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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.
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.
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.
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 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
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
Are we not all teachers?
-- I speak only for myself
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.