Making the plunge tonight

Tonight I will be ordering my first macbook pro and office 08 for mac on the online apple store. I am so excited and cant wait to get home to place my order. Anything I should know and also, what are yalls opinion of Microsoft office 08 for mac?

I personally use Office 2008. Everyone else in my company uses Outlook. We also have many forms which were created in Word that I use for work. However, if it were not for my job, I would hold off on purchasing Office until to test drive the iWorks package that comes with your new Mac. You may find that you actually like Pages, Mail and Keynote better than Word, Entourage (Outlook), and PowerPoint.

Jaygray said:

I personally use Office 2008. Everyone else in my company uses Outlook. We also have many forms which were created in Word that I use for work. However, if it were not for my job, I would hold off on purchasing Office until to test drive the iWorks package that comes with your new Mac. You may find that you actually like Pages, Mail and Keynote better than Word, Entourage (Outlook), and PowerPoint.

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From what I heard, office 08 was overall a great product except for Excel. Since Excel doesnt support VBA or something like that. How well does Iwork convert stuff to office files for use in office? I most likely will need office becuase not only will I need it for the community college but also I plan on buying CS3 in the future for web development.

Also, I cant stand Outlook or Outlook Express. Both are junk IMO. Personally, I prefer Calypso, I use it at work.

As far as word processing is concerned, I've used Pages and Word 08, word being by far the better option in my opinion. In pages the spellcheck and proofreading tools are awful in comparison to word and the microsoft layout is much more intuative, more obvious formatting options and no functions hidden away in silly places (so far). Also compatability is a big issue, formatting tools differ between the two programs so even if you save in a word compatible format when using pages (rich text or something similar I think) your document may not be exactly as it was when you transfer it to office.
Microspft Entourage is a nice mac version of outlook, sets up accounts well etc, but it does suffer a common flaw in that it is slow.
The my day application is nice too, not an amazing technical advance or anything but a useful organisation tool thats easy to use and well linked in with entourage.

Another vote for Office 2008. Make sure when you install Office 2008, the free trial version which will probably be pre-installed on your new MacBook Pro is uninstalled - Office should do that but it has been known to miss.