Mac Office 2004 Launched

Since Mac Office 2004 is available in stores, we've announced that it's available. For those of you who follow Mac news sources, you already know this. But, Joe Wilcox, over at Jupiter Research, posted a nice article about Using Office 2004.

When you ship a piece of software, there's always a period of anxious anticipation as you wait for the first reviews to come out. You never really know how well the product is going to be received until then. Stories like Joe's are no small part of the juice that keeps you wanting to go back and do it all over again.

 

Rick

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 19, 2004
  Here are two. :-P
  
  http://nslog.com/archives/2004/05/19/entourage_2004_font_fuzzies.php
  
  http://nslog.com/archives/2004/05/19/entourage_2004.php

• Anonymous
  May 19, 2004
  Here is the New York Times review:
  
  http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/20/technology/circuits/20stat.html
  
  ---
  Just got mine yesterday. I have to agree. It's a nice polish, but not terribly exciting. The project center will certainly be useful, but where are the performance & functional enhancements of basic elements (faster search, in entourage for example).
  
  In this office I'm the guy who approves upgrades and I'll approve upgrades if people request them, but I certainly won't mandate upgrades as I did last year for Photoshop 6->7.

• Anonymous
  May 19, 2004
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 19, 2004
  regarding the handheld sync installer, it turns out that it ISN'T the same version as the one for Entourage X, it's just that the readme was never updated! (shame on you for missing that Microsoft, thats the kind of mistake that an amateur like me would make :P)
  
  i only figured this out after i tried to sync my PDA and it was much to quick to have actually done the sync.

• Anonymous
  May 19, 2004
  Nate, send the Entourage comments to the folks who do the Entourage blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/entourage). Use the "Contact" link on the upper left-hand part of the home page.
  
  Also, since you have a web site, post your thoughts there, and send a link around. Saves bandwidth, and other people's server space :-).
  

• Anonymous
  May 20, 2004
  Is Mac Office 2004 going to be put on MSDN Universal ? If not why not ?

• Anonymous
  May 20, 2004
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 20, 2004
  why didn't i think of that? blush
  anyway, i've now got my feedback consolidated at http://board.forgottennewbies.com/cgi-bin/ib3/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST&f=1&t=94 and i'm sending that contact the same URL :)

• Anonymous
  May 22, 2004
  Rick
  
  Any comments on Bare Feats' numbers below?
  (from www.barefeats.com/quick.html)
  
  ---BARE FEATS---
  May 20th, 2004 -- Is MS Word 2004 for Mac faster than MS Word X for Mac? Short answer: NO.
  
  Long answer: We ran our three typical WP tests with a 250 page document on our PowerBook G4/1.5GHz.
  
  Word X
  Find/Replace 7 sec
  Spell Check* 14 sec
  Scroll Thru** 11 sec
  
  Word 2004
  Find/Replace 30 sec
  Spell Check* 21 sec
  Scroll Thru** 23 sec
  
  * "Check spelling as you type" and "Check grammar with spelling" turned OFF in Preferences. Otherwise it takes "forever."
  ** View set to "Normal. "Page Layout" View takes "forever."

• Anonymous
  May 26, 2004
  In general I love the new Office... but there is one little bug that is driving me bananas:
  
  Entourage 2004 doesn't use the OS X System anti-aliasing prefs.... it just seems to ignore them. As I get lots of text tables I always use a fixed width font and almost all of these look horrible when smoothed. Also on my portable I prefer the folder list in a 9 point un-anti-aliased font. Entourage 2004 just smooths everything regardless of your system settings! Consequently things look horrible! So bad that I don't think I'm going to upgrade to Entourage 2004. I live in email and just can't stand this. Even worse smoothing prefs are respected for bold fonts so you get some smoothed and some unsmoothed.... yuck.... it's the little things...

• Anonymous
  May 30, 2004
  It is the little things, and currently, font handling in Entourage 2004 is HORRID. Well heck, most of Entourage 2004 seems to be a kludgy upgrade. Project Center? Don't want it. Weird views that don't quite work right? Don't want it. Three-up viewing? Nope - can't customize the columns. What's left?

• Anonymous
  May 31, 2004
  Font handling in Entourage is indeed awful. I too am bothered by the fact that entourage ignores my antialiasing system prefs when rendering folder lists and whatnot...
  
  3 pane is great on my 23incher but useless on my powerbooks.
  
  I do like project center and I love that Entourage now works with Exchange.
  
  Entourage is a great mail client, but I wish MS had focused on core functions... I don't understand for example, why searching the database takes so long on a system with 3 gigs with memory... Also rules are still kludgy to set up.
  
  Mail does seem to be catching up to Entourage and given the pace of change it will overtake Entourage which probably won't be upgraded until 2006.
  

• Anonymous
  May 31, 2004
  I have used Word since 5.0. I had ordered Office 2004 last week, but still haven't got the new computer (which is due today).
  
  One thing that changed in the last three upgrades (I have skipped Office v. X) was the view of the Style sheet dropdown in Word. It changes so that the style sheet reflects the percent zoom - and it is very irritating. In other words, if I am working at 50% zoom on a Word document, I don't expect the style sheet to show at 50% but it does. I know of no other product (on the Mac or Windows) that does that), and for those us us who are a little older, such a change is unacceptable (I can't read the styles). Is there a "good" reason that it changes?

• Anonymous
  June 01, 2004
  Ripps: I'll share your comments with the Entourage team, but you can send them directly via the Entourage blog (see my comment above for the link).
  
  Rich: The reason the control follows the zoom is to give a more accurate preview of what the style will look like when applied. You can turn this off in Word/Preferences/General, where you can uncheck the "WYSIWYG Font and Style Menus" option.
  
  By the way, the new Style panel on the formatting palette in Word 2004 doesn't follow the window zoom scaling.

• Anonymous
  June 01, 2004
  Didn't mean to use as a form help session, but thanks for the quick response. I had thought it was a programming issue, not an end-user issue.
  
  What's strange is that I typically uncheck ALL "auto" stuff in Word anyway. I wonder how I missed that?!

• Anonymous
  June 02, 2004
  Thanks for the link for the Entourage blog. I'm also bothered by Entourages shoddy anti-aliasing and will send feedback. Example: If I turn off anti-aliasing at below 10 points and have 9 point list items, most list items are still anti-aliased (ugg). Stranger still, some items (things in bold and the occasional odd item are not anti-aliased... the mix of antialiased and non anti-aliased is particularly ugly. The preview pane renders correctly...
  
  Aside from this quirk, I like the new entourage, but wish the BU had spent less time on the project center which I will use rarely, and more time on fast searches and sorts and smart folders.
  
  

• Anonymous
  June 07, 2004
  I finally received my copy of Office 2004 (along with a new eMac). Most of my work so far has been in Word 2004, with minor email setup in Entourage. I must say that I find it well done and a definite improvement over previous versions (although 5.1 was tough to beat!).
  
  Anyway, job well done on the product.
  
  My next goal is to assess Excel and the new "Center" in Entourage. Look forward to it.

• Anonymous
  June 10, 2004
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 10, 2004
  Noticed a problem yesterday about VBA. Even with simple commands like Range("A1").Copy, when stepping through (using F8), an error is given: "Copy method of range class failed." When recording a macro it writes it properly, but then when stepping through, it flags an error. I submitted and error report to MS.
  
  Not good.

• Anonymous
  June 11, 2004
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 18, 2004
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 25, 2004
  The comment has been removed

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