iSwitchd

When it comes to word processing, spreadsheets and presentation software, we don’t have much choice, the market being almost entirely taken by Microsoft Office. I loved Office 2007 on PC, but can’t say the same about the 2008 version.

I’ve been using Word and Excel since the version 2 (a long time ago), and I’ve followed their evolution. I thought it became more and more complicated as Microsoft added new feature after new feature. Meanwhile, another office suite has been rising and starts to be taken seriously: Open Office. Microsoft had to find something to make its product stand out. They successfully made it with Office 2007 on PC. I think it’s the best version so far. They completely changed the menu bar and it didn’t take me a long time to get used to it, I even got more efficient.

In these circumstances, I was eagerly anticipating Office 2008 for Mac, and bought it on launch day. I first thought the application was good, even though it’s still ‘old school’ and doesn’t have the lovely Office 2007 revamped menu bar. I must say the installation was pretty long. Most of OS X applications just need to be dragged and dropped in the Applications folder, but Office 2007 has its own installation program. It took around 20 minutes.

I didn’t use Office 2008 a lot during the first month, but one day I had to work in Word, then the issues started to show up.

• Office 2008 apps are way too long to start, between 30s and a minute. This is terrible, I always think twice before I start Word or Excel. I only open them when it’s absolutely necessary. And overall, the applications are slow. I don’t have a slow computer, every other heavy applications run well.
• Something I like in OS X is the ability to scroll on a window that is in the background. For example, you have Safari open in the background, with a long web page. But you are working in a Finder window in front. If you scroll over the Safari window, the page will scroll.
  This doesn’t work when Office 2008 apps are in the background. The application must be focused on if you want to scroll in your document. This is bad.
• One Leopard feature I like quite a lot is Spaces. Unfortunately, Office 2008 doesn’t like Spaces. When you switch spaces and go back to the one where you’d left your Office app running, it has disappeared! Sometimes on another space, or just hidden itself.
• I’ve lately been working with 2 Excel spreadsheets, copying and pasting data between each other. When switching from a window to another, they randomly resized themselves, in a smaller size. This should not happen, period.

As you can see, it’s not much that Office 2008 doesn’t work, it’s just that it doesn’t behave like an OS X application. I think Office 2008 would have been a suitable application on Windows or Linux, but it’s definitely not reaching the quality and ’standards’ of a good OS X one. So my advice is: Stay away from Office 2008.

Further reading:
Office 2008 for Mac: not worth your money
Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac - Criticism - Wikipedia