Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Home & Student Edition

If I had not had the upgrade for $10 I would be hacked. The 2008 version starts much slower than the previous version of office. Powerpoint can not function with slides involving quicktime videos without crashing the program. I am reverting back to the 2004 version. It is stable and starts 3 times faster. I don't see any real advantage to the new version.

I wish I had never brought this software! I love my iMac, but since I installed this product, the computer has had nothing but problems. I am actually thinking about trashing the software and going back to the old 2004 version. What a wasted use of money, especially since it was a birthday present to myself! I wish I had listened to the other reviews.

I recently got a mac and was distraught because all my files are in word or excel from my pc. Then I bought this product and can open and use all my files on the mac. The learning of the new software is not that bad either. I will never go back to pc.

Having read several reviews about this product I have to say I was nervous about purchasing it! I am both a MAC and PC user having being mostly a PC user for most of my work related requirements. I recently decided to make the move completely over to my MAC. This product is different to the PC versions and does take a little bit of getting used to but when you do its great. It has so many of the features I love about Mac. I was worried it was going to make my MAC run like a PC and gladly it doesn't! Installation was easy once you follow exactly what it tells you. I had problems registering it and that was really the only issue I had with it!

I use this version for both work and personal and it really fits my needs.

We bought Office '08 for our Macs several months ago (right after it was released) and as of the latest update, it's been stellar.

Before I begin, we own and use iWork '08 (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote) on all our Macs; we use it side-by-side with Office 2008. We also own and use Office 2003 and Office 2007 on our PCs as well.

Office 2008 is probably 95% as good as Office 2007--what I mean by good is all the "good stuff" that Office 2007 includes. Backward compatibility is excellent, fast on Intel chips, and comes w/ a slew of useful tools (esp. for writing in Word). Powerpoint '08 is a welcome refresh of the old '04 version--new everything, but it still is not Keynote by any stretch (Keynoters know what I'm talking about). Excel is fine, nothing exciting, but VBA script is noticeably absent from the old version. I don't use Excel a lot and have unofficially switched to Numbers (iWork '08) for 90% of the spreadsheeting I do (which is very little anyway).

I don't use Entourage at all (Mail.app primarily) so I couldn't tell you how well it works, or what it does for me. If you're a Mac user, you're probably using Mail.app w/ iCal and Address Book. However, there are a few die-hards that swear by Entourage as "Outlook for the rest of us". I've tinkered w/ it in previous versions of Office (Office X) and it was decent, but not anything groundbreaking.

Word '08 is still the king of desktop word processing. I use Pages '08 a lot but Word is still the king when it comes to doing anything more than letters. Granted, Pages is very powerful and allows you much more creative freedom when designing documents that include text and illustrations/graphics--I think this is where Pages outshines Word. However, Word has 10x more templates and is designed more for heavy word processing (the bibliography tool is awesome!).

When I am taking notes for classes, I am usually using Pages b/c I like how it effortlessly handles texts compared to Word. However, when I am writing a paper or report, I still use Word. The reference library in Word is 'right there' at your side w/ dictionary, thesaurus, language translation tools, grammar checker, etc.etc.etc. Pages does a very minimal version of grammar checker (Proofreader they call it) and it does a C+ job compared to Word (B+, A-).

iWork '08 is an excellent suite of office tools, but Office '08 is still the gold standard.

4/5 Stars!

NOTE: I would've rated it 4.5/5 but Amazon doesn't let you rate in 1/2 stars. I deducted 1/2 a star b/c of all the bugs Office '08 had when it was released, and how SLOOOOOW it was to startup. The latest/greatest updates have resolved this and it loads within an adequate amount of time now (Word takes 5-6 sec on Macbook 2.4 w/ 4GB RAM).