Software Review: Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, Part 2

By Dr Greg Mulhauser
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This second part of our review of Office 2008 for Mac — Microsoft’s latest business suite for the Macintosh — covers Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage.

Article Contents

More on Word (Continued from Part 1)…

There’s one other oddity which I find particularly aggravating, but since I have not encountered this documented elsewhere, I cannot be sure whether it is specific to my setup or whether it is the intended behaviour: every time I copy text using command-C, Word auto-saves the whole document. (There is a preference setting for auto-saving, of course, but the normal auto-saving behaviour occurs after a configurable period of time, not with every single copy command.) If the document is of any significant size, that means a guaranteed wait before I can make use of whatever it is I’ve just copied. If I try to switch away from Word before the saving is complete — say, to paste my text into another application — I cannot make the switch. I just have to wait. Rrrggh.

On the plus side, in addition to the new interface and the improved rendering engine, Word also offers a surprisingly capable and easy to use Publishing Layout to complement the usual Print Layout, Notebook Layout, etc. This provides decent page layout capabilities which, while they cannot compete with full-fledged page layout packages, nonetheless extend the capabilities of Word in an eminently usable direction. (And contrary to claims in some reviews, the Publishing Layout does not require that a new copy of the current document be created: it is possible to switch back and forth between Publishing and Print Layouts.) It also provides new tools for non-fiction writers, including a built-in bibliography feature which, while limited to just four different styles, nonetheless is better than what was available before. (And those four styles, including APA and Chicago, cover most of the bases for academic writing.) It won’t take the place of a dedicated solution like EndNote, but it will do for simple bibliographies.

Office Applications: Excel

Microsoft Excel

Like Word, Excel has been around for very long time; I wouldn’t expect anything too major to happen to this leading spreadsheet with more than two decades of development behind it. Yes, a few keyboard shortcuts have been changed, and the Elements Gallery is available just as it is in Word; there’s also a new Formula AutoComplete and a Formula Builder palette; and it’s now much easier to try out different charting options (thanks to the Elements Gallery). But I haven’t personally discovered any major Earth-shattering changes.

There have, however, been widespread reports of difficulties exchanging files with Windows users, particularly where pivot tables are concerned. This, coupled with the VBA problem, means that if collaborating with others or even using macro-laden worksheets produced by others is an important part of your Excel-based workflow, you should check very carefully to be sure you’ll still be able to inter-operate before upgrading to Excel 2008. Many businesses and even home users may well choose to stick with Excel 2004 or even switch to Excel for Windows (on a Mac, of course!) for exactly that reason.

Office Applications: PowerPoint

Microsoft PowerPoint

PowerPoint 2008 benefits perhaps more than any other component in Office 2008 from a new Smart Art Graphics feature, which can turn a simple bulleted list into all manner of snazzy (or occasionally hokey) looking graphics. This is the sort of thing that I used to do manually — i.e., slowly and painstakingly — back in the 90s in order to make a presentation more visually meaningful. I could have saved myself literally weeks or months of my life if I had had this capability back then. If this feature can help rescue us all from the hideous lists of bullet points put together and called a ‘presentation’ by so many folks in the business and academic worlds, then I recommend that everyone upgrade immediately! If you are among the guilty ones (you know who you are), you now have no excuse for forcing your audiences to sit through page after page of bullet points.

Apart from this headline feature, PowerPoint 2008 also offers improved transitions, more themes and layouts, and various other minor improvements; it also supports the Apple Remote that comes with recent Macs.

Office Applications: Entourage

Microsoft Entourage

I can evaluate Entourage only as a former regular user of the software, rather than as a current regular user: although I relied on Entourage 2004 for several years, when Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) arrived, I moved to Apple’s own Mail. From initial impressions, however, the interface updates in Microsoft’s integrated email, contact, calendar and task management package are very encouraging. Particularly promising is the new "My Day" feature, which presents events and tasks for the day together in one place. I used this type of functionality for years on a Palm handheld, but it’s nice to see it appear on the desktop with Entourage as well. Unfortunately, the implementation is still a bit rough around the edges: you’re stuck with Microsoft’s colour choices for the "My Day" window, it doesn’t seem able to show a whole day’s events, and overdue items only appear in a separate pop-up.

I’ve tested Entourage 2008 using a few hundred megabytes of email and contacts from before I migrated to Mail, and in general everything feels more modern and less cluttered.

One thing that hasn’t changes is Entourage’s reliance on a single monolithic database for storage. That means two things: 1) if anything goes wrong in that one giant file, it is possible you will lose access to all your email, and 2) there are no incremental backups via Time Machine or any other system, because backing up means duplicating that entire file, even if nothing has changed except, say, updating a single message’s status from ‘unread’ to ‘read’.

A Few Other Caveats

I’ve already mentioned the elimination of VBA as a major issue for some users, plus the problems with copy and paste; there are a few other caveats which might also be relevant to the buying/upgrading question.

Of relevance to those considering a switch from Windows to the Mac, Microsoft has apparently begun re-introducing odd little changes in the interface and structure of Office between the two platforms, making it significantly more difficult than it used to be simply to swap users from the PC version of the suite to the Mac version. Conspiracy theorists across the web are viewing this as an attempt to defend the Windows platform itself against inroads by the Macintosh.

And while I’ve generally found the Office interface changes to be a big improvement, in many ways they remain just skin deep: things initially look much nicer, in my view, but to really take advantage of what the software can do frequently means returning to the same old quirky modal windows and curiously mixed-up settings that we’ve been living with for more than a decade, since the arrival of Word 6.

I’ve also frequently found Word in particular doesn’t play nicely with Spaces under Mac OS X 10.5: sometimes the application comes to the foreground in response to a click on its icon in the dock, while its active window stays in another space. This is the same type of behaviour I frequently see with Adobe CS3 applications; it’s not clear whether this is just poor support of Spaces by Microsoft and Adobe, or whether it reflects a deeper problem with Apple’s implementation of Spaces. Whatever the cause, these quirks with Spaces can — just like the auto-save with every copy command — really get in the way of smooth working.

Conclusions

Overall, Office 2008 is a solid update which manages to achieve a great deal through interface changes. Microsoft has succeeded in exposing more of the underlying power of the applications, and some of the new features — e.g., Smart Art Graphics when used within PowerPoint — can make a real difference to the final result of a given amount of work.

For some environments, however, the elimination of Visual Basic for Applications will be a deal-breaker (or, at least, a good reason for keeping Office 2004 around too). And while some users may never encounter the problems with copy and paste, for others these may prove to be a real headache.

Behind all this is the rapidly changing competitive landscape which I mentioned at the outset. Both what we’re doing and how we can do it are changing quickly for many people in organisations both large and small, and it remains to be seen whether large suites like Microsoft Office are going to be able to change quickly enough to keep up.

Office System Requirements and Pricing

Office 2008 requires a Mac with an Intel, PowerPC G5, or PowerPC G4 (500 MHz or faster) processor, 512 MB or more of RAM, 1.5 GB of available hard disk space, and Mac OS X version 10.4.9 or later.

Retail prices for the various packages are as follows:

 

This page was last reviewed by Dr Greg Mulhauser, Thursday, 4 December 2008.

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http://counsellingresource.com/practice/reviews/ms-office-2008/office-part2.html