Microsoft Office for Mac: Excel, Word, Powerpoint and Entourage | Mactopia
Well, Microsoft’s version of Office for Mac has finally been updated (and it’s a Universal app - so it’ll work speedy on those Intel Macs). MS decided not to update their previous version to a Universal binary so Mac users who had to use Office for some reason or another were working with a pretty sluggish app.
Personally, I’m not all that impressed with the new version. It’s like some sort of hybrid bastard baby of Office 2004 and Office 2007. All the nice features I liked about Office 2007 aren’t there, and all the compromised decisions of 2004 are. Also, still no Mac OneNote.
I was quite excited about this product, but after iWork ‘08 I found I really didn’t need it as Pages was finally a worthy alternative to Word that worked fast and was well integrated into OSX. Everyone I’ve introduced to iWork (up to and including the most recent Mac convert, my mom) has loved using Pages - clean interface, lots of functionality, and works just dandy with Word files (with the occasional bit of weirdness in complicated documents). I talked a lot about word processor options back in August (The Joy of Word Processing).
But, different strokes for different folks… Get them here (your Uni store may have them at a better price. Mine doesn’t, but yours may)
Microsoft Office 2008 for Home and Students
Apple iWork ‘08
And some free alternatives (though I find them sluggish on an Intel Mac)
For PC users, of course… you have the (in my opinion) excellent Office 2007 (and OneNote!) and of course OpenOffice and its variations work well.
Have a favorite word processor I didn’t mention? Let’s hear about it!
17/01/2008 at 11:25 am Permalink
I really love Office 2007. One of the best features is the immediate preview to the settings you select, such as mouse over a font size and you can see your document in the font size. Its such a useful feature and saves me loads of time. OpenOffice is really good though, especially because its free. It’s the best free Office alternative out there. On the Macs at school, I’m stuck using AbiWord, its a really weird word processor, and I don’t like it at all.