Hands-On Report--Microsoft Office:mac 2008

[1/22] [Updated] Hands-On Report--Microsoft Office:mac 2008

While at the Apple Store over the weekend I picked up a copy of Microsoft's Office:mac 2008--Standard Upgrade Edition for $239.95. [Update: Several readers pointed out that if one will not ever need to connect to an Exchange server, then the best deal is Office:mac 2008 for Home and Student Edition with three licenses for as low as $131.] I also picked up a copy of TaxCut Premium Federal, State and e-file for $69.95 to begin pecking away at my 2007 tax returns.

Installation

Upgrading my installation of Office:mac 2004, itself an upgrade from Office:mac v.X, was straight forward. Microsoft has adopted Apple's installer rather than a simple drag and drop copy from the CD. Fortunately, the installer only requested the Office:mac 2008 Product Key so I did not have to hunt around for my original Office:mac v.X Product Key.

TIP 1--Save some hard disk space. The space required for a complete install is 36.4GB, according to the installer. However, the final Microsoft Office 2008 folder is only 909MB in size vs 510MB for the Office 2004 folder. A bit of hard disk space can be saved, I think, by clicking the "Customize" button to get a custom installation and then deselecting all of the Proofing Tool languages except the one(s) that you will actually use. I don't know how much is saved because the installer incorrectly shows everything as 0 bytes. The 909MB includes all of the Proofing Tool languages.

Tip 2--Don't blindly delete older Office versions. At the end of the installation, I was asked if I wanted to delete other copies of Office, in my case Office:mac 2004. Without thinking, I did this and later emptied the Trash. It turned out to be a mistake--I had given Microsoft too much credit for doing it smartly. The installer not only deleted the applications and any supporting system files, as I had surmised it would, but the entire Office:mac 2004 folder and everything in it including my custom FAX templates. Fortunately, I'm running Leopard so I was able to retrieve all of my custom files with Time Machine. To save older clip art, templates, themes, etc., you can copy your old Office Folder from Applications>Microsoft Office 'version'>Office to your desktop and rename it. After installing Office:mac 2008, the files you want to use from a previous version can be copied to the appropriate folder in Applications>Microsoft Office 2008>Office>Media. I would recommend against copying any .framework files, however.

Performance

One minor disappointment is that Office:mac 2008 applications running natively on my MacBook Pro do not seem to launch significantly faster than did Office:mac 2004 applications that ran under Rosetta emulation, although subsequent times are much faster than the first in both versions. I did not actually measure those times so the comparison is subjective but Word:mac 2008 on my 15" 2.4GHz MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo launches much slower than Word:mac 2004 on my 12" 867MHz PowerBook G4--21 vs 11 sec at first but both take 4 sec subsequently.

Unfortunately, the speed trick for Office:mac 2004 of deleting the FontCacheTool file does not work in Office:mac 2008. Doing so in Office:mac 2008 disables Word:mac 2008 so it won't launch at all. FontCacheTool caches and checks all available fonts on first launch so one might improve first launch speed by deleting those fonts not used.

Once launched, Office:mac 2008 applications do seem to open documents much faster than Office:mac 2004, especially PowerPoint presentations with lots of images originally made on Windows. It also does so without firing up our MacBook Pro's fans, a welcome change.

User Interface and Use

The menus and commands for Office:mac 2008 applications have been re-organized and some are new so there is some learning required to navigate them. But its not too bad. I like the new look and feel and organization although I miss the transparentizing floating palettes in Office:mac 2004.

The new window header with design and content template image views that is consistent among the applications is really cool. Many of the templates are very similar in look and function to those found in Apple's iWork '08.

I won't go over all of the details because there are too many and we are not really an expert in Office, using it as little as possible. Entourage:mac 2008 supposedly has more improvements under the hood to work better with a Microsoft Exchange server. I have never used Entourage:mac nor an Exchange server so I can't really comment on this functionality. The same with Messenger:mac and Remote Desktop Connection, the latter is a separate download.

Office:mac 2008 handled all of our sample Windows Office 2007 files in Microsoft's new Open XML format.

So far I have found just one significant but weird bug. Copy and paste from a Word:mac 2008 document to a Dreamweaver CS3 document does not work. It does work to TextEdit and every other application I tried, except Dreamweaver CS3. I don't know if the bug is in Office:mac 2008, Dreamweaver CS3 or Leopard but copy and paste does work from Office:mac 2004 to Dreamweaver CS3.

In summary

Office:mac 2008 installed perfectly while upgrading our Office:mac 2004 and it runs well on our 15" 2.4GHz MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo. Mac users with Intel-based Macs will be very happy with breaking free from Rosetta emulation. I think that Office:mac users will like the new 2008 interface improvements and functionality. Those who interact a lot with Windows Office 2007 users will be happy with the ease of handling Microsoft's new Open XML format. [Bill Fox]