What, who?

Oh, them. Are they still going?

So (intel) Mac users finally get the ribbon. I notice however we also still get proper menus.
I've been using Office 2007 at work for a while now and I have to say that the Ribbon is okay but it's not the great advance some claim. It's immensely frustrating to have to hunt through several tabs to find what you're looking for. Stuff is still buried in the ribbon just not always as deep as it was in the menus. I guess I should try and learn all the keyboard short cuts.

+1

I’ve not used one of Microsoft’s Office Apps for a very long time and I don’t have any plans to start again.

Sadly, I have to support them. Here's an example; I've just installed Office Mac 2008 for someone..

1) Install office mac 2008. This is relatively painless, however it no longer supports 'drag & drop install'. You have to run an installer.
2) After installing, it runs the autoupdate. The autoupdater tells me it has to update the autoupdater. This fails, because the installer app hasn't quit before running the autoupdater and the autoupdater couldn't update itself while the installer is running.
3) So I quit the installer, and the autoupdater updates itself.
4) The autoupdater then runs again and downloads an update. The update starts and begins to update office. This fails, because the autoupdater has locked a couple of files that the update installer needs to update, so I have to quit the autoupdater so the update can finish being installed.
5) The update is installed. I then have to run another installer to install the Exchange Web Services plugin, which allows entourage to properly connect to our exchange service and which wasn't in the update.
6) The EWS plugin fails, because my copy of Office 2008 is not up to date. It turns out there is a later update, which the autoupdater hadn't bothered to download. I have to go to MS.com and download a DMG which contains the most recent update.
7) I install the new update. When it finishes installing, it runs the autoupdater which informs me my copy of Office is now up to date.
8) I install the EWS plugin
9) The user gets to use Office.

I mean, seriously, What. The. F-

I have bought the Mac Box Set so have iWork to add to my Office 2004. I am seriously considering switching using iWork apps instead of Office apps. Though some of my spreadsheets will take a bit of work to convert. But I will be getting the Mac Box Set in future so why keep Office?

I know people knock it, but for everyday office activities, I find that OpenOffice does everything I need and is remarkably stable. It doesn't come with the same price tag as MS Office, and although it too isn't 'drag and drop' installable, it's easy enough. If you want to avoid all the updater stuff on install, go to the website and download the latest version

To be honest, unless you are using some really advanced MS Office features or fraternising with other MS Office users, I don't see why anyone would need to shell out for it...I know I'm not an average customer, but I've not used it out of choice for four years and have been fine...

I use it for polynomials and n-th roots and I have not found those features in numbers yet, Though I will admit that I have not looked very hard.

I've tried both iWork and OpenOffice - I used OpenOffice as my main office app for about 3 years and my last employer used it internally, but it is a complete pain, when doing complex documents or having to look at documents generated in MS Office.

If a company has fairly basic requirements and doesn't need to share documents (as opposed to sending/receiving PDFs), then it is fine. But if a companies customers/partners use MS Office, OO.o or iWork really aren't a suitable alternative.

iWork is still very young and not very feature rich, if the Office user uses things like pivot tables or conditional formatting or many of the advanced features in Word, the information is lost. Individually and, if you don't need the compatibility with MS Office, iWork is very powerful at producing great looking documents. But long documents, especially spreadsheets aren't its forte.

The biggest problem is that OO.o and iWork work very differently internally to Microsoft Office, so they cannot do a true 1-1 import or export. If the complete workflow can happen within one suite, there isn't a reason not to use them. If you need to work in a workflow that includes one of the other suites, you need to have that suite as well, or the results will look dreadful.

Pagination is especially poorly handled switching between the suites, as is the positioning of graphics in Presenter and Keynote, when the original came from PowerPoint.

We had a customer come in to show us their workflow, so that we could plug their new e-retail and B2B websites into their workflows. They had produced the presentation in PowerPoint, but the presentation room computer in the agency only had OpenOffice on it. That lead to a very embarrassing presentation, where the lines of the workflow pointed to the wrong boxes or trailed off into thin air!

After that experience, the company invested in a single copy of MS Office for presentations and converting incoming/outgoing documents, so that the customer saw what we wanted them to see, not what the conversion filters in OO.o thought they might want to see!

It looks like I will have to get Office 2011 then. Well it will save me ages having to convert spreadsheets.

Does you current version work okay?

If it does, why do you need to upgrade?

Although I hate to use it, I still have Office Mac X on this machine, and it still works without problems. It's nearly ten years old now.

I still use Office 2004. As you say it still works fine. Maybe I should just stick with it.