[Taliesin]

Too little too late. I, for one, have vowed to never again initiate another document in Microsoft Word, and it has nothing to do with the lack of VBA. I've been fighting this program for literally over 20 years, and now that Pages has change tracking, I've found I just don't need Word anymore. I'm really sick of struggling with formatting, Open Type fonts refusing to appear in the style menus, and— now with the XML format— unexpected crashes that corrupt my file and result in data loss.

Recently I was working on a document with lots of persnikety styles and formatting. Word 2008 kept crashing about every 15-20 minutes. Frustrated, I opened the doc in Pages and made up all the lost time and continued to work for hours, crash-free. The doc has not crashed one time in Pages ever since, so I'm forced to conclude that Pages can handle Word docs better than Word itself can!

I'm still waiting for some feature parity, but I'm willing to cut Apple some slack since this is only, like, version 3 of the app. Microsoft had been developing Word for over two decades and they still can't produce an app that is as reliable, responsive, or elegant as Pages.

So forget it! I keep Word around for legacy docs and docs I get from other people where it's important to keep it in Word. But all the Word docs I create now will be Pages docs saved as Word files (in the event I have to share it with a Word-only user). Feels like a great weight has been lifted from my shoulders.

In similar vein, I much prefer Keynote to PowerPoint. But Numbers is currently too primitive for my needs, so I'll still keep ONE Microsoft app in my dock...

T.

[trip1ex]

Basic lesson? MS has been around for 25 or 30 years and know they should listen to customers, but they often don't. A big reason why they often don't is because they have 2 monopolies and can get away with it.

[heisetax]

There never has been anthing that can compete with Excel & to date there is nothing that probably will. MS has done the most to move Excel down to make other spreadsheet programs seem better than they may actually be.

Excel does a good job with my income tax program. I just need more cell formats, (4k in Excel 11 & 64kformats in Excel12). But the loss of VBA in Excel more than makes up the difference. That's not even to talk about the much slower speeds I have with my spreadsheets. Then there is the matter of wasted space with the way the new windows have items stored there that many of us do not want or need. In Excel 11, my program comes out to 129 lines on my 30" display. With Excel 12 the best I can do is 127 lines. With my program being a standard 64 lines per page, Excel 12 does not page as well. This makes the loss of macros even more of a problem.

I'll be like many others in that I will use Excel for all old spreadsheets. But it remains to be seen if I will use Excel 12 for much. This is because most of my spreadsheets get tied together in my income tax programs.

With Excel 12, i.e. MS Office 2008, I wonder how many people use Office 2008 compared to how many have purchased Office 2008. I've owned Office 2008 since it has come out, but have no plans to use it in my day to day work. The same has happened with Mac OS 10.5, I had it delivered before it was to be on sale, but I only use it for testing use. It seems that these new probrams like Apple Numbers, Mac OS 10.5, Office 2008 & others seem to be all hype or should we say all show, but no go!

MS says that they plan to eliminate one of the problems with Ofice 2008, but how will the other problems be worked on. Mac OS 10.5 needs the same kind of work.

Bill the TaxMan

[heisetax]

I agree with you & the poster that MS thought that they could just put any program out & the Mac or Windows market would purchase & use it in large numbers.

Office 2008 is becoming just like the original Office X, which was basically just a port to the PPC. Office 2008 was just a port to the Intel Mac, then only a partial port. So what is there for the PPC Mac user. There seems only tyo be lost features with slower program use.

I still have more PPC Macs than I do Intel Macs. This just means that Office 2004 will continue to rule in the Mac arena for a few more years. Just as Windows XP will rule for a few more years. Remember how long it took Apple before Max OS X was ready for prime time. I owned OS X beta, OS X, 10.1. It wasn't until OS 10.2 before I used OS X on a daily basis. It just seems to be the same with MS Office 2008.

Bill the TaxMan

[Steve_S]

heisetax said:

Office 2008 is becoming just like the original Office X, which was basically just a port to the PPC. Office 2008 was just a port to the Intel Mac, then only a partial port. So what is there for the PPC Mac user. There seems only tyo be lost features with slower program use.

Yes, it seems that Office 2008 is very much an "interim" release. That is, Microsoft has challenges ahead in terms of porting VBA code and in terms of optimizing the existing code. I do keep in mind that Microsoft was forced to move over to Xcode and likewise, a significantly modified code base.

In terms of updates, Word seems to be the biggest change. While it has some features that are better than pages (styles, chapters, etc.), it's mostly just catching up in terms of page layout features. Powerpoint has made a few improvements, but I still prefer Keynote. The only reason to consider Powerpoint is cross platform issues. However, I've found that Powerpoint presentations have significant issues between Mac and PC platforms. Likewise, that promise of a consistent output doesn't really hold true. Excel is definitely the top dog of spreadsheets. Of course, Numbers is a 1.0 product. Pages didn't compare well to Word at version 1.0 either. Look at it now.

I suspect the next release of Office for the Mac (2011? 2012?) will be a better product. The question is, by then, will it matter? If it's priced competitively with iWork, I might consider it. Otherwise, I suspect the OpenOffice derivatives and iWork will offer more compelling solutions.

[gplawhorn]

You've GOT to be kidding. Microsoft listens to clients? If they listened to clients they wouldn't have pulled VBA in the first place. For pete's sake, Office 2008 was one of the last major packages released. They certainly had time to work on VBA and chose not to.

And don't get all excited about VBA being in the next version. There's at least an 18-month wait for the next major release, maybe longer. At this point it's nothing more than words. VBA isn't IN the next version, because there IS no next version as of today, just a promise.

It's hard for me to imagine anyone who truly needs scripting (as I do) waiting that long. I'm working on Applescript replacements for my VBA scripts, combined with Quickeys. Not as elegant, perhaps, but certainly functional. I'm not likely to dump all that work when the next version of Office is released.

[Kees]

as long as they're listening, when sharing a project in Entourage, maybe they could see fit to let us share, like, oh, say freaking e-mails?!!?
(without requiring an MS exchange server, like we can do with contacts and calendar events)

[mainstreamx]

Are you fooled or what, they didn't listen in the first place, took that long to bring out an intel version of Office, all in the fear that people will switch from windows to mac (and without office 2008 business people and companies couldn't switch) and now that open office with vba support is out they whine up the road and tell us they listen to the people.
What crude business strategy!!!!

[Neil_Anderson]

Loving iWork 08. :)

[akulavolk]

Nothing new here. Let me get this straight:
- Office had VB
- Microsoft makes users pay for an upgrade (if they want Intel usability) w/out VBA
- Microsoft again makes users pay for an upgrade w/VBA.
They call double-charging users "caring for and learning from our customers." For those of us who just wanted a universal binary of Office (how many of these new features do we really use anyway?), it's two paid upgrades we didn't need.
Now that's customer service! :-) A company competing in a normal market would go out of business with support like this. A monopoly can weather a lot more customer abuse backlash, though.
At least with Adobe's paid upgrade to the UB version of CS3, I got a ton of updated apps, most of them with significant new features I actually use and need.
I'm using Google Docs and iWork a lot more...I rarely open up Office. Will have to check out OpenOffice now that they have a native (non-X Windows) version. Maybe I'll dump Office altogether...

[bellevuefineart]

I fail to understand how bringing back VB in a future version, possibly in 2011, equates to Microsoft listening to its users. Uh, that's at least 3 years away. Moving at the speed of business are we?
So, if Office 2004 had VB, and Office 2008 does not, and I don't see any real other new features, how is this an upgrade? It sounds like a downgrade to me. In fact, if feels like a downgrade.
If it weren't for a monopoly in the office market, this wouldn't happen. We can all only hope that we'll see more splintering of the office market that forces even Microsoft to pay attention to interoperability.
Strangely enough, I moved to the MAC because Vista sucks so bad. I was finally pushed over the edge to find another computing solution. Now does MS think that making an inferior office product for mac will force me back? After what I've gone through with Office 2008 for MAC, do they really think I'll upgrade again? I think not...
And no, I'm not a grumpy old Microsoft hating MAC head. I'm just a consumer who gets annoyed with getting ripped off.