Microsoft Office !008 for Mac Home & Student Edition

Review by Values Privacy for Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Home & Student JournalRating: I was running office 2004 and wait for this. This survey is limited but I was looking for specific things.

The excellent:universal double (quicker on intel macs)PowerPoint now shows the slides on the left instead of barely the text outline.

ou can install it alongside office 2004 and run both versions on the same computer

The terrible:dragging images from other apps doesn`t work anymore-when you paste an icon in scripture or PowerPoint, it gets converted to a different format so that if you send it second to the original app it`s a unadorned picture instead of an editable one. (for instance if you create an instance in OmniGraffle, paste it in word 2008, you get back a week later and take you want to pluck it, you can no longer copy the project back to OmniGraffle and cut it. You either must have protected the master or go over. Office 2004 didn`t do this and so sadly I`m more productive with office 2004).installation is not drag and drop anymore and it installs things like silverlight without asking you. I find my Mac got dirty now with who knows what installed where.

What didn`t change-you still can`t generate motion paths in PowerPoint (to go objects around on a slide) like you can in the PC version since a few versions ago. But you can meet this back fine if you generated the PowerPoint on a PC.

Conclusion-intentionally crippled.a step back for me as I desire to use it for lectures in my course but now I`m worried to because I have hundreds of diagrams and illustrations that now will be locked in PowerPoint.I`m going to all use Keynote/Pages (iWork) from now on. Unfortunately some 3rd party apps require Office so I`m wedged with it. And it doesn`t take all the features yet of Office.Unfortunately OpenOffice/NeoOffice exhibit the same image formating problem and they bear their own issues.

Disappointing.

EDIT:I have since reformatted my calculator and sold Office to a Fellow who needed it. Excellent Riddance. So long Microsoft.

EDIT #2:To add a promising note, I learned Nisus Pro word processor. It does (technical writing) things Pages doesn`t (e.g. index) and seems better than MS Word.

EDIT #3 (Oct 2009)I`m doing fine without MS Office for a long time now. For very math heavy documents I use Lyx (free, small intricate to go but worth it). For casual word processing, I use Pages or Nisus or openoffice (typically one of these will give a doc or docx file accurately). I use Keynote for presentations with LaTeXiT (free) for math equations. And Numbers or openoffice has been enough for spreadsheets. Since the new OS (snow leopard) has built in exchange support (which this reading of office doesn`t), there is nothing lacking.