OK i got office 08 a few days ago and today was the first day i could try it out. It sucked!
It was very disappointing, so i went back to using iWork 08.
It's so much easier to use.
Anyone else disappointed with MS Office 08?
From my experience, Word is very good and can do many things that Pages cannot. Excel and Powerpoint are also very good. The thing that really disappointed me was Entourage. It's very buggy and can't do many of the things that Mail can do. It can't detect names, addresses, phone numbers and the like and automatically save that info in it's Address Book or calendar. This is a seemingly simple feature of Mail and I've grown to love it. It wants to sync it's address book with Mac Address Book. Not good because I have to maintain 2 different address books. I've had it crash several times already.
No built in stationary and cannot easily work with photographs in email. I realize these features are more for home use and Entourage isn't designed with that in mind but lets face it, those of us who use Mac's use them because they enable us to be more creative and are easier to use. M$ missed an opportunity to make this office suite a must have in my opinion. Oh sure, it will be the must have app for office use but only because they have a strong hold on the business community and we're forced to use it for compatibility reasons alone.
Below is an excerpt from Macworld. I couldn't have stated this better so I'll quote them.
"Entourage uses a single database file to store its information, and that file can become quite large over time. When Apple released Spotlight, Microsoft created a workaround so Spotlight could index and search Entourage’s e-mail messages: it replicates each message as a small text file in your User Library folder. But there’s no such workaround for Leopard’s Time Machine backup facility. If you receive even a single e-mail, the whole database is marked as new, and Time Machine will back the entire thing up every hour. If you’re short of backup disk space, you might consider excluding ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2008 Identities/ from your Time Machine backup, and regularly backing up that directory using another method."
Oh and one more thing. Entourage already has a known bug where it loses the ability to alert you to incoming mail audibly. Not only that but there is no way to set your own sound file for any of the alert tones. So not only are you stuck with the tones that M$ has selected for you but they don't always work. Overall I think that Office 2008 is nothing more than a pig with lipstick. It's Office 2004 rewritten in Universal Binary with a UI update.
Mail has some similar issues with the alert tones but at least it works half the time which is 50% more than what I get with Entourage, LOL. I feel confident that Apple will fix Mail faster than M$ will fix Entourage.
