I installed the new version of Microsoft Office for Mac on Saturday and spent a bit of time with it on my flight to Boston on Sunday. (Check out the official CNET review here.) While I like the cleaner interface and some of the new fonts, overall I feel like the applications are much slower. I also found out the hard way that the default save state of .docx screws you pretty much immediately if you aren't careful. (To Microsoft's credit, you can easily change this in the preferences.)
I mainly used Word as I was afraid that Excel would jack me up. One positive for Word is that creating themes for documents has become much easier. One negative is that my documents would occasionally disappear between Expose windows and show up in the "window" menu but not on screen. Having spent a fair amount of time on a doc, I was pretty shocked when it all of the sudden disappeared.
The big thing to note is that the Mac version of Word and Powerpoint are significantly more user-friendly than the new Office for Windows. And while we all expect Mac software to be easier to use, it doesn't make a lot of sense that Microsoft wouldn't have applied the cleaner interface to the Windows product.
Mac users must wait until next year for fresh versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint: Microsoft has moved its intended launch of Office for Mac 2008 to January from the second half of this year.
"We had hoped to hit the Christmas selling season, but now we hope to target Macworld" in January, said Craig Eisler, who became general manager of the Mac business unit at Microsoft six weeks ago. "We, as a group, were not satisfied with product quality."
Details about any software development snags, as well as final pricing, were unavailable. Office for Mac 2004 is sold in three versions for $150 to $500.
The company demonstrated early previews of Office for Mac 2008 at the Macworld 2007 convention in January.
Microsoft will not open beta testing to the public as it did for more than six months while building Office 2007 for Windows.
The 2008 release will be the first built for Intel-based Macs. The features and visual style of Office for Mac software differ from their Windows counterparts. Microsoft is introducing XML-based file formats, which require a converter to be opened in older Office software. A time-management, task-launching widget joins Office for Mac 2008 in addition to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and the Entourage e-mail application.
Among the controversial anticipated changes is the removal of Visual Basic scripting, which enables macros that automate commonly used software functions.
Microsoft also postponed its initial shipment deadlines for Windows Vista and Office 2007, which arrived in stores on January 30 amid a marketing blitz following the holiday shopping season.
Microsoft aims to unveil its next operating system, internally code named "Windows 7," within three years.
Meanwhile, Apple remains mum about the timing and features of its next iWork office suite, a competitor to Microsoft Office. The MacRumors blog speculates that Apple may skip a 2007 version, instead releasing iWork '08 in October in tandem with the Leopard Mac OS X operating system.
Further competition to Microsoft Office and iWork looms in the form of free, Web-based productivity software, such as Google Docs & Spreadsheets.
One more time around the block, James.
Microsoft late Thursday revised one of its critical security bulletins from Patch Tuesday, adding another item to its list of affected software.
Security bulletin MS07-036 now includes a warning that Microsoft Office 2004 for the Mac is also affected.
The update is designed to address a security flaw, which could allow attackers to overwrite the computer's memory with malicious code.
Microsoft notes that people running Office 2004 for the Mac on the Mac OS X 10.2 are at risk. It advises people to first install the Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac 11.3.5 update, before downloading the latest fix.
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