Mac Office 2008: The semi-review and a gift

So amid the news coming of Macworld the new version of Office for the Mac was finally shipped by Microsoft. A few days ago a big box filled with all our upgrade versions was delivered to our CIO who, without me needing to ask for it, threw one to me the second I walked into his office.
Now my relationship with Office for the Mac is long and already detailed but I was very much looking forward to the upgrade for three reasons.

1. Entourage 2004 just never worked for me. I couldn’t schedule meetings correctly, it would barf all over itself all the time, the whole thing was a complete disaster. Even if it wouldn’t be feature complete when compared against Outlook I had nowhere to go but up.
2. Word 2004 had some screwy tool bars that for whatever reason just bugged me.
3. It was slow because of the Rosetta translation for the Intel chips.

I am very happy to report that all three of my main complaints have been addressed in this version. Entourage now does work for me, just like it used to for everyone else here in the office. The ability to schedule alone is worth the price of admission especially since Apple decided to let the meeting entry UI of the Leopard iCal marinate in a bowl of liquid mouse clicking stupid before they shipped it.

I know other folks in-house haven’t seen huge speed gains but given my nearly daily usage of Word on massive documents I can definitely tell a difference. The crazy Word toolbars are gone but I suspect that those got swept away in the more modern, and dare I say shiny look, that the entire Office suite got. And that’s really the punch line of the whole upgrade. Yes it is now Intel native, yes it is better looking, but that’s about it for compelling new features. I realize that there are only so many things you can do an office productivity suite at this point but I would have figured that in four years we would have had more than a whole bunch of new layout templates that no one uses anyhow.

Oh, and Entourage still uses the DAV interface to communicate with Exchange. Four years they’ve had to port over the communications code from Outlook. I’ve got the feeling that is a political problem though since all the MacBU people I’ve ever met are more than bright enough to handle that task.

One last thing, for you Mac Surround SCM users out there, the rather controversial move to ditch VBA in favor of AppleScript has yielded dividends. Jeff has written a couple AppleScripts that bring Word document differencing to Surround SCM.

Think of it as our little gift to you, even if the gift is one of those “Man that would really useful for me and if it happens to help out the rest of the world then that would be okey dokey too” types.