Home

Office 2008 for Mac - Home and Student Edition

Must have for anyone who deals with Mac's and PC's!

Written by DB from Maple Valley

Dec 2, 2009

I have always been a PC person in the past so all my computers are PC with the exception of this new MacBook Pro. therefore I need something that will work with my Microsoft Office 2007 so I bought this product. Love it! In my opinion it is much better than Office 2007 because it has more features (which can cause some compatibility issues but you can run a compatibility report to fix that). However, it does not have a publisher which is why I also had to buy iWork and is the reason I only gave it four stars. Overall a good buy!!!!!

16 of 16 people found this useful

Office 2008 for Mac - Home and Student Edition

Works great for me...

Written by AH from Green Bay

Dec 2, 2009

I'm using a MacBook Pro bought in November of 2009. This is my first Mac purchase after using a PC for 15 years.

I work in a home office and use Word and Excel frequently. There is nothing I have not been able to do, albeit after learning a little more about the Mac controls (not too difficult either). I would recommend Office 2008 for those of you former PC users who are accustom to it. I HAD NO PROBLEMS INSTALLING IT.

Hope this helps...

26 of 26 people found this useful

Office 2008 for Mac - Home and Student Edition

Works like a microsoft product, just doesn't crash

Written by MV from Binghamton

Nov 30, 2009

My wife and I bought the family pack, I tried iWorks first and while I think Pages is better than Word (that's not difficult) I found Numbers sorely lacking as a spreadsheet. I'm a power user on Excel at work and have some rather large financial spreadsheets I work with at home. I've never had a problem with operation, freezing up or crashing. Just the same clumsy (and sometimes frustrating) interface you'd find with any microsoft product.

13 of 13 people found this useful

Office 2008 for Mac - Home and Student Edition

Crasches constantly

Written by SJ from West Hollywood

Nov 27, 2009

This software is useless... it crashes constantly and chews up all my CPU. Definitely take the trial before you part with your hard earned cash.

21 of 29 people found this useful

Office 2008 for Mac - Home and Student Edition

The most hateful product I have ever HAD to buy

Written by MS from Newburyport

Nov 27, 2009

originally in the 50 lb. box with 75 diskettes to install, reinstall, reinstall again, upgraded over and over and over – too many hundreds of dollars to think about for barely perceptible improvements that are utterly wiped out by the endless additions of totally unintuitive icons, the irritating little jumping helper who invariably answers a question you didn't ask – need I go on? And why must we settle for this absolutely inferior product? Because everyone on the planet has found they have to have it to converse with one another. There is no reason for Microsoft to bother with scrapping the whole mess and building a software suite that is both intuitive and thick-skinned. We all have to have it. We all have to put up with the crashes, the messages that it doesn't like something like a font and will refuse to open until you rebuild your system so that it can finally open and ask questions like, "Would your like to save this a Normal Template?" Normal? What are you talking about!! I'll like to hear Lewis Black after spending a week or so mud-wrestling with this beast. I've had to teach college students how to do page layouts using Word. I prefaced the introduction with the promise that every other application they would learn would be, by comparison, a very good day at the beach.

20 of 47 people found this useful

Office 2008 for Mac - Home and Student Edition

Does The Job

Written by CG from Merrick

Nov 27, 2009

I have been a mac user for about 10 years. Before that I have had a PC. The microsoft office on a mac is well integrated and does what it needs to do whether it be inputing data into excel, making a presentation on ppt, or typing a document on Word. What makes it just as good is that you can open the files on other PCs or macs. Coming from my opinion, it is not an exotic software and you can only perform very general tasks. For more extensive projects, I use iwork 09, with more templates, and an array of features, iWork 09 wins! If you do not want to leave Microsoft Office, which was hard for me too, it will still perform the same tasks as if it were on a PC.

19 of 20 people found this useful

Office 2008 for Mac - Home and Student Edition

Solid Product

Written by RD from Greer

Nov 24, 2009

No one makes more comprehensive office software than Microsoft. If you wish to do much more than write a VERY simple letter or paper, or do an extremely BASIC spreadsheet, then I think this software is necessary. Though the programs may not run as smoothly on a mac, there is still no comparison for Microsoft's office. Yes, the interfacing is different than the current windows release of office software, but with an extensive help section I've found the learning curve to be pretty easy.

23 of 31 people found this useful

Office 2008 for Mac - Home and Student Edition

Windows and Mac versions differ

Written by FB

Nov 24, 2009

I bought a Macbook Pro because I found it be lighter for business travel than my heavy IBM Thinkpad. I bought MS Office for the Mac thinking it was identical to the very powerful version for Windows. I was wrong and in subtle but important ways.

For example, it is not possible to conditionally format more than three items in Excel unlike Windows (Home Office 2007). This is a real pain. Even more of a pain is the Acrobat conversion facility in Word does not convert the text document into one file if there are landscape an portrait sections combined in one doc. It outputs as many pdf files as there are sections. Thank goodness I have the Windows version of Office and it outputs the pdf file perfectly. The conversion works fine in Powerpoint.
As part of my work habits I routinely use styles in Word. However, when I try to convert a Word 2007 document to Word 95 the conversion introduces what appears to be a bug: second lines of paragraphs have an extra bit of hanging indent than the first line. There is nothing I can do to make this conversion work properly. But guess what? It works perfectly in Windows. Finally, there is no Outlook for the Mac. Entourage will not work with Exchange Server unless you buy the Pro version of Office at significantly more money.
Otherwise, the app works fine, but these issues should not happen. I fail to understand why Apple would not work with Microsoft to ensure 100% compatibility between Mac and Windows versions of Office.

87 of 94 people found this useful

Office 2008 for Mac - Home and Student Edition

Hard at first but i fixed the problem

Written by LA from bronx

Nov 21, 2009

i got my macbook pro in July 2009 and i bought office 2008 in august. At first, i was having problems with it. Everytime i loaded it, it said something about troubleshooting problems. what i did is i re-installed it and now it works perfectly.

35 of 49 people found this useful

Office 2008 for Mac - Home and Student Edition

No longer actively supported by Microsoft

Written by BS from prunedale

Nov 19, 2009

Bad enough that with Office 2008, Microsoft consciously disabled the ability to move Organizer data from the PC into Entourage (Organizer replacement) but it also has numerous bugs, including not being able to use symbols in a document, that have persisted for years but no patches are provide.

Obvious that Microsoft has pulled the plug on development or support for this product.

34 of 49 people found this useful

Office 2008 for Mac - Home and Student Edition

It's okay

Written by RY from McLean

Nov 17, 2009

I am a Windows user who just switched to a Mac. This is probably why I went for Office instead of iWork. I'll break this down into four groups: Word, Powerpoint, Excel, and Entourage.

Word is as awesome on a Mac as it is on a PC. It's pretty much the same except there are some features missing, such as the booklet maker, but Microsoft added more features to make up for that like the notebook layout view. Overall, Word is a 10/10.

Powerpoint... meh. I am used to the 2003 version, so switching to both a Mac AND a new version is tough. It's a bit more difficult to use (for me, at least) and the animations are not as varied, but overall this is a 7/10 application.

Excel is even better on a Mac than on a PC. The tools are around the window instead of on top of the window which creates a more user friendly experience. 10/10

Entourage is the main reason that I gave office a 4/5. I don't know why they bothered to include it in Office. After all, Mac OS X Snow Leopard already has an awesome mail app. If they put in Office, at least make it good. It has a whole bunch of useless features that make me feel like I HAVE to use it. It's probably just me, but I just plain hate it. However, it does work, so 5/10

Now, another reason I gave Office a 4/5 is the lack of Publisher! I had to go back to my old eMachines to get my brochure done. If you are reading this Microsoft, PLEASE add Publisher!

106 of 108 people found this useful

Office 2008 for Mac - Home and Student Edition

A Step Backwards

Written by DB

Nov 16, 2009

Too many useless gizmos. I wish it had simply let me create my own tool bars rather than giving me what it thought best. Speaking of which, its self correcting functions are opt-out rather than choose, and trying to find the opt-out controls is frustrating. The graphics portion is much worse than the older Word versions. Pure frustration and torture to use. The only reason I gave it two stars instead of one is that, ...well..., I made a mistake.

21 of 29 people found this useful

Office 2008 for Mac - Home and Student Edition

Use free software

Written by JS from HOUSTON

Nov 16, 2009

OpenOffice is free and it works great on the Mac - compatible with MS Office and works like a champ -

73 of 87 people found this useful

Office 2008 for Mac - Home and Student Edition

Useless!

Written by GR from Cambridge

Nov 15, 2009

Completely useless. I cannot work on my files because it keeps crashing! I wish I could give this product no stars at all!

22 of 36 people found this useful

Office 2008 for Mac - Home and Student Edition

Save yourself the headache and don't by!!!

Written by RS from Wichita

Nov 14, 2009

As a student I have been using office for years. I recently bought the Office 2008 (I was using 2004) online as I wanted to stay with the same program that my school and professors use. I downloaded the suite just fine and it worked for about a day. Then it decided that it did not like being on a Mac even thought it was Office FOR Mac. I call Microsoft and talked with the techs. Went through a bunch of steps including starting it in safe mode and deleting files. They finally told me that they did not know what was wrong and that it must be an Apple front issue and to call Apple. I called and the tech at Apple was really nice and did what he could without making me pay $50 more dollars to be told that I would have to reinstall my operating system. Seriously!!! Reinstall my operation system without a guarantee that Office would work!!!!! No product is worth that headache!!!! I asked for a refund so now I have no choice but to switch to iworks which yes does save as a word file but does not hold the settings and formatting of a document. So now I have to go to a PC fix the document before giving it to my professors. I don't know who to be more frustrated with Microsoft for saying that it's for Mac or Apple for wanting me to reinstall my operating system. Please one of you fix this!

40 of 52 people found this useful

Office 2008 for Mac - Home and Student Edition

Doesn't Work

Written by MB from Raleigh

Nov 12, 2009

This product doesn't work remotely as well as any Mac software and doesn't work as well as Office does on a PC. The only time my Macbook has ANY problems is when this Microsoft product is running on it.

20 of 28 people found this useful

Office 2008 for Mac - Home and Student Edition

Next Time I will get iwork

Written by JW from Indianapolis

Nov 11, 2009

I have had office 2008 on my computer for a little over a year and I am disappointed. The updates are huge on memory and make little difference. Word will take forever to bring up and often freezes like with powerpoint. If I didn't need this software for college it would be deleted in an instant.

15 of 20 people found this useful

Office 2008 for Mac - Home and Student Edition

Just another garbage

Written by FM from Santana do Parnaiba

Nov 11, 2009

This is just another Microsoft bad experience. I've experienced a lot of crashes and lost too much information in my Excel spreadsheets. Hated it! I'm using iWork instead and I am much happier now. iWork is cheaper and works perfectly fine.

18 of 26 people found this useful