Commentary: Microsoft Office 2007 for Mac delayed until Late 2007--Does Anyone Care?

The significant delay of eight months after the Windows version was confirmed by The Courier Mail, an Australian news site. It will be tailored to Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard," be written in XML and run natively on Intel-based Macs. We don't care at all but does anyone?

We don't care because Microsoft Office is not that essential to our work any longer. We mostly use Apple's Pages or TextEdit for word processing and Keynote for presentations. We use Office when we need Excel or to spiff up a PowerPoint exported from Keynote because we must submit the presentation in advance and it must be in PowerPoint. But then we mostly use Office:mac v.X which still runs fine and is fast enough under Rosetta.

Our guess is that only those who use very large models in Excel on an Intel-based Mac will feel much of a pinch from the Office 2007 delay. Perhaps, Apple will relieve their discomfort by including an Apple-built spreadsheet in iWork '07 that is compatible with Excel. [Bill Fox]