers documents.”
I suppose you are under the impression that password-protecting Excel documents actually secures their contents?
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2001/1217excel.html
http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-3513_7-5662635-1.html
http://www.office-addins.com/-excel-addins/excel-password-recovery.html
Couple things:
1) MS Office v.X still works as do later versions (pre 2008).
2) For more advanced users, yes OpenOffice and NeoOffice work, but OO is still very window’s centric in it’s UI and is just as much a pain to work with as the windows version of Office. The NO port of OO: NeoOffice is growing up, but it does not handle forms very well. I don’t use it for spreadsheets.
3) iWork is great for the casual user, student, even the light power user, but for those of us who rely heavily on related documents with embedded scripts and advanced collaborative features, (especially in spreadsheets, and word forms) Word and Excel are still far better than Pages and Numbers. (indeed, Pages cannot even do forms)
I hate MS just as much as the next person, but unfortunately I would have to say that for me the only reason I want a viable and functioning MS, is to continue to produce Excel. It is far and away the state of the art spreadsheet application. Nothing even comes close.
AMPAR, I sure you are aware that MS produced Word and Excel for Macintosh before Windows. And that typically the Mac versions exceeded what the corresponding Window’s release could do, feature wise and usability.
zac
I could dump MS Office tomorrow, if it weren’t for Entourage. I don’t need Exchange compatibility, but there is simply no other Mac app that does as good a job of integrating mail, contacts, calendar and tasks. That Entourage comes from MS is strange in the extreme.
I will be haunting the aisles at MacWorld in two weeks hoping to find a new app that looks like the iWork apps and can completely replace the functionality I now enjoy in Entourage. Otherwise, I will be buying Office 2008.
I use Pages on a daily basis for work. Overall, it is a great product but if you need to send and read Word documents on a regular basis with Windows users, it can be a major pain. The Export and Import functions are very good but it needs to be perfect otherwise it can cause the other person much aggravation.
I have found that paragraphing, track changes and text boxes to be slightly problematic in converting documents back and forth. Also there are some features which I had gotten used to in Word which don’t really have an a simple equivalent on Pages.
While I have and use Pages, I will seriously consider buying Microsoft Office for creating and amending complex documents which require collaboration with non Mac users. Pages can’t do the job at the moment.
PC Magazine gave Office 2008 Mac a pretty poor review, but considering it’s a “PC” publication this may be par for the course. Other reviews have not been kind either. Still, one of the great things about Office 2004 Mac was not only file compatibility with Office 2003 Windows, the menus were largely the same.
The real issue here is MS obviously did not want to make Office 2008 Mac too much like Office 2007 Windows. Then again, Office 2007 is a piece of dogshit anyway, so at the end of the day, I think the Mac version will be far superior anyway.
No Visual Basic? No purchase office 2008…
Taking VB out of Excel is a huge mistake and it renders Excel very limited.
Anti-competitive? I’ll give you anti-competitive!
MS Office 2008 Mac – Remains incompatible with MS Exchange for no good reason;
MS Office 2007 Win – MS Exchange compatibility inbuilt for years.
MS Office 2008 Mac – VBA support removed for no good reason;
MS Office 2007 Win – VBA support remains.
MS Office 2008 Mac – Right to left languages still unsupported;
MS Office 2007 Win – Right to left languages supported for years.
And there’s almost certainly to be more features restricted to the Windows version of Office.
All these lacking features for the Mac version are deliberate so MS can cling to their ill-gotten Windows monopoly position, by preventing Macs from penetrating the corporate sphere.
How about someone launch a class action against MS for these obvious anti-trust violations? Surely it would have a better chance of success that all those bogus anti-competitive charges against Apple/iTunes/iPod? It’s plainly obvious what MS is up to here.
Come on Mac heads – time for revenge against MS of the legal kind.
(Personally, I’d never buy a MS product for my personal or business use. I have MS Office on my Macs, but only because they paid me to have it – it came free with my Macbook and they gave me $50 AU through a mail-in rebate – idiots!)
@Stuart,
You have a great point. Considering MS’ practices with Windows and Office and the growing juggernaut of Apple, this would be an incredibly compelling case to make for an anti-trust lawsuit.
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incredibly compelling case to make for an anti-trust lawsuit.
At this point, what’s another lawsuit gonna do?
IMO this is an incredibly compelling case to say FSCK MS, and switch to someone who doesn’t sell crippleware.
If MS doesn’t really want to sell software, why should anyone buy from them?
Who else is going to have problems if Office 2008 doesn’t support VBA?
@ Stuart
Good idea – I vote you as President!
Down with Microsoft and it’s Office 2008
1) not a cocoa app
2) mostly 2007 innovations
3) four years of sitting on their anti-innovative “r”ses
4) spending too much to FUD Apple
5) spending money to stronghold partners like HD-DVD
6) a Zune looks too much like a iPod – Apple must SUE
Bo-Bleep
Too little, waaaaaay too late. Already made the switch at work, (several 100 of us) to iWork. FINALLY completely, microsoft-free. Now if I can only get my Leopard to stop yakking on me sometimes…. C’mon, Apple. Where’s that stability update?
tThe article states, “the programs are still Carbon, rather than Cocoa.”
What does this mean? What’s the significance of this information?
Glad to see at least some people are using iWork. The truth however, is that most people using Macs in business do use Microsoft Office. Any place you find Macs in medium to large businesses, if there was no Office, there would be no Mac.
Most people still e-mail Word documents around and there is a great deal of collaboration on these documents. Without the ability to use Word and Excel, the growth of Macintosh would be significantly slowed.
I don’t like it, I just know what’s out there. I constantly try to get people to use pdf files rather than e-mailing Word and Excel documents. It’s still hard to get them to change.
And this visual basic thing is a big problem. I have one client that has countless complex budgeting spreadsheets that utilize visual basic heavily. Not sure what we’re going to do there.
If the producers that need those spreadsheets want updates, the talk is right now, converting them to Windows Vista.
” MAC the Office halo effect ”
Thank God I wasn’t taking a sip of coffee when I read that!
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theloniusMac,
the ability to follow changes in Pages works through the export to Word and back. I have, in the last weeks, exchanged manuscript versions with colleges who currently serve time in MSHell. There was no problem at all.
Likewise, with Excel-Numbers.
With Keynote, I had a funny experience last spring. I was attending a workgroup meeting in South America, and the designated laptop (a design wonder made by Dell) for the “powerpoint presentations” failed to recognise the beamer. Well, my MacBookPro certainly had no problems. Next, everybody and their brother shoved USB sticks into my MBP, and I tried to run their WinPP presentations using Office 2004. Failure! All Excel-created tables were shown as poor rebel flag imitations. Just for the heck of it, I imported the WinPP stuff into Keynote: voila! Perfect presentations. The little limitation that PPP are imported in 800×600 by default can be overcome easily. Just open a new Keynote document at 1024×768, and then drag the slides from the imported PPP into the new document.
After the full day session, I combined all the Keynote presentations into one PDF, for distribution to the partners. What can I say, last fall, when me met the next time, four out of twenty partners were sporting brand-new MacBooks! LOL.
Stuart said “… Anti-competitive? I’ll give you anti-competitive …!”
Great comment Stuart. I am retired and not dependent on being able to read all or any MS office docs. If I have to, I use Neo Office. But even when not being able to render properly an MS Office document, I just don’t even try to read it. If it comes from a friend, I will ask if it can be sent as a PDF.
Microsoft must have read all of the list of practices forbidden by the Sherman Antitrust Act and said. “Wow, what a business plan! We will use it to win.”
Every maneuver of Microsoft is evil. Every act is meant to limit, hinder and destroy its competitors — not by offering a better product, but by cutting off any choice on the part of their end users.
I refuse to buy or use MS products, period. MS is a truly evil company and should be shunned. Pound that wooden stake into the vampire’s heart and feel no remorse.
The sad fact is that a Mac in a business environment needs to be 100% compatible with any MS Office file from the PC side to be a viable solution to business heads that sign POs. The only way Apple can even attempt to change this is to release iWork for Windows. If they do that however, MS will most likely drop Office development for Mac creating a stalemate.
Judging from the past, Apple will create it’s own software solution if it’s forced to when others do not support the Mac. I believe iWork was produced because an Office update from 2004 was nowhere in sight. Safari as well because IE was bad on the Mac (most use Firefox and Safari now). iPhoto because of Adobe’s poor consumer photo Mac offerings. If Microsoft produced excellent software for the Mac, I believe Apple would kill off iWork. Didn’t MS make excellent software for the Mac at one time? What happened and why can’t it happen now? If your not making the money as expected on Vista, MS shoud at least be making up some of that loss on selling great Office software to Mac users.
Did Apple make a crappy version of iTunes or Quicktime for Windows? No, because they can make a lot of money from Win users even thought it is a competing OS platform. Why does MS not have the same philosophy? MS needs to understand that yes, Apple makes great software but they also make a ton of money from hardware sales which MS does not except for the xBox.
I would like Apple to give their apps (iCal, Mail) Exchange support. Then we can hook into Windows networks and work seamlessly.