Review: MS Office 2008 Mac

Since my original post about acquiring a new MacBook last week, I also mentioned in this post that I purchased MS Office 2008 with the computer; here’s some of my observations about the product based on my experience.

Although I now have the hang of the software; those coming like myself from Windows versions of office should be aware of the following:

• You cannot import your Outlook PST file into Entourage
• Task requests sent from Outlook do not work in Entourage
• Mailboxes can only be imported in MBox format

These items alone are a big thing for Windows Office users; and the more cynical side of me can’t help but think that maybe Microsoft made it this way to try and persuade more users to stay with the Windows version of Office?

The Office application icons are placed in the dock by default as seen in the screenshot of the icons below:

From left to right:  Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Entourage and the Project Gallery.

Unlike it’s Windows cousin, Office for Mac does not seem to bog down the computer and the installation seems to have no impact on the performance of the computer itself.

The one thing that does throw me though is the floating “Formatting Pallette” in the Office applications; people coming from a Windows environment are used to having the toolbars to choose fonts and other formatting items from.  Still, this is from what I understand a Mac thing with the floating pallettes and you do get used to it after a while.

Office 2008 uses the same file format as Windows Office 2007, so compatibility is not an issue and you can change if your are exchanging the file with all the way back to Office 97 format.  The available templates that come with the program are great and vibrant as you would expect with an MS Office release.

I just can’t help but keep coming back to the Outlook to Entourage file import issues.  Why MS would not allow Entourage to import Outlook .pst files I will never know.  This is a serious impediment to anyone who has a lot of data in their Outlook PST file wanting to migrate to OS X / Mac platform.  If you are connecting to an Exchange server, then this will be a different issue altogether as the ability to import PST files isn’t really an issue as your mail and calendaring etc is held on the server.

Overall, out of 10 I give Office 2008 for Mac 7 out of ten; and that would be an 8 – 9 if you could import Outlook PST files