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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.
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
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\textbf{YES!}
I agree \emph{completely}.\footnote{``Text markup'' is much more portable. I
have 10-year-old \LaTeX{} files that are still usable on my \textsc{gentoo}
box.}
\end{document}
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.
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.
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.
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.
Seriously. I have a copy of office, but it is mainly to read other people's office files (OO.o just isn't there yet--I'm not going to deal with an X11 interface just to open MS Office files).
My theory for anything that I write has been that anything more complex than a plain text document generally deserves LaTeX.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
I generally like Entourage and its interface (which is why I use it), but I can't stand how it stores my mail.
.mbox files. I like this - all I have to do if I want to backup 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.
In the Apple Mail app, mail is stored in
I only recently learned that when you drag Entourage mailboxes to your desktop, they are saved as mbox files (although I haven't tried it yet - haven't been doing backups lately). Of course, this isn't documented by Microsoft - could have saved me a lot of trouble if they had.
Does anyone know whether you can do this in the new version? I really don't plan to get the new Office (give me a good reason why I should upgrade), but I was curious.
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
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
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.
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
Why would you spend thousands of dollars on a proprietary hardware/software combination only to top it off with a poormans office solution? That's very inconsistent.
I can appreciate your argument about most people not needing certain features but price aside, that seems to be the only argument against microsoft office. There are numerous open source and commercial alternatives that offer interesting subsets of features that are good enough solutions for most people. Some alternatives even have features that are better than the ms office equivalent. At the end of the day however, the full set of features found in ms office is pretty much unrivalled by any other product or collection of products.
People with macs like to pay for quality so it would be natural for them to consider ms office 2004. MS seems to have pulled of some nice improvements over the previous version. Compatibility is good, it integrates with OS X better than most other office suits. It's hard not to like it if you have the money and a taste for quality hardware & software.
Jilles
I have tried the demo. I have found nothing else new worth paying for.
So this bug fix will cost me 300 euro. Yes, I will pay up, but I will spit at the receipt.
Besides there is still no support for right-to-left writing (like in Arab and Hebrew). I guess they will add that to the next version in three years together with a new boring clip-art of a grey over-head projector, so they can charge another 300.
"So when and more importantly, WHY do you shell out cash for an Office upgrade?"
Only two valid reasons:
1) you NEED to
2) you WANT to
What else?
I think, therefore I am...I think.
Are we not all teachers?
-- I speak only for myself
Since Windows 2000 (and then XP), I haven't had any major problems with MS products, and think Office XP was pretty good. So this isn't a "I hate microsoft" post. And I'm a RECENT (2 months) Mac convert (though not zealous).
Microsoft's "Mac Business Unit" is suprisingly good. I personally think that Office X and Office 2004 are the best pieces of software to ever come out of there.
It would be a shame for them to dismantle such a good team. The offices for Macs lately have far surpassed the offices for Windows. If nothing else, it gives them a foot in the door, and some respect by the Mac users that they're at least writing some software for the platform.
Finally someone got the bright idea to transfer it to a Mac, open it in Office X, save it as PDF and send it back to the PC. It worked like a charm. The printing from Acrobat on Windows 2K was perfect and all formating was fine.
In this case MacOS X actually helped us with an MS document that Windows 2K could not handle on its own.
I doubt they'd risk being split up, especially when they have such a good core product here. I haven't seen the new version yet but I expect it's not utterly different. As long as Apple keep Carbon I can't see it being worth the risk for them to stop producing a native version.
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.
If your other criticisms weren't better than this I would think you were trolling.
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!
You mean here at Slashdot? We've got tons of underqualified "teachers" and nobody willing to be the "students".