| Office 2008 for Mac, Home and Student Edition (Mac) | 
 enlarge | From: Microsoft
Category: Software
List Price: £106.99
Buy New: £78.99
You Save: £28.00 (26%)
Buy New from £78.99
Avg. Customer Rating:   (37 reviews)
Sales Rank: 17
Format: Dvd-rom
Platforms: Macintosh, Mac Os X
Media: CD-ROM
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Batteries Included: No
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3
Dimensions (in): 0.1 x 0.1 x 0
MPN: GZA00006
Model: GZA00006
UPC: 882224526302
EAN: 0882224526302
ASIN: B000X86ZAS
Release Date: January 16, 2008
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Bit of a disappointment March 17, 2008
11 out of 13 found this review helpful
Having used office 2008 for a month or so, I must admit to being a bit underwhelmed. Its been a long time since the last release of MS office and the 2004 version was starting to look old. This version has been given a facelift and now runs natively on an intel mac but... thats about it. Whilst the apps themselves are superb, they haven't changed dramatically in years and it would have been nice to see some genuine innovation from Microsoft here. Look at applications like Scrivener for word processing and Apple's own Numbers spreadsheet and you'll see some compelling ways of doing things which show some real insight into how people work. After 4 years, I would have hoped that Office would see some similar innovations but as far as I can tell, this version mainly offers cosmetic changes. I know they had to port their codebase from Codewarrior to Xcode but surely they had time to come up with something better than this?
Another concern is that the Windows and Mac versions are diverging in terms of both interface and functionality. This version has an interface which has more in common with Office 2004 than with Office 2007 and does not use the "ribbon" toolbar of the latter. Also, the omission of VBA scripting in this version is unforgivable.
In terms of speed, I was expecting a speed boost now that the suite is not running under Rosetta on my Macbook. As far as I can see, things run at pretty much the same speed and all the individual apps take quite a while to open. I've also experienced frequent crashes, particularly in Word and Excel.
Overall, despite the above criticisms, the individual applications are all excellent but for the average home user, much of the functionality of Office 2008 is superfluous and there are cheaper alternatives available
The good: Looks nice, universal binary
The bad: No obvious speed boost, frequent crashes, lack of VBA scripting, different interface to Office 2007, elements gallery can't be disabled and uses a lot of vertical screen space, brings nothing new to the table, poor value compared to Windows version which includes VBA scripting and MS access for a lower price.
 Many interesting features, nice design, not stable March 14, 2008
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
Office 2008 was at first a very pleasant surprise. As opposed to its PC counterpart (Office 2007) it has a much better interface allowing one to be more efficient. Another pleasant surprise was that some shortcomings of Powerpoint 2004 were now solved. At first... after having worked with it for a longer period of time, I have identified many problems with the performance of the system. I have experienced many crashes (especially when changing the layout of pictures I feel like I need to be extra careful) and the saving of the documents takes longer than before. In addition in expose, the names of the files do not appear when you move your cursor over the file, thus making navigation between different documents not really straightforward. In general, I think that the software has many features, but a service-pack is needed urgently in order to make things work better and become more stable.
 Fairly OK so far February 29, 2008
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
I've had Office 2008 for Mac for a few weeks and so far it has pretty much behaved itself. Yes, it did crash once (cannot remember what I was doing) but the file was autorecovered.
The software seems to run smoothly and there are no freezes or waits. I wonder if this is because I immediately upgraded my iMac RAM to 4Gb when I bought it?
The only problems I am encountering are differences in layout and controls to the earlier (PC) Office software I use at work. For example I cannot find a button to compress image sizes in powerpoint presentations so the files don't grow too large and there appear to be fewer slide layout options etc.
Most importantly, Office 2008 for Mac keeps my existing Word, Excel and Powerpoint files looking the same. I found Open Office changed formatting etc. and iWorks stripped out all the hyperlinks in my documents. However good they are I haven't got time to restore every Office file to working condition under a different application.
 All of these reviews are correct... February 15, 2008
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
Difficult one. Do you keep using an older version or do you upgrade?
Well, despite reading the reviews here, I installed the new version, and yes, when I tried to paste some figures or a chart from Excel into Word, it instantly crashed Word.
But here is a rather random thing. If you paste it from the new Excel into an old Word version "X", it goes in just perfectly.
That's all I have found so far, and that's enough to make me sad. It's hardly a power user thing, to want to paste a chart into a word document.
My advice would be to wait until they sort out these errors, or at the very least keep your old version of Word on your computer so that you can just ignore the new one!
Good luck.
Beware: corrupts files from previous versions of office February 13, 2008
8 out of 10 found this review helpful
Been using Office 2008 for a month. Had some problems, but generally it appears OK. Not good, but OK. At least it's a universal binary so should be a bit faster (it's slightly faster) and more reliable (definitely not).
Discovered that PowerPoint 2008 has corrupted a set of presentations for a course. It messes up the fonts and seems to break the underlying template.
This has resulted in my publishers requiring me to completely re-do an update using Windows and PowerPoint 2003. Needless to say this will cost an enormous amount of time, tedium, and not to mention the hassle of using Windows.
Office 2004 was completely compatible with Office 2003.
I'm not the only person who's reported problems with Office 2008. I've read a lot about problems with Word and Excel.
I shall be deleting Powerpoint 2008, Word 2008 and Excel 2008. That leaves Entourage 2008. And for 90, that makes it a pretty expensive email client. And BTW, Entourage 2008 doesn't import PST files either. For that you have to use Exchange or buy a 3rd party addon.
So, caveat emptor.
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