Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Home & Student Edition

LIke many Mac users, I'm a big fan of iWork; however, as I work in a school that is entirely PC based and which upgraded to Office 2007, having Office 08 means that I can now open attachments and send attachments without worrying about cross-compatibility issues.

I don't use Excel, so I can't say much about that, but PowerPoint and Word seem to work just as well as the PC based 07 versions, when I do use them. I don't like the layout of Word for Mac, it just doesn't make sense, the same is true for PowerPoint. iWork is a much more intuitive program with, IMO, many more options.

Having said that, this program does what I need it to do--gives me the ability to share files between home and school and to accept files from students and other teachers that I can actually read and work with from home.

I've been considering purchasing Microsoft Office 2008 for Macs, and just weeks ago there were pages of (mostly negative) reviews; now there are only two reviews (the oldest from two days ago...???) Did Microsoft use its leverage to force Mr. Bezos and Amazon to remove all those negative reviews? Most disappointing to find those useful comments removed. I have not used this product, and gave it the low rating as Amazon required the star rating in order to post this comment.

I've never used such a buggy application. Too many to list. Still, overall it does what it's supposed to do. Sadly, it's not as good as iWork.

First, where did all of the reviews of this product go? Last time I checked the number was large and the consensus was fairly negative.

With Mac sales up and MS always paranoid, did MS decide that the Mac version of Office could be released with reduced features and more bugs than usual? This software reminds me of what we endured the darkest days of Apple hardware/software in the mid-90s. As examples of feature cuts, Excel 2008 has neither Solver nor any of the analysis add-ins. Fairly simple operations in Excel, such as drawing a graph, sometimes now involve a substantial amount of time to complete. I can't recall the last time that attempting to draw a simple scatterplot produced a warning that due to the "complexity" of the graph, I might experience a long wait. Similar operations were essentially instantaneous in the 2004 version.

The only thing I have found to like about the new Excel is the increase in the number of cells in the spreadsheet.

In Word, as in the bad old days, simply scrolling is an adventure. The screen does not re-draw correctly even in a short document with simple formatting. Be careful about scrolling and then deleting. You may be very surprised by which portion of text disappears.

I've been a Mac user since System 6, and I'm hard pressed to remember an "upgrade" this stripped of features and full of bugs.