So here we are faced with another version of Microsoft’s behemoth and I’m not terribly excited. I’ve been using Microsoft products since Works, back in the day, and I’ve got to say that with the slow and steady rise of web-based editors and programs with better workflow and features — some aimed at long form writers rather than “office workers” — have slowly replaced my Microsoft Office mindshare. Heck, even newcomer Pixelmator turned me off of that old standard, Photoshop, so maybe I was just ready for some change.
Given my current “Meh” attitude in regards to Office, I wanted to give Word 2008 a quick look and asses its various merits over 2004 and, as I did with Pages, decide if I should switch — or, rather, stay.
Word 2008 borrows liberally from Word 2007 for Windows yet interestingly avoids the “ribbon” UI, maintaining the top menu bar rather than a set of tabs along the top. More importantly, the Office icon doesn’t hang out in the top left corner, either, reducing visual clutter. The task bar is about the same but the icons are much larger and easier to hit.
But wait — bigger icons? That’s it? Well, Word has a number of templating features that were once relegated to the “new file” interface in Word 2004. For example, you can dump in canned title pages and charts just by hitting one of the pre-made templates under the tool bar. And for another example, you can create a quick table or chart, complete with shading, in seconds. Great for making reports, not so good if you’re writing blog posts or a short story based on your experience in Prague last summer where you totally got drunk every night and were way into gypsies.
So Word 2008 is a nice improvement, especially for office users. It is aimed squarely at the work environment and just barely infringes on the things iWork has been doing for years, namely making it easy to create interesting content with templates. However, as I’ve described, the tools in Word 2008 will soon grace a TPS report near you. It probably won’t grace your next novel.
Because this is not a corporate IT blog, I’m hard pressed to get into the Automator improvements or the Entourage interaction. I will review Entourage in good time, but I would say 90% of us are going to use Word to write the occasional resume or longer office document. The new version seems snappier than the old version, which isn’t much help, but other than standard UI changes I can’t really see many major differences. Unfortunately, OS X already comes with a number of useful applications for handling contacts and email and when, really, is the last time you needed to do a Mail Merge? Whereas I was pleased by the improvements in Word 2007 for Vista, I’m nonplussed by this version.
Incidentally, I’ve been using Scriviner for longer writing and TextEdit for blog posts. I use Word for one simple reason — the “Send To…” feature. I know it’s silly, but I love being able to write a piece for the Times or whatever and click send to. Pages doesn’t have that. Call me a freak if you’d like, but that’s really the only reason.
So, in conclusion, upgrade if you’re in an office — after all, it is called Office 2008. If you’re at home, use Google Docs, OpenOffice, Pages or anything else — Word 2008 is officially overkill.
I will attempt to review each application on its own in series. Next: Excel 2008! You know, for spreadsheets.
The fact that they have left out VBA support is going to affect a lot of people, Excel users and cross-platform apps like my company’s MathType equation editor to name some of them. While Microsoft has stated that it is too hard to make VBA work on Intel Macs, this is really hard to believe. First, this is the biggest (or at least richest s/w company in the world. Second, the VBA engine runs on Intel in the Windows products. Finally, how hard can it be? Presumably only a little bit of it (if any at all) is written in PowerPC assembler. It is just another case of Microsoft’s marketing agression via selective feature support.
Paul
I didn’t even mention VBA support because I haven’t used it since NT versions of Office and wouldn’t know where to start. I agree that it sucks that they took it out, though. Someone, somewhere, was using it.
I’ve been using Office 2008 (Word and Powerpoint) for since it was available on Amazon, and although I keep resisting the temptation to switch back to Word 2004, I am pretty close to doing so.
Word 2008 is a perfect example of why people do not like Microsoft products. After four years of waiting I was really expecting something special, but find myself frustrated with many of the components, and also with some minor stability issues.
The first frustration was that Word 2004 crashed when quitting. It turns out that upgrading from 2004 to 2008 caused word not to create a normal template and so I was forced to create a new account and then copy the normal template across.
The second one comes when you start the application, and wait, and wait, and. . . It seems to take quite a while to load on my 1.67GHz G4 PB. Its not much better on my dual G5 desktop either.
My first impression of the new interface is mixed. It bears a striking resemblance to Pages, but without the attention to detail. This causes the grey parts to look a little clunky and chunky, particularly when you start adding toolbars as it seems I cannot dock toolbars on to the same row as another now. Another problem is that Word allows you to show icon or icons and text, but Pages also offers text only, which is really nice. Add to that the eye candy for the document elements bar and you soon lose half your screen. I can certainly live with the interface and it will probably grow on me. I have noticed that toolbars occasionally reset themselves and you need to add them again.
It seems that MS changed the way that pasted objects behave in 2008 relative to 2004 because when selected you can no longer adjust the image relative to text. For example if I paste an equation or chemical structure into a line of text I used to be able to use the font position adjustment to get everything lined up, but now with 2008 pasted objects take on the page layout image controls. There is probably some way of fixing this, or something I am doing wrong, but since I perform this type of pasting many times a day when writing documents I use for teaching chemistry it is really annoying. Interestingly, if I paste them in to 2004 and open the file in 2008, it works fine!
Why has equation editor not been updated for years? It is still the same, but now it seems to crash when trying change some of the fonts.
All in all I am a little underwhelmed by the new version, possibly because MS’s website made it sound like the greatest thing since sliced bread, or because I just was expecting something very slick.
Finally, I have to wonder why they selected a none standard font like Cambria for the default, and made it harder to change than before.
I’ve been trying to figure out how to fix the defaults on the Word template …. it’s a serious pain in the butt. It starts off with a Cambria font, which is similar to Times New Roman, but different enough that it’s unacceptable for what I’m doing — writing research papers. I write enough papers every day of the week that constantly having to go through the motions of changing the font, along with the line spacing (default is 10, it should be 0) is really ticking me off.
I can’t believe that M$ decided to take VB support out of Excel … that’s insanity … what’s the point of using the advanced features of Excel on a Mac now? I can pretty much through out my Computer Science for Business students training now, unless I want to buy a PC and load it with that God awful Office 2007.
Okay, back to Word — I found out that the settings for Office can be manipulated to a file named Document Elements.dotx located in the Applications/Microsoft Office 2008/Office/Document Elements folder. Problem is, when I try to replace it with my edited template, it crashes on startup now. I think M$ built that into the program …. seriously, and I normally scoff at the idea of conspiracies, but this is ludicrous.
But get this … when I would try to edit a template the way I wanted it to appear when Word starts, and then save it into the directory as Document Elements.dotx, Word would give me an error that it couldn’t overwrite the error. This wasn’t a default OS-X error, it was an error produced by Word. So I went into the terminal and manually removed the file, then copied the template into the directory.
At this point I’m just experimenting because there is no documentation about this stuff yet on the Web. It’s going to take a while for a programmer to figure this one out because they generally avoid Macs on principle … but soon I’m sure there’s going to be a solution to this crap and M$ would only have succeed in further alienating it’s customers.
To change the defaults, you must change the style sheets..
there are several ways to accomplish this, but the easiest is:
-Click ‘Format’ from the menu bar
-Select ‘Style…’
-Highlight the ‘Normal’ style sheet
-Click on the ‘Modify’ button
-Select font you want
-Make sure ‘Add to template’ is checked
-Click ‘Okay’ and then ‘Apply’
you can use this to change the other style sheets as well.. like the ones for the headings and such.
:)
Forgive my awful grammar …. it’s early enough in the morning that I’m typing with one eye open.
Does anyone know how to add a custom table to the quick table menu?
I use the same table at least 20 times a day, and because there is no macro feature in Word 08, I really want to find another way to automate this mundane task.
Thanks!
Office 2004 and 2008 for OS X are the most bugged pieces of software I have ever had to use, to the point now that I am desperate for some real software that really works.
I was never really of the opinion that Windows was so horrible (I used windows 15 years before also starting to use mac, when their first acceptable OS, OS X 10.3, was running). But I can now understand the level of hatred against Microsoft if Windows was once as big a piece of shit as Office 2004 & 2008 for OS X are.
At this point, I am really skeptical whether Office 2008 is a product that should be available for purchase or not. From my experience with a PowerPC powered IMAC with 1Go ram, it is one of the slowest software I have ever tried to use (I insist on try because it cannot possibly be USED, really). The last 4 times I have tried to open or save documents, it has crashed on me.
I have been coping with a similar behavior from Office 2004 for the last 5 years at work (mac only), and after the first 4 years where I often felt like throwing the computer by the windows, I kind of got used to the pathetic crashes in series, so I don’t mind anymore, but I strongly dis recommend anybody to buy the software.
What amazes me is that there is NO acceptable quality office suite for OS X now. I tried NEO OFFICE and ABIWORD 5 seconds each, to see it was even worse than level zero of OFFICE.
I just installed OPEN OFFICE for OS X, which didn’t exist last time I checked (or did it ?).
And the web apps are still not good enough for me.
Terrible, isn’t it ?
I think MAC should realize what is happening, because let me tell you that the last time a software crashed on me on Windows is long long ago. I don’t even remember last time I had any major bug in Office on XP or Windows 2000. Or in any other soft actually.
These days, stability of Windows (XP, never tried Vista) is what should be expected of an OS.
But OS X is still another story.
The OS is kind of fine (stability-wise, I mean), but the software, my boy, the software…