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Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac Released
kylea writes "Office 2004 for Mac OS X has finally been released. From the Apple page: The latest improvements to the Office productivity suite promise new approaches to create, manage and distribute your projects. New features and tools in the programs help you get work done more efficiently. And now you can extend your reach beyond Office with greatly improved AppleScript support."
According to previous reports, you can download Office 2004 from LimeWire.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
It works just fine for me.
I hope they removed the "wipe my home directory" feature.
Can it connect seemlessly to Exchange servers?
-Sean
The only thing I noticed that doesn't transfer well so far has been bitmaps that are embedded in documents.
Conserve Oil, Recycle, Boycott Walmart
does anyone know if this is the full version (including pro) or the student/teacher edition? i heard the pro version was not going to be released until vpc 7 is done. i doubt there's any difference between any of the versions though *shrug*
- tristan
The spreadsheet just wasn't up to task--printing was a real problem. Information will be free and consciousness will be hosted on computers some day. But for now, office just does more.
-I am an elective eunuch.
I downloaded this the other day off LimeWire. I think there was a bug in the installer because it deleted a bunch of my files. So I tried it on a friend's Mac too. Same thing there. Leave it to Microsoft to not know how to write an installer.
This is due to a lack of both Exchange server support and .NET technologies on the Apple platform.
Their answer? Run XP. Defeats the purpose of getting an Apple to begin with if you ask me.
Stick with the Mono project for .NET compatibility, and wait for a OS X Native Open Office port while using Appleworks in the mean time.
If you're half as beautiful naked, you'd be 4 times as beautiful with twice as many clothes on.
And I was so impressed I bought the student/teacher edition. The improvements to Entourage alone make it worth it to me but the compatibility with windows versions is also a big plus. Yes it's expensive, yes it's microsoft but the MacBU is very much a mac unit, they love the mac and take a great deal of pride in this app. It's very elegant and easy to use. The only problem I'm having is with IMAP in Entourage, it seems to have trouble with the mailbox lock where as the older Entourage didn't. Hopefully the full version doesn't have this trouble, but if it does screw it, I'll switch to pop3, it's just that good of an app.
ruby -e 'require "base64";puts decode64("U3RlcCByaWdodCB1cC4gTWFyY2guIFB1c2gu")'
-e:1:in `decode64': _deprecated_base64 is deprecated; use Base64._deprecated_base64 instead
Might want to use:
ruby -e 'require "base64";puts Base64.decode64("...")'
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
The single biggest block to my using Entourage for my email rather than Mail.app is the fact that Office X did not integrate at all with OS X's built in address book or calendaring functionality. While I can live without iCal integration (maybe) the plain fact is that I'm damn sick of massaging my address book data every time I need to use it somewhere else - usually because MS has stupid import/export options. Can anyone using the new version tell me if Office talks to the system Address Book, and if so, how well it does so? I like syncing my Palm directly to the System (iSync) and hence to .mac, rather than to a MS sandbox and then having to pry my data out of there with a crowbar.
Now, there may be very good reason(s) why the MacBU chose not to integrate with the system PIM services (and yes, I know Office X predated stable versions of those services!). If that's the case, an informed explanation of why this is so would also be much appreciated.
Thank you!
A hero is someone who knows when to run away. I am a hero. -Trent the Uncatchable
Feh... LaTeX is a new-fangled text-markup package. I still write papers using troff, pic, tbl, etc. Seriously.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
One other thing is that the floating toolbars alpha fade after a few minutes of inactivity. They go opaque again after you mouse over them. That's a nice touch and indicates as to a lot more MacOS X native integration under the hood.
Other than that, well .... :-/
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
Am I the only one who thinks this is actually a step backwards? Couldn't they have better spent the effort on making it more compatible?
Oh wait...
The MS employees here are up to their old astroturfing tricks....funny to watch them talk to each other as if they were separate entities :)
I don't care how good the rest of the Mac version of Office is. Until the Exchange connectivity is MAPI instead of all those separate protocols that sort of act like MAPI, Mac Office Exchange connectivity is teh suck!
I'm using Office 2004, and as far as I have been able to tell it still doesn't integrate at all with Address Book or iCal.
It has been on sale for about a week at the Apple Retail and Web Stores.
I have the (full) teacher/student version. I get the mailbox lock error constantly for my IMAP account. I have it checking for new mail every 5 minutes, and about half the time I get an error.
On the web, people have suggested unchecking "send commands simultaneously" from the Account configuration menu (just google for it). But that doesn't seem to help. Any other suggestions?
Also, the "live sync" option for IMAP accounts doesn't seem to work. I expect to be notified immediately when I get new mail, but it only notifies me when I'm actively doing something with Entourage (reading old messages, etc.).
Finally, if you have "live sync" on AND have the account included in your "send & receive" schedule, Entourage seems to get the mail twice, resulting in duplicate mails appearing in my inbox. And then you can only "delete" one of them. To get rid of the second one, you have drag it to the trash.
I ran into all these problems the first hour of using Entourage. Very disappointing.
-Andrew
NoteBook View is very cool and it runs flawlessly for teeny-weeny 300 line notes, with say 2 tabs. However, start to cut and paste large amounts of text into it from other documents and you get a STALL or FREEZE.
Also, titles, in a large note, become impossible to position the cursor in the title boxes so your page doesn't get a title.
I really wonder is there ANY MANAGEMENT up there in Redmond. It seems the programmers can put into PRODUCTION any half-a**ed solution. Really, it's a great place to work for lazy incompetents. No Code Review or stress testing of Any Kind. Is this too harsh? Well, these idiots almost lost a good chunk of my data..
Word = TextEdit (reads/writes Word files)
PowerPoint = Keynote (reads/writes Powerpoints)
Entourage = Mail/Address Book/iSync (I will never give up my Bluetooth)
Excel = Mariner Calc
Two of those you have to buy. Keynote is $100 CDN, Mariner Calc is around $160. Panther was around the same and includes the rest. This is all cheaper - combined - than the standalone version of Word, last I checked.
Don't shell out the massive cash for Office Mac unless you really think you need it. Mostly what I deal with day-to-day is Word and PP files, and I do just fine with the above.
Sure, TextEdit isn't Word, but on the other hand.. it isn't Word, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
I'd like some honest feedback: Who upgrades MS Office and why?
My Macs are running Mac Office v.X, which was an upgrade from Mac Office 2001 whcih only ran under OS 9. But I don't see anything compelling me to upgrade to Mac Office 2004. I like the idea of Virtual PC, but I can't think of a single Windows Only app I need to use so I'll take a pass on VPC for now.
In the Windows world, I can tell you that I only ever upgrade MS office when I get a new computer and it comes with the whole package. It would be 'nice' to have Office XP running on my single PC, but since I bought the thing with Windows and Office 2000, I have upgraded to Windows XP but not bothered to upgrade Office to XP.
So when and more importantly, WHY do you shell out cash for an Office upgrade?
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
have't played with the new version but both are address books are scriptable so it should not be hard to write an applescript studio app to sync them. Not sure ab out the calenders though might ave a look when I get access to a copy. The applescript on entourage is intprevious verions has been some of the best I have seen
I have OfficeX running under Panther and generally it is nicer than the Windows version of Office. On my big machine I have Office 2K running under WindowsXP and the problem I have been having is that when I create a file on the Mac the formatting goes a bit screwy on the PC. Fonts change, characters just simply vanish. A case in point, I wrote a doc using OfficeX but when I opened it using Office2K a table that had * in it had lost them. I put them back and saved it. When I opened it again with OfficeX the table looked fine but it had changed every instance of courier font to arial and wrecked all the formatting.
I love the justification MS has for VPC, that you can check the formatting of your office docs to see that they will look right. If MS used a standard file format rather than having a program that just blows its brains all over the disc there wouldn't be these problems with formatting and that would be one less reason to buy VPC (from MS), Windows (from MS) and Office twice (both from MS). Oh, wait.......
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
This is what The Register are saying.
Online & Feelin' Fine
imagine if they worked on openoffice.org, gave it an aqua look 'n' feel and also threw in ximian's connecter so it could connect to ms exchange! it would be better than having to depend on microsoft for a proper office suite. let's face it, appleworks plain sucks. it never opens any ms office documents. even though openoffice.org is only 1.0.3 and needs x11 to work, it's still way better than any other alternative to ms office.
a lot of people think that they need ms office but they don't at all.
look at the safari situation. apple making their own browser from an existing open source rendering engine was the best thing they ever did. safari is way better than mac ie
I have three words for you: PDF.
I skipped the upgrade from Office 98 to Office 2001 because according to accounts I read in mailing lists, virtually none of the bugs that had (and have) been plaguing me in Office 98 were fixed.
(The worst is: unwanted and seemingly unpredictable behavior in the numbering and formatting of numbered lists when minor edits are made in other portions of the document).
I was unable to obtain from Microsoft anything corresponding to what other vendors refer to as "release notes" for Office 2001, or any list of bugs that were fixed.
Are there release notes or bug fix lists for Office 2004?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
"Now, there may be very good reason(s) why the MacBU chose not to integrate with the system PIM services"
It probably shouldn't be called a very good reason, but Entourage does have it's own integrated, competing calendar and address book, and Microsoft isn't exactly known for going out of their way to make their products bypass built-in features to interoperate nicely with the competition. Few programs from any vendor do.
In fact, it seems to me you may as easily ask why Apple didn't write open API's for the interface with address & calendar services so Microsoft could write Entourage in a way that other programs interface directly with it instead of with Address Book and iCal.
One other thing I'd like to note is that, while I miss the system integration (pulling Fax numbers out of Address Book when using print-to-fax, etc), Entourage's Address Book and Calendar are better than Apple's.
Anyway, there is a not-too-ugly way around this. There is a nice little app available that syncs Entourage & Address book. There's also a couple of converters from Entourage-> iCal. I know you don't want to run these all the time, but you don't have to. It should take about 2 minutes to assign an Applescript folder action to the folders that store the user data for both apps, that run the sync applications whenever the folder is updated. The only trick is that there's no ical-> Entourage import filter I could find, so you need to remember to make all your calendar updates in Entourage until there is one.
- Phat Tony.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
I had printing problems in it and was comparing office favorably to it.
-I am an elective eunuch.
Maybe someone slipped something in my coffee, but the day the "Home Directory Wiping version" came out I found myself in an Apple Store. There were copies all over of Office for Mac 2004, including the student and teacher addition. I was holding one in my hand while telling of the /. story to a friend of mine.
This post would then be a week or so late no?
I boycott signatures
Does this version have product activation? Does it force you to register, and force you to sign up for a Passport account in order to register?
I use and like a number of Microsoft products. But there are some things I won't do. Activation and Passport are among them.
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
home directories stored on an NFS mount?
We've got Office X and it insists on screwing up it's own preference files just because users home directories are stored on a file server.
I don't suppose they fixed this?
Where I work we use a LOT of shared Excel spreadsheets for filling in information about what has been completed on various versions of various products, and what that result was. It's a nice interface that's easily accessible... to WINDOWS clients. Office for Mac has somehow managed to skip over this really useful feature, requiring us to use Windows boxes to record all our results. AFAIK this feature wasn't put in to office 2k4 for Mac even though it's been around since Office XP in Windows. Honestly, I'd rather have something else, but I don't know any better way to get the job done. Anybody have suggestions?
I still say that Microsoft will stop making Office for the Mac and instead replace it with Office for Windows and a PC Emulator running a stripped-down Windows (VirtualPC which they bought from Connectix).
Did we learn nothing from all of the virii circulated through Office document macros???
I'd find the switch to turn that off pretty damn quickly!
I think that if they did want to develop an office suite, then I don't think that they would choose OpenOffice (just like they didn't build Safari on Mozilla).
As other posters have mentioned, they are a number of FOSS competitors to MS Office - my personal favourite Word replacement is AbiWord (the native OS X is not yet in "stable" - but it does look very encouraging)
Do they have some sort of alliance with Microsoft? Because they put out a lot of software for the others OS.
I agree with the parent. I plan to purchase MS Office for this exact reason. It's excellent software that's still unrivalled (at least on the Mac OS X platform) in terms of consistency and visual appearance, and also I feel that the existence of a format-compatible MS Office suite is a Good Thing for the Mac OS X platform, so why wouldn't I support it with my dollars? Go Microsoft, and keep making Office/Mac, and keep getting my money.
Now, I am basically saying there's not a better alternative out there. I'm emphatically NOT saying Office is perfect. Microsoft, if you really want me to love Office, here's what needs to change:
- Use (or allow to be used) the systemwide services for address book and calendar. I'm just asking for the option here. The API's are wide open. I prefer to use these programs. Let me. Then maybe I would use Entourage.
- Okay, so yeah...make Entourage better than Mail.app. At least in the v.X version, it is just screams "BAD OS 9 PORT!!!" MS needs to bite the frikkin' bullet and learn Cocoa. That goes for all their products. I can just feel the Carbon in every click, every widget. Like in *shudder* Internet Explorer *shudder* (Yes, I know this is officially unsupported now but sooo many people still use it because they're too dumb to know that "Internet Explorer" != "The Internet").
- Those stupid-ass palettes need to go, too. Okay, MS basically invented the toolbar, and now they're saying, no, use this bloated six-square-inch palette with sections you have to collapse and expand, instead of a nice little toolbar at the top of the screen! Shame on them for wasting my screen real-estate. I know that you can put the normal toolbar back via Customize, but few people know this, so the default needs to be changed back.
Instead of the usual MS tactic of going for full bore feature bloat they really cleaned up the rough edges and most new features were done with restraint....a word not usually present in the MS dictionary.
I wish my Windows XP version of Office looked and acted a lot more like the latest version for OS X. This has just added yet another reason for me not to fire up the XP box when I need to edit a word document. Thanks Microsoft!
I wanted to use the COM features in Office.X to link in some c++ code that I wrote. It turns out that Office.vX doesn't use the Darwin COM model and you can't make it.
Does the Office2004 COM interface play nicely with 3rd party developer tools like Xcode?
In fact, it seems to me you may as easily ask why Apple didn't write open API's
Ummmm... They did.
I didn't read the entire document, but my understanding of the API's in there is that they are only to allow other applications to interface with Address Book, not to replace Address Book, and to provide the address book's system-wide services with another applicaton.
Allowing other aps to interface with Address Book doesn't allow MS to sell a competitor that also provides system services using the same interface.
I mean, it would help them to write an equivelent interface using those API's, but they'd basically have to hack the system to force Address Book and iCal out and replace them with Entourage's. At least, that's my understanding of the situation. Apple is not providing the same opportunities to other developers that they give themselves; like somne other company I can think of, they are using integration with the operating system to give their products a leg up on the sompetition.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
I didn't read the entire document, but my understanding of the API's in there is that they are only to allow other applications to interface with Address Book, not to replace Address Book and allow another application to provide the address book's system-wide services.
Allowing other aps to interface with Address Book doesn't allow MS to sell a competitor that also provides system services using the same interface.
The published API's would help a third party to write an equivelent interface using those API's, but they'd basically have to hack the system to force Address Book and iCal out and replace them with something like Entourage. At least, that's my understanding of the situation. Apple is not providing the same opportunities to other developers that they give themselves; like some other company I can think of, they are using integration with the operating system to give their products a leg up on the competition.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Actually, you are misunderstanding the APIs. Or I assume you are. These APIs are not so-called automation APIs such as the ones exposed to Applescript on the Mac, or VBA on Windows. The are full APIs that expose an interface to an address-book system. You could perfectly well delete AddressBook off your system and still use these APIs to store and retrieve your contacts.
AddressBook is Apple's front-end for this system. Entourage could just as well use these same APIs, and be Microsoft's front-end.
Apple is providing the same opportunities to developers as they are to themselves. At least in this case.