Customer Reviews:
 My Mac didn't use to crash November 8, 2004
Christopher B. Prentiss (Bay Area, CA)
31 out of 31 found this review helpful
I moved to Mac after more than a decade of PC use because I was sick of getting "application not responding" messages. In 9 months of owning my iBook, I think I had one message of this sort, that is until I installed Office for Mac. Welcome back to Microsoft!
Don't get me wrong, the applications are well designed and presently there is no other office suite that can compete. They look great and aside from a few weird functionality issues I have been happy with Office. But just like Windows, these programs crash all the time. At least once a week Word or Entourage will simply freeze. At lot of times this happens when I am cutting and pasting between the two.
Anyway, be forewarned, if you are a Mac zealot, you might enjoy Office but be prepared to be even madder at Microsoft.
 Office X ran faster and had fewer bugs! November 16, 2004
Amaurosis Fugax, MD (California Central Coast)
28 out of 29 found this review helpful
I bought Office 2004 for the Mac as an upgrade to Office X, even though I was not really having any problems with the older version. Office 2004 has been nothing but problems. Excel and Word crash more frequently. There are random but frequent hard drive accesses for no apparent reason. There are problems with removing password protection of Excel files. Worst of all are the font-related bugs in Word that are even worse in Excel. Excel 2004 screws up the letter spacing of fonts as well as line spacing for wrapped text. Everything is bigger by 10-30%. This doesn't seem to be a problem at first, especially if you are only entering single words or short strings into individual cells. However, I have dozens of forms that were laid out in Excel X that include wrapped text in merged cells. If I open these documents in Excel 2004, the font spacing is all screwed up, requiring complete readjustment of each form. Even worse, Excel 2004 is not WYSIWYG. The screen layout isn't the same as what gets printed. I find this wholly unacceptable for a major business suite, especially when it worked OK in the previous version. Don't be fooled by Microsoft's promise of bug fixes in their recently released Service Pack 1 for Office 2004. They may have fixed a few bugs but not the major ones I have issues with. Check out the comments by users at Macintouch.com, under Office 2004. As for me, I intend to uninstall Office 2004 if possible and reinstall Office X.
 Problems with Endnote 7 May 18, 2004
Tarquin S Dorrington (Wakefield, RI United States)
26 out of 46 found this review helpful
I just brought this along with Endnote 7 for MAC which works fine with Office X. Endnote 7 does not work with Word 2004mac however so I now need to buy Office X and try and return 2004. I have talked to Endnote and they can't seem to solve the issue so it won't be resolved until Endnote 8 comes out (whenever that is). I have to write alot of scientific papers so need my endnote library. This is a warning to any students/professors/scientists. Do not buy this...stick with the old office X.
 Best MS-Office so far... but hardly the best office suite. May 20, 2005
Eric Pruss (Atlanta, GA USA)
22 out of 23 found this review helpful
Coming from 15 years of working with Windows, it is sheer joy to work on Mac OS X (yes, I am one of the highly vaunted switchers! - No, i did not just recently grow a brain... I work as an IT professional, and until OS X, the Mac did not allow me to do my job as an NT admin. I got laid off due to the glut of Windows IT pros and am changing careers to web design, where the Mac easily outshines windows in every single imaginable way!). I have since decided to get a BS BS in Interactive Media Design at Art Institute of Pittsburgh to step my career up further, and the school requires I use MS Office for some projects. I have OpenOffice, but hate... ABSOLUTELY HATE, the Java interface, so I decided to buy the student version of MS Office for Mac despite my years of utter distaste for MS Office as a whole.
Once installed, I was really quite pleasantly surprised to see that MS Office 2004 for Mac is ten times better than MS Office 2003 for Windows. Much cleaner, more logical interface, less cluttered, though stil la long ways off from clean and uncluttered. Some things are a little odd, but nothing I could scream about.
Overall, MS-Office 2004 for Mac is easily the very best MS-Office suite ever (I have not even considered Office 2008 for Mac as I do not need it at all - see next paragraph), and is made that much better by the total lack of that incredible pile-o-crap, Outlook. I can't say anything about Entourage, as I have no need for it, so I have never launched it, and most likely never will.
But, is MS-Office the best office suite ever? Hardly! Since Apple's iWork '08 includes the Numbers spreadsheet program with the slick, simple and surprisingly powerful Pages and KeyNote, it has definitely become my choice for best office suite, hands down. In fact, after getting a free trial of iWork '06 when I upgraded to Tiger in 2005, I went out and bought a copy (it's a measly $79), and then again upgraded to iWork '08 when it came out and have not needed MS-Office in way whatsoever since as it opens, edits and saves Word, Excel and Powerpoint files, which is actually more than I would ever need.
Updated to reflect upgrade to iWork '08
WHY I HATE MICROSOFT (part 1 of a gazillion) September 30, 2005
mademoiselle_josephine_clementine_pilgrim (1550 N. Fern Circle)
21 out of 39 found this review helpful
First, if you are a professor or a student, you can probably buy this through your university bookstore or on-campus computer store for 60 dollars. I'm at UCBerkeley and that's what it costs here.
Second, once you've installed it, don't even bother registering it because it is not necessary in order to receive the upgrades. It took me 4 days dealing with some of the most catatonic "Customer Service" people in the history of the concept before I learned this fact (I didn't feel like joining "Passport Network" just to register my software.) You'd probably fare better with a geeky 12 year old little brother and the undernet, if you know what I mean.
The programs themselves work well, (at least [Word]) AFTER you turn off all the "AutoCorrect" crap. Still, annoying are the little visual flourishes that pop up anytime you do something remotely different than what Microsoft thinks you should do. I don't need alot of "visual stimulation" when I write, so why does there need to be a little blue inchwormish thing creeping across the screen everytime I accidentally type "nad" instead of "and"? And I hate the little dime-sized square things that pop up everytime I paste something, etc. I understand that for Microsoft's main customer base -- people that work in gray cubicles, all the pretty colors might really make the day seem alittle less fascist, but when you are trying to write a dissertation, or a love letter, or your last will and testament, all the annoying pop-ups become intolerable. This is a Word program, NOT Super Mario Brothers after all! I constantly feel like I am having to "Slay" things to get them to disappear from the screen. And not in a good "Buffy" kind of way, either.
At least they got rid of the annoying "Paperclip-shaped helper guy" that was always irritating and creepy like the "Hamburger Helper" hand.
REALLY, the ONE STAR has mostly to do with the absolute lack of anything remotely resembling customer service. But hey, Bill Gates just got a raise! Ugh.
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