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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."
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.
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
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.
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.