Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
Standard and Student/Teacher have identical features, except the latter version is discounted for Academic users. Professional is identical to Standard with the addition of VPC 7. VPC 7 has been delayed, and as such, so has Office 2004 Professional.
Don't forget that the Student/Teacher also comes with three CD Keys. Someone in your household is supposed to be a student or teacher if you want it though.
:(
Anyway, after playing around with Entourage 2004 (to me the only reason I need office, the new word, and excel are just gravy) for a few hours, I just wanted to share my first impressions:
The Good:
I like the little popup notifications in the corner when I have new mail. Although now that I think about it, its a bit Windowsish - not that's a bad thing.
I like the grouped sorting. I always sort my messages in the order in which they are received, descending. Entourage groups them so I have little blue headings for Today, Yesterday, etc. This helps me organize my email better.
The other nice thing is that you can tell it to hide read messages. I have this set on all my mailing list filtered folders to keep track of things a bit better.
I'm quite happy to see that I can *easily* use certificates so that I can digitally sign my messages. (assuming that you can figure out how to import them in the first place, see below)
Unicode Support! (need i say more?)
The last new feature that I enjoy with the new Entourage is that you can finally control the autocorrect settings without waiting for word to boot.
The Bad:
The Entourage database is bigger than v.X.
Grouped sorting sorts the groups ascending or descending, depending on your settings, but it only sorts the items in the groups ascending. I haven't found an option to fix that. (Yet. Anyone have any suggestions?)
Changing folders with a lot of messages seems a bit slower, probably due to those Today, Yesterday etc. headers, and the hiding of read messages.
Entourage still doesn't have a grammar checker.
Creation and/or importing of certificates is anything but obvious. This isn't even made clear in Help. It took me 20 minutes just to find a link to the Microsoft website that than had links to several Certificate Authorities. Then the one I chose (because the page said that they are free and trusted) was anything but clear as to how to create a certificate (no longer Microsoft land I know) and Entourage doesn't trust them to boot, so I can only assume that neither does anyone else's email client.
The Ugly:
I think the new icons are a throwback to the Office 98 days. They are flat and ugly, I want my aqualicious icons back.
When I tried to install the new Handheld Sync Conduit, the authentication box said "Hendhel-" (with a cut off 'd') instead of OK. And than it turned out that it was the same old handheld conduit that shipped late in the Entourage X life.
I don't get enough information in that little popup notification box. I would like to see *who* the message is from, as well as the folder it was filtered to.
I can't move the little popup notification box. It is stuck in the lower right corner
The popup notification box only seems to appear when I get new mail and Entourage isn't the currently running application.
Preview Pane on the right doesn't give me enough options on the mail list on the left. I want more than 2 columns of information!
I think I've run out of first impressions.
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
Yes.
Read the Exchange Server Support info here
Things might get interesting shortly =)
Actually, VPC 6 runs fine in Panthurrr. The problem is getting VPC to run on G5's, because they don't have quite the same functions as the G4's (something about little-endian's or something I believe). They aren't shipping VPC with Office as a replacement for an Exchange client, but it's a nice conspiracy theory. VPC is just part of the Office Suite in this new version.
Btw, after using it, it's very similar to v.X from what I can tell.
short answer yes with an if, long answer no with a but...
If you have an Exchange 2000 server (with Service Pack 2 or later) then it's as close as it gets. If you're running an earlier Exchange server, then you're still in the same boat as you were with Entourage 2001. In either case, there's still no real MAPI support.
~jeff
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
...all I have to do if I want to backup [Mail.app] mail is copy the mbox file. On the other hand, Entourage stores mail in its own proprietary format, and I haven't been able to find out how to work with it.
What's to find out? Quit Entourage and copy ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data in its entirety to someplace else. Presto-- your mail is backed up.
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.
Virtual PC took advantage of the afore-mentioned instructions to gain a speed boost. Without them, you have to do a few byte swaps (eg: an integer of the form ABCD becomes DCBA, but you need to keep strings in the same byte order, etc...) before doing the calculations. This means that Virtual PC simply will not run on the G5, and needs to have the optimised code re-written to work properly without those instructions.
Presumably, they'll introduce a second code path: one that makes use of those instructions and one that doesn't. Of course, that depends on the code structure; it may be easier to just ditch those optimisations and keep it generic.
This is what The Register are saying.
Online & Feelin' Fine
Sounds like a font problem with your Mac or Lose-dows version of Courier. If a Mac user sends me a QuarkXpress file which uses a *dings font and I have a different version of that font (or none) then I am not going to see what she intended either. Very few document formats embed fonts as they are copyright and sometimes big, and there is no widely accepted standard for embedding.
No - I would never claim that Keynote does all the same things as PowerPoint. Keynote handily spanks PowerPoint into the ground, in my opinion.. even in version 1. Charts and diagrams are part of how your workflow goes - Keynote doesn't support those in an editable fashion, but I just do mine in OmniGraffle or some other program first, then paste them in. Obviously this doesn't work for everyone but in my workflow this is what I did with PP anyways (I'd never 'trust' a chart or data set to PP. Never.) I don't think I could ever go back after using the Smart Guides or text editor in Keynote. Or the transitions for that matter.
And to claim that TextEdit and Keypoint read Word and Powerpoint files is like saying that vi is the only Desktop Publishing Program you will ever need. Sometimes it works. If you have created any serious work, it won't.
My experience has been different. The Word features import to TextEdit properly for 99% of the documents I've received... its only when you've done some truly weird acrobatics in Word that it'll choke.. and even then, it never chokes to the extent that you can't fix it pretty fast. Embedded objects can be a problem, but hell, that's true just between different versions of Office.
Believe me I am comforted by the fact that I do have Office just in case something really breaks... but it hasn't happened yet, knock on MDF.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Works great with an Exchange 2003 server, but, inexplicably, does not sync Tasks or Notes. Doh!Email, Contacts and Calendar work well, but I'm extremely annonyed about the omission. (Yes, I know it was mentioned previously in the fine print.) I can't see any technical reason why they would omit such an important feature.
Overall, a great upgrade, but I wonder what else is missing.
AAAAARGHHHH!
PLEASE PLEASE,FOR THE LOVE OF GOD,STOP!!!
MAPI is not the Exchange protocol, its the Mail API under Windows! It has no meaning outside the Windows world. It gives you an opertunity as developer to call the default mailclient and do basic mailoperations without knowing anything about which mailsystem that is used.
The Exchange native protocol is just called that, and is a modified X.400 derivative.
AFAIK the future of this protocoll is still unknown and there is parallel developments between shoehorning Exchange features into using the internet mail protocols, (making Exchange server more versatile, and Outlook capable of "embrace and extend" competetive mailservers) and modefying Exchange server and its protocoll to scale better.
I think the last coinflip favored the Exchange protocoll, but it is less than two year since they wanted to kill it at next serverupgrade!
Who says you need a Passport (or Net account) to activate? All you do is press the Next several times, and you are done. Filling personal information is optional. I doesn't even bother to do it as long as I can use my copy of Office. Have you actually do the activation process for Office 2004?
On Excel for Mac (v.X and 2001) you can share workbooks: Tools > Share Workbook. Now, I'm not sure if workbooks can be shared cross platform, but they can definitely be shared amongst users Mac users.
We moved from shared workbooks to FileMaker Pro about 4 years ago and we spend much less time rebuilding corrupted files.