Microsoft Office 2008 For Mac Not Working

#Microsoft Office 2008 Not Working Mac 2008 Will#

Microsoft Office 2008 Not Working Mac 2008 Will

And, especially if you're an advanced user, you might consider sitting out this version entirely.Office for Mac 2008 will not suddenly stop working next week it will launch, and let users create, edit and print documents. If you've been impatient to upgrade, I think you'd be wise to wait, at least until Microsoft releases one or two bug-fixing updates. Office 2008 will be released for sale on January 15, and I'm sorry to report that in my first few days of testing the final code, I found a mixed bag of improvements, incompatibilities, and bugs. Anyone with a new Intel-based Mac has been eager for a version of Office that can run nativelyвЂ”and at top speedвЂ”on this new, powerful platform. This update fixes vulnerabilities in Office 2008 for Mac applications that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer's memory by using malicious code.Among Mac users, Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac is probably the most-widely awaited software release of the year, partly because Office is the most powerful and most widely compatible application suite available for OS X and partly because all previous versions were written for the old PowerPC platform. Improvements for all Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac applications.

Additionally, I was pleased to find native use of the new Office 2007 file formats and hand-holding helpers for mail merge in Word and formula building in Excel. As I had expected, the new version impressed me with its fast operation on Intel-based Macs. I found some, but not all, of the improvement I had anticipated. Drag a document to the Word 2008 for Mac program icon.I had hoped that Office 2008 would give me Mac versions of the Office applications that would be as reliable, flexible, and innovative as the corresponding programs in Office 2007 for Windows. Ways to open a document in Word 2008 for Mac: Double-click the document.

The interface would fit right into the graphics-rich Mac environment, and it's a major disappointment that Microsoft didn't introduce it to the Mac. Opinions are mixed on the Fluent interface, but I prefer it to old-style menu clutter. Instead, it offers an ordinary toolbar (customizable only in Entourage, not in the other applications), with a set of tabs below it that lead to a distractingly animated 'gallery' of charts and table formats.

For example, I could now click and drag to create a new event in the calendar, and unlike the 2004 version, the new app didn't send a response to invitations that didn't ask for one. All these seem to me minor improvements, and none is a compelling reason to upgrade or to prefer Office to iWork.I found that Entourage 2008 was notably faster than the 2004 version on both Intel and PowerPC platforms, and that its calendar features were more customizable and manageable. Excel has new prebuilt 'data ledger' worksheets for common uses such as invoices or checkbook records, and an improved Formula Builder that helped me walk though the job of using simple and advanced functions. In addition to the previous version's slightly silly-looking Notebook view, which uses a lined-paper-style background and optional tabs, the new version adds a Publishing Layout view with an even sillier-looking (but harmless) wood-grain background on which I could store pictures and other document elements before dragging them into a file.

Office 2008 supports both AppleScript and Apple's Automator workflows, but that's little comfort to professionals who have spent years fine-tuning their VBA code. Unfortunately, I found that the 2008 version was notably slower on older PowerPC-based machines than the 2004 version, that the interface was permanently cluttered with tabs for features like Word Art that I never use, and that Microsoft had completely dropped VBA automationвЂ”instantly rendering unusable any spreadsheet that relies on VBA programming, and rendering impossible any cross-platform sharing between Windows and the Mac of data that relies on VBA. (It must have seemed cool to someone in Microsoft's graphics department, but it strikes everyone I've shown it to as downright ugly and a waste of space).I could live with the minor interface annoyances I've mentioned if the suite functioned as well as I had hoped. Entourage boasts a new 'My Day' application that displays today's tasks and events in a floating purple window reminiscent of a cheap plastic PDA. You'll get improved speed and a few new features, but I'm not sure those improvements alone are worth the price of an upgrade of the whole suite.PowerPoint's major new benefit is the SmartArt feature for building graphics based on tabular data, but other useful features include output to PNG or JPEG formats and an Object Palette (shared throughout the suite) that included my iPhoto libraryвЂ”a nice feature but not enough to make me give up Keynote's dazzling and intuitive graphics.

I also noticed that Microsoft still hadn't fixed a compatibility bug in Office 2004 that caused the bullet symbol in some of my Word for Windows files to print as an open squareвЂ”although the same symbol imported and printed perfectly when I opened the file in iWork's Pages.I was even more disappointed to find that Office still insists on using its own address book and calendar instead of the native OS X Address Book and iCal program. When a new version of Excel can't even open one of its own files correctly, it's time to wonder what's happened to Microsoft's quality control. In the Mac version, parts of some lines in the chart simply didn't appear. I was taken aback again when Excel 2008 could not correctly display a chart created in an Excel for Windows 2003 worksheetвЂ”a chart that opens perfectly in Excel 2007. The Spinning Beachball of Death replaced the cursor, and I had to use the OS X Force Quit option to shut down Word and start over. Maybe big corporate customers might persuade Microsoft to change its mind, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting.вЂ” Next: The Spinning Beachball and the Incompatible ChartThe Spinning Beachball and the Incompatible ChartI was taken aback when Word 2008 froze within minutes after I had installed it, while I was using the MailMerge Manager to insert merge fields into an envelope.

So I find it disappointing that this feature can only be turned on or off for an entire document, not applied selectively as it can be in Apple and Adobe applications.Most of these problems won't bother users who just want to get some basic work done in a word processor, spreadsheet, or presentations programвЂ”but any user who just wants to get some basic work done on a Mac might be better off with Apple's own $79 iWork '08 suite than with an expensive upgrade to Office 2008. Microsoft had promised tighter integration with the OS X typographic feature that automatically creates ligatures (joined characters in place of separate ones for combinations like 'fi' and 'fl').

Microsoft Office 2008 For Mac Not Working