Office for Mac 2008 support umbilical chopped off Mac fans wedded to Microsoft Office face a stark choice on April 9 – upgrade or continue running the unsupported Office for Mac 2008. April 9 2013 is the date when Microsoft will stop providing new code and security fixes for Office for Mac 2008, which launched in January 2008. Redmond is urging Mac users to take out an …
So Office for Mac Home & Student comes with Outlook? That's good to know. I'm half way towards a Mac/Win setup so Office on Mac is an alternative to Office on Win. Outlook may not be great, but if you've been using it since it was called exchange & schedule, it's handy to stick with it.
MS dropped outlook from the Home & Student PC version from 2007 onwards. Then they went and published a blog about how Outlook was so useful to Students (although you could by a copy of Outlook 2007 to go with your Student Office for an extra £163, which was just over twice the price of Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Access combined.)
2011 has a number of *new* bugs -- but still no fix for the Asian languages compatibility problem that's plagued Office since, well, forever.
(About half the time, whole chunks of Japanese, Chinese, or Korean documents created under Asian localisations of Windows look like line noise when read into Office for Mac or LIbreOffice. Apparently, even Office 2011 hasn't entirely abandoned "code pages". <Sigh>)
>"That means, after just one year and four months of Office 365 you'll have paid for the equivalent of owning the suite, but with the added bonus that you keep on paying because you are on a service contract."
$10 a month for 5 licenses, or $139 for 1 license. So, if you use all 5 licenses, it would take 6 years, 8 months to pay as much monthly as you would by paying for one at a time.
Publisher is rubbish, definitely the worst DTP program ever to be foisted upon the world. And if low end DTP is your bag then Pages does a far better job, as does Swift.
Access is the nastiest database the world has ever seen. Its cross platform sibling, Filemaker, is far superior (and it's amazing that the two programs were ever related). Personally, though, I'd be going for MySQL or something similar for true cross platform portability.
And OneNote is ably replicated in the Word for Mac Notebook view.
Honestly though, Office is not a joy to use - and, if it weren't for the issue of compatibility with PC users, I'd use iWork exclusively.
> And OneNote is ably replicated in the Word for Mac Notebook view.
Oh, rubbish. I use both. Notebook view is better than nothing, but it's missing about 95% of the functionality of OneNote. It's basically good for banging out indented pure text notes in linear sequence, with perhaps ten pages in a "notebook". Push it beyond that and it's very poor even for the features it is supposed to implement. It also has problems with its rendering, so that you can find that a chunk of text simply doesn't display: this is absolutely fundamental functionality which does not work reliably. A couple of weeks ago I even managed to corrupt a document by moving a notepad tab (i.e. a section), so that if I tried to display that section, Word would lock up. The only reason I use it is because the small number of things that it does do happen to correspond to one job I do on a Mac every 2-3 weeks, and I want to use Word to be able to read the documents a few years on. I'm not a great fan of Evernote compared to OneNote, but for most purposes it is a country mile better than notebook view.
While the jury is still out on the general concept of leased software, the article and some of the comments are a bit off.
They aren't taking away the ability to purchase the current version of office (2011).
I am sure if you really need 2008, you can continue to get that under volume licensing as per usual, or ebay.
While it has some new (and some old) bugs still about, Office 2011 is _vastly_ faster, at least in my experience (100+ nodes of various apple machines).
On the subject of 365 - it gets you access to install more than one copy if your needs fall within the licensing TOS.
Additionally, it gets you outlook, which makes the comparison more like 200$+ vs 100$ a year. Finally, you do get access to one note and other services, albeit in their online versions.
While I am far from a Microsoft evangelist, there are plenty of things to be upset about without making up new ones.
Karl P
Pay for an office suite for my Mac? Seriously? ROFLMAO!
OpenOffice.org, NeoOffice, LibraOffice.... Take your pick and don't feed the beast.
It's fat enough already.
I use OO.o and work use M$ Office, no problems either end and both convert to .pdf files smoothly when required.
They don't mind Google docs either, come to that. Paying for M$ Office is looking sooooo 2003 to me.
I suggest neither, I only speak from personal opinion. I have not and will never pay Microsoft for any of their software. Having said that I have bought and loved 2 Microsoft USB mice, the best things M$ ever made imho and a steal at 26 pounds each. The software is and always was extortionately priced mutton dressed as lamb.
As for your milked Apple fanboi assumptions, I'm posting from my Hackintosh. The Jobs is dead, long live the Jobs!
Microsoft claims that its actually a benefit to "always have the latest version" when it comes to Office 365. Quite frankly I heavily disagree on that point.
The latest isn't always the greatest, and that holds especially true with some of the Microsoft products. Unless of course you like change because of the change, but I for one only welcome change when it makes sense.
And trying to make a desktop application appear as it it were a web application isn't a change I'm very fond off. With a regular Office license you can simply tell MS to take a hike and continue to use the software you want. With a subscription model all you can do is allow Microsoft to tell you to take a hike and use whatever they provide you with. Even if you liked an earlier Office version a whole lot better.
I was happily running Office v.X which must have been over 10 years old. It was absolutely fine, apart from the inability to digest docx files. Only upgraded to 2011 because my firm had a deal for buying for home use for minimal cost.
Using an unsupported option should hold few fears.
My office suite productions have barely changed in the last decade, yet MS continues to spew out bloated products with reworked navigation every few years. How much more can you add to an office suite anyway? Could I sign up for an Office 2003 contract at 99c per month instead of using 365?
> MS really need to sort out the backup problems with Outlook for Mac (effectively, you can't) , although we know they won't, don't we!
MS need to sort out Outlook backup, full stop. At some stage long ago, someone had the bright idea that everything should be in a database on Windows. Admittedly, that was the orthodoxy of computer science at the time, and Windows was supposed to be changing to a database file system (WinFS). That left us with gigabyte .PST and .OST files rather than small files that could be individually backed up: a problem for both MacOS and Windows.
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