Microsoft Office 2008 · 10/30/08 01:20 PM by Michael Caldwell
Anyone who knows me knows that in general I am disenchanted by Microsoft, but really, that isn’t going to be the point of this post. Microsoft got themselves to become an industry standard for document editing and spreadsheets which is perfectly acceptable. The only thing that comes close and is available cross platforms in my opinion is OpenOffice.org which is amazing, but it still isn’t as polished and ready for consumer consumption from what I have seen. Office has always had quirks which I don’t like but have lived with and have generally been happy, that is to say, I have never found a suitable replacement to offset my need for Microsoft Office. Office 2004 has been the version I have used for a number of years, (4 to be exact) and it has worked well. With the advent of Apple switching to Intel processors however, Microsoft Word has since been run under “Rosetta” which allows applications compiled for PowerPC processors to continue to function well with Intel processors. I had been looking forward to a new version which would be compiled and meant for use on Intel based Macs since it should be faster, have better load times, etc. I don’t have an extensible budget to allow for purchasing the new version, however I did receive the new one where I work. I was curious to see how it compared.
I was immediately put-off by the similarity in look and setup to Apple’s iWork suite. While I do like iWork and I like that Microsoft tried to put a “Mac feel” to their application, it just gives the impression that they copied an existing product rather than create their own unique text editor. The next thing that I noticed as I began to use it is that it’s slow. Painfully slow. I don’t know why this is, but it feels slower in almost all aspects when compared to it’s predecessor. For those old time mac users, it feels like going from Word 5.1 to Word 6.0. It just felt different and slow. So, I am not going to bother upgrading. Fortunately Microsoft has provided DocX support for Office 2004 and thus I will be staying there until a better solution presents itself. I’m still betting on OpenOffice to produce a better product before the next version of Microsoft Office gets released…
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