Of all the Office apps, Word is probably the biggie. If you work in any sort of office that's cross-platform, you'll almost certainly need to use Word and its tools. Sure, TextEdit has the ability to open Word files, but anything more than the very simplest formatting or whizzydoodads will be stripped out. Likewise, Pages, Apple's most recent foray into the word processing world, also allows you to work with Office files. But compatibility issues remain, and if, like me, you work collaboratively, common sense and the path of least resistance suggest that using Word is for the best.
I'm not sure how much to say about Excel without sending you all to sleep, other than to say it's the same old spreadsheet application we know and love. Again the new UI makes itself known, albeit with a green Document Elements tabs instead of Word's blue. You can still do everything you used to be able to do before, and now you can make some more graphs and include SmartArt (although why one would put SmartArt inside a spreadsheet makes little sense to me).
The included templates for lists, ledgers, invoices, and the like are nice enough, but let's face it, it's quite hard to make a spreadsheet application sexy, and the sort of people who think like that tend to use Windows anyway.
Of all the Office 2008 applications, PowerPoint must be the one that faces the stiffest competition from iWork. Keynote was the first component of Apple's productivity programs, and version 3 is a mature, fully-fledged piece of software that's very good at allowing users to make great-looking presentations. Compared even to Keynote 1.0, PowerPoint 2004 felt clunky and awkward, and given the choice between the two, I could rarely think of a reason to use PowerPoint unless I knew that I'd be presenting somewhere that wouldn't have a Mac on site.
As with the new additions to Word that suggest the MBU has been paying attention to iWork, PowerPoint 2008 also shows the signs of lessons learned from the competition.
Again you'll find most of the commonly used floating palettes have now taken up residence in the document window, along with the Document Element tabs. In those tabs are a host of old and new themes for slides, layouts, tools for inserting graphics and graphs and transitions, and those transitions now include a number that are suspiciously like the 2D and 3D effects that helped make Keynote such a winner. I've been on the receiving end of enough boring seminars and talks to know that even if my subject matter might not be keep the audience awake, cool animations between the slides will do.
Even if you have to use the other Office apps every day, you might have no need to ever open Entourage. Apple's Mail, iCal, and Address Book have many fans, but Entourage isn't as bad as it's often made out to be. And if you need to use Exchange for your e-mail, then really it's your only choice for an e-mail program.
For those of us for whom this is the case, the news is good, especially if you're anything like me and therefore spend half the day working with it. Out of all the Office 2004 applications, Entourage seemed to run by far the slowest in Rosetta.
Probably the number one strike against Entourage before was its rendering of HTML emails; they were slow to draw, and made the program sluggish. Not any more, though. HTML Messages display instantly, although by default images won't be displayed.
There is a final component of Entourage that I've saved for last, and that is My Day. My Day is a good idea in principle, but in execution I find it falls a bit short. In essence it's a widget that tells you what events and tasks you've got for the day ahead, which would be quite cool if it lived in Dashboard. Except it doesn't. My Day lives in your menu bar, or even the dock. It also floats on top of everything by default, which is particularly irritating on a smaller screen. I can't be alone in thinking that it would be better suited to Dashboard, and if it lived there and also told me about new e-mails, it would have the makings of a worthy addition to Office 2008.
Conclusion
When it comes to Office, compared to other apps it doesn't necessarily matter if the package is better or worse than any others out there. Since it's the de facto standard, many of us have to use it regardless. That being said, for the person in front of the keyboard, of course it matters if the software is easy and pleasant to use or not. Thankfully, I can relate to you, the reader, that this is the case. In typical Microsoft fashion, the newest version builds on prior examples to do what it's supposed to.
More serial numbers thanks to west/1 @ msjuk.
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MCX6K-J8YQP-CGMTM-X3XQ8-K6KDY
XH4P8-PQ2KW-JDM9P-YW2BV-PCF3Y
TTTCG-JRGVX-R3J29-2XRG2-GP6BB
DV4XH-WWB2F-9BGX2-WR82D-JGWBB
PQRFY-VCW3V-8MBF4-2H8Y8-KDBBB
FR7YV-P38TR-83V4C-G2RXD-VTF3Y
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