In Short: “Dude, you just got Vista-ed!”
Like many Vista users going back to XP, I went from 2008 to 2004. Office 2004 is actually faster (in my experience) and more stable than 2008. This is the Vista for the Mac — something so bad you want to downgrade. I was so quick to downgrade I didn’t take screenshots of Office 2008.
Ironically enough, I started writing this from Word 2008 for Mac and was too annoyed with the lack of speed that was in Office 2008. I was excited that Microsoft was going to be releasing a Universal Office Suite for the Mac – having used Office 2004 on an Intel-based Mac, well, doing work was nowhere near responsive as its Windows counterpart.
I was more excited to see speed improvements and enhancements made to Excel – I pretty much stare at spreadsheets all day and do find working in Excel on Windows to be somewhat limiting, i.e. the lack of the free floating Windows.
One addition to Excel 2008 that I was quite excited to see was that there are now over 1 million rows that are supported. Yes, over 1 million rows, and columns that extend out to XFD. However, keep in mind that anything over 65k you’ll have to save it in the new format “.xlsx,” which of course, is not backwards compatible with older versions of Excel. A welcomed surprise with the new .xlsx file extension is its ability to save space. Having previously been limited to 65k rows per worksheet, housing a year’s worth of sales data becomes not only cumbersome, but also quite big, with a file size coming in at 145mb. Consolidating all that data into one worksheet and saving it in the .xlxs format shrunk it down all the way to 45 mb.
Aside from the additional rows, I’ve yet to see any real speed improvement over Excel 2004. It’s still sluggish and takes quite a bit of time to work with large data sets, albeit it is an improvement over what I have work, but then again, I am still working on a Pentium 4 processor (a glorified Pentium Pro), whereas I thought having an Intel Core 2 Duo processor would show significant speed gains. I was wrong or I may need a MacPro to run Office 2008 the way it was meant to be run.
The UI isn’t too terrible, you won’t be lost with a “What do I next?” reaction that’s for sure. Microsoft has added a row above the columns bar that consists of “Sheets,” “Charts,” “SmartArt Graphics,” and “WordArt,” which I doubt I’ll be using anytime in the near future, but can be quite useful for people who are not frequent users of spreadsheets. I’m still a fan of the free-floating windows that is a main staple in the Mac OS.
Excel no longer opens with three worksheets by default, but one, which is quite nice, as there are many cases where I really don’t need three worksheets. Another nice addition is that a “+” icon has been added next to the worksheets tab to quickly add worksheets should you need them.
One quick tidbit on Pivot Tables, don’t expect to take advantage of having Pivot Tables that take up lots of rows — I tried dragging a data field that was about 265k rows, but the Pivot Table was not having any of it.
Word is still Word, I can’t be quite too sure on how much you can exactly elaborate on a word processor, however, the response time appears to be just a tad bit sluggish – typing input does not exactly feel real-time, but slightly delayed, which can seem quite annoying when you are typing.
