Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Home & Student Edition

Got software for my new mac and couldn't be more satisfied with it. Have had no issues at all, it is different from older versions so there was slight a learning curve but I'm pleased.

My purchase from Amazon was great, as usual. But I have been using Office 2004. All I wanted really was MS Word on my Mac Pro laptop. Cheapest option was to buy Office 2008 bundle. Buying just Word cost way more. But as has been written many times before, the MS 2008 upgrade is completely idiotic. Word processing with Word 2008 is very cumbersome without the old tool bar at the top of the page for quickly choosing font size, etc. Luckily I have iWorks now and use that instead. My purchase of Office wasn't wasted. I needed Power Point too.

Typical Microsoft; first thing I had to do was update the program!!!!
I will convert everything to Iword

This version of Office performs very well, with all of the functionality I expect from those software products. It is a bargain at Amazon's prices.

This month, circumstances forced me to do spend a lot of time trying out alternative email packages,
and learning what I could learn from others as well. (Gory details on my personal web page.) Because I need to organize a real torrent of important information, with important attachments, I used to rely on Eudora 7 for PC as the main filing systems for my work, my independent activities, including even documents.

Many folks say that Entourage for Mac is a poor cousin to Outlook -- but not any more. It's much easier to file volumes of email in Entourage 2008 than in Outlook, and the search engine is FAR better. (The filing is theoretically the same.. but having three times as big a window in "file to" makes a big practical difference.) For reasons of security, and because Outlook couldn't do the job for me, I migrated to iMac at work this month -- but in teh end, decided to go with Apple Mail with the Rocketbox add-on instead of Entourage. Entourage really does have a much better interface with Microsoft Exchange servers; it synchronizes much faster and better. Unlike Apple Mail(where I work), it has no problems uploading folders BACK to the server... which is really crucial when moving mail around. Entourage's search engine offers many more categories, as many as Eudora 7 did, and those categories were really crucial for me in the past in locating year-old documents that suddenly became critical. However -- all accounts say that Entourage's search is MUCH, MUCH slower than Apple's (and perhaps less reliable?). Apple Mail's interface for filing lots of files (and even seeing them) is much, much easier and more powerful. Filters in Apple Mail
are MUCH easier to set up than in Outlook or Eudora (though I never got to Entourage for that.)

To get more search power in Apple Mail, there is a simple fix -- the Rocketbox add-on, which may
be more powerful in the future but already fills most of the gap. Too late to matter -- I learned that
the add-on NeoPro does the same for search in Outlook. I couldn't find anything like that for Entourage.
ALL three of these leading email packages officially let you move folders easily betwen personal computer, shared drives and server -- and can be used as gmail clients, so you can get web access and high quality filing and search both - depending on how good the gmail interface is, which I don't yet know. To get email out of Apple Mail -- it probably moves easily enough from Mac to Mac; Aid4Mail gets you easily
back to outlook.

All three of these products are infinitely better than Thunderbird or "Eudora 8" for folks
who don't care whether they just lose all email and documents more than a week old.
The level of product maintenance and reliability is already decisive. (Because Eudora 7 worked
so well for me, I made the mistake of "upgrading" to Eudora 8 at home. Only Aid4Mail could rescue me.)