Microsoft Office 2008 For Mac

We waited 4 years for this shit? Well, it wouldn’t be the first time. If you remember back in 1994 when Office 4.2.1 was released, it took Microsoft another 3 1/2 years to roll out a decent version of Office ’98 for the Macintosh users. Here we are in the first month of the year and after running Office 2008 Beta for God knows how long, I made the switch.

Don’t worry. Microsoft put all the goodies in there just for you. Everything you love on Windows, including a copy of what I consider to be the most useless application on any Microsoft Windows installation, Messenger. Office 2008 for Mac was originally slated for release in the second half of 2007, however it was delayed until the first part of 2008 citing the need to “fix lingering bugs” if that gives you any sort of hint.

Not many people know this, but Microsoft Office first appeared on Mac OS before it graced the noisy hard drive of its Windows supporter. The first version of Office was released in 1989 with Microsoft rolling out a version of their own for Windows a year later.

The installation process of Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac is very quick and painless. I want to say it moves along a lot faster on my Mac OS X Leopard (Intel 2.9GHz) than it does on similar hardware running Windows Vista. It takes a long time for each application to run for the first time. It may just be me but the Office applications seem to load considerably faster after you’ve run them once or twice. I was able to load Microsoft Word and PowerPoint simultaneously in under 10 seconds.

If you’re stuck on an older PowerPC Mac, you’ll want to stay away from Office 2008. Even though it’s a universal binary, Office 2004 runs a lot smoother on older Macs just like Office 2004 runs horribly slow with Rosetta on newer Intel-based Macs. Since Leopard has bumped up the requirements and left a lot of older Macs in the dust, I think 2008 will be further known as the year of the upgrade.

There are still a lot of little issues Microsoft needs to address (like letting us use our own native address book and calender) but for the most part, the average Office user who needs to write or edit a few quick pages for their Windows PC buddies will find themselves right at home overlooking random screwball errors and hiccups that has become Office 2008 Final. However if you’re a “power user” who’s always kung-fu’ing Office documents and have become a slave to the copier, I suggest moving back to iWork ’08 until Microsoft releases some more “lingering” fixes.