Instaling Office:Mac 2008

January 30, 2008 10:23 PM

Office:Mac 2008 question. Any problems installing it? Lose any documents?

I have an Intel-based MacBook with Office 2004, and I bought Office:Mac 2008. Before I install it, should I wipe everything clean and save my documents to a server? Or will it be fine to install Office:Mac 2008 on top?

posted by msacheson to computers & internet (12 answers total)

I'm installing it tomorrow and doing a little testing. I'll check this thread again tomorrow.
posted by damn dirty ape at 10:24 PM on January 30, 2008

There is a bug in the Office 2008 installer that results in several folders being set to the wrong ownership permissions. Microsoft has a page that describes the steps needed to fix this after installing, which involves entering a couple of commands in Terminal to fix up these folders (click the link that says "IMPORTANT").
posted by RichardP at 11:02 PM on January 30, 2008

I installed it two days ago, on top of a 2004 install, and so far have had no problems at all.

That said, a backup can never hurt, at least for your most important documents/files.
posted by stilly at 12:05 AM on January 31, 2008

Been using it for just over a week. No issues with it.
posted by mphuie at 12:35 AM on January 31, 2008

Had no troubles with installation (over top of Office 2004), but it does not play well with spaces under Leopard. So much so that I've had to turn spaces off, which is quite annoying. But if you don't use spaces, then I don't think you'll have any other probs.
posted by modernnomad at 1:07 AM on January 31, 2008

+ 1 on the Spaces suckitude. I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed that. A real downer considering 99% of the reason I use Spaces is to keep email distractions to a minimum.

I had a bizarre email issue where most (but not all!) incoming email wasn't synchronizing with our Exchange server. I didn't have access to the Exchange error logs, so I ended up nuking my account on the Mac (after archiving it), then re-creating and re-syncing it. No problems since then.
posted by thomsplace at 2:13 AM on January 31, 2008

Ditto stilly. I installed without any problems, but I also backed up my important data first (which I do fairly frequently anyway, but I did an extra back up before installing word). It was also overtop of 2004. I don't use Spaces by the way.
posted by synecdoche at 5:47 AM on January 31, 2008

It screws with Spaces? Great.

I'm already pissed that it destroys interoperability with EndNote and all other third-party add-ins. Now I hear that it breaks Spaces, too.

I've not had the chance to install it yet, so I can't say what else will break. University isn't posting it to the server until Feb. 6. What I have heard is that if you rely on third-party things like EndNote you'll need to keep '04 installed to use them for workarounds until updated versions of the add-ins are available.

I am just so damn frustrated with Mac Office. It's the one app that has kept me from being completely happy with using OS X. I was really looking forward to finally dropping the dog-slow pile of crap of '04 for a universal binary, because it would be nice to edit a 10-page document without having my system grind to a halt. (Apparently a core duo processor + 4 gigs of RAM isn't enough to run '04 smoothly?)

I cannot understand why Microsoft insists on maintaining two separate code bases for Office rather than building it once and compiling it for both platforms, as seems to be done with every other major application. You think Adobe has two isolated teams creating both the Mac and Win versions of Photoshop? Hell no, they have one feature set, and groups of people who take those features and ensure that they are implemented equally on both platforms. Fully half of the posted known issues with Office 2008 are interoperability problems with documents created in Office 2007 (and vice versa). I'm damn tired of coming home to use my Windows machine for office docs because I need feature X , only to find Microsoft has decided not to include it for Mac users. It's insane, and because the vast majority of Windows users have MS Office, switching to an alternative is not a realistic option.
posted by caution live frogs at 6:51 AM on January 31, 2008

Is it true that it also doesn't have VBA so no excell macros work?
posted by The Bellman at 7:08 AM on January 31, 2008

I've got it installed - no problems with spaces, but it crashes.

All the time.

Constantly.

To the point of unusability.
posted by TheNewWazoo at 7:50 AM on January 31, 2008

caution live frogs: "I cannot understand why Microsoft insists on maintaining two separate code bases for Office rather than building it once and compiling it for both platforms, as seems to be done with every other major application"

MS tried essentially that approach with Word 6, which was a resounding dud, and can still get a few people worked into a lather when you bring it up. Especially considering the unorthodox interface they adopted with (Win) Office 2007, porting that to the Mac would have provoked a lot more antipathy. Mac Office is a profitable product, and they clearly don't want to jeopardize that.

Bellman: "Is it true that it also doesn't have VBA so no excell macros work?"

Yes. It's been the subject of much tooth-gnashing, but according to MS, the code for VBA was such a tangled mess of spaghetti, accumulated, patched, sprinkled with cheese, and re-patched over the years, that it would take a complete re-write to get it running natively on Intel, and that would have delayed Office's release a lot.
posted by adamrice at 8:12 AM on January 31, 2008

I can't speak for everyone, but I installed it last week over Office 2004 and haven't had any problems. Runs fast, doesn't crash and I even still run Spaces (although moving the Office window from space to space doesn't work). All in, I like it much better than 2004.
posted by tundro at 9:39 AM on January 31, 2008