Rating: 
Summary: excellent update!
Review: I had initially ordered Office 2004 primarily for my sister's iBook G4. The Office 2004 Student / Teacher edition includes 3 licenses --a pleasant surprise indeed! As a graduate student myself, I was able to install one license on my Dual G5. So far, in my usage, Office X 2004 brings more refinement to all four programs (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage). I especially like the fact that Office now tracks your recently used documents, making it even easier to locate and work with your documents. Initially, Office X 2004 seemed to be a bit more sluggish than its predecessor, however the recent Service Pack update seemed to restore the speed I had grown accustomed to from the previous release. I'm more of a casual Office user -- I use Word to write papers, Excel to keep track of various accounts, and Entourage for a secondary email client. In short, if you are a casual user of Office, and have a previous version, I wouldn't recommend getting the update. However, if you are in the academic arena and don't already own Office for OS X (especially if you're making the move over from a PC to Mac), I'd recommend the Student / Teacher version of Office 2004 X wholeheartedly.
Rating:
Summary: A Must Upgrade
Review: Don't get me wrong, I enjoy bashing Microsoft with the best of them, and I think most "upgrades" from Redmond are a waste of money at this point, but Office 2004 for the Mac is not one of those cases.It is simply a must have upgrade. What I love about the new upgrade: 1. Long file names
2. Better change/edit management
3. Lots of new features in PowerPoint (although Keynote still looks better displayed)
4. Much cleaner interface I'll give credit where credit is due. This is a fantastic update, one I am glad I paid for. Only one beef, to be balanced, is MS should work on speeding up the apps in the .1 release.
Rating:
Summary: A Must Upgrade
Review: Don't get me wrong, I enjoy bashing Microsoft with the best of them, and I think most "upgrades" from Redmond are a waste of money at this point, but Office 2004 for the Mac is not one of those cases. It is simply a must have upgrade. What I love about the new upgrade: 1. Long file names
2. Better change/edit management
3. Lots of new features in PowerPoint (although Keynote still looks better displayed)
4. Much cleaner interface I'll give credit where credit is due. This is a fantastic update, one I am glad I paid for. Only one beef, to be balanced, is MS should work on speeding up the apps in the .1 release.
Rating: 
Summary: Microsoft is really getting bad...
Review: First let me tell you right now that I am and have been for several years a beta tester for Microsoft, MSN, ETC.
The beta of Office 2004 was BETTER than this piece of crappola.
Stay away from MS products. The program has what look to be great features, but let me assure you that is crashes, is slow, is full of bugs, and I HATE IT.
Did I make myself clear enought?
Rating:
Summary: must have upgrade
Review: First off, I would like to say that Microsoft did an outstanding job on Office for Mac, something that most people aren't used to hearing. There are so many improvements from previous versions, including faster speeds, smoother integration, and excellent compatibility with windows version 95 and up, just to name a few. Not to mention the beautiful design of the templates of all the included applications. Word, excel, powerpoint, and entourage look, feel, and perform like Apple's applications, which is a very good thing, with the added bonus of having the tools of microsoft office's programs.
I use Office for Mac especially for research papers and homework. With the portability of my Apple iBook laptop, i can't help but do online research wirelessly for my essays. Then I just use Word to type out and organize them. THIS COULDN'T BE EASIER! Because our printer is hooked up to the main computer in my house (windows-based), I just simply e-mail my word-processed essays to the main computer (a pc) and voila! My essay is automatically converted as soon as I open the document, fully compatible! Then it's just as simple as printing it out and your done!
Overall, I am so pleased with my purchase, I recommend this item to all of my friends and family and definetly recommend this to you. This is a must have upgrade for your Mac and it is worth every penny!
Rating:
Summary: I am impressed.
Review: I am surprised to find myself impressed with a Microsoft product. I vowed I never would be, but I have to admit that the Macintosh Business Unit of Microsoft has truly released a must have product. I bought the upgrade as soon as it came out and so far it has only crashed once (while doing an import into Excel). If you have Office v.X then I doubt it's really worth an upgrade. Unless you see one of the new features as a must have v.X will work well for quite a while. However, if you use another product I must impress upon you how wonderful this suite actually is. The new project center in Entourage is very handy if you have problems with keeping files together and the new notebook view in Word is especially useful if you often take notes in meetings. Presenter Tool's in PowerPoint is also a great feature. Messenger is useless, but you already have iChat so you don't even have to bother with it. I have found that all of the applications feel more "Mac-like" with a more appealing interface. While a completely Apple built suite would win me over, I doubt I would be satisfied with any other companies product. If you are in a business or academic environment, then this product is a must have. So, while I think that all of the rest of Microsoft's products put together are worth about $5, this is simply a must-have product unless you already have v.X.
Rating: 
Summary: Can Be Slow to Respond
Review: I am using a new G4 Powerbook, 1.33 GHz clock, 256 MB RAM, and with no simultaneous applications running except for Office 2004 I experience the following:
Word 2004 Mac (version 11.1) is sometimes very slow to perform certain functions: opening documents (even small and new documents can take 5 to 8 seconds); deleting by hitting the Delete key (2 -3 seconds to respond); pasting text into a document (2 -3 seconds to respond); and clicking on toolbar menu items (click on the icon then wait five or six seconds before the pull down menu appears - this only seems to happen the first time after working in the document for a while, clicking on a second menu icon will cause the menu to appear instantly as it should).
Also, and perhaps related, scrolling down the page in Word 2004 by rolling the mouse scroll wheel for what would be a more than 9 or 12 line scroll down command seems to cause this weird wave to roll down the page. It is disorienting because you momentarily lose sight of the page and where you were. Could this be related to the slowness of Word 2004 (or the G4) and an inability to refresh the display quickly. Word 98 Mac did not do this, nor do documents pasted into Apple's TextEdit running on the same machine. All other apps run quickly on the G4.
Other problems include the occasional crash of Word (and loss of all of the document you entered since the last save) for example when selecting Tools > Spelling and Grammar.
Also, it takes too many steps to get to set margins for a document in Word 2004: File > Page Setup > pull down the Settings menu to choose Microsoft Word > click on Margins button. Word 98 was easier with fewer steps.
Other than the above the Office 2004 suite has served me well these past few months. There are many improvements in the Charting functions in Excel 2004.
Rating: 
Summary: Office X ran faster and had fewer bugs!
Review: I bought Office 2004 for the Mac as an upgrade to Office X, even though I was not really having any problems with the older version. Office 2004 has been nothing but problems. Excel and Word crash more frequently. There are random but frequent hard drive accesses for no apparent reason. There are problems with removing password protection of Excel files. Worst of all are the font-related bugs in Word that are even worse in Excel. Excel 2004 screws up the letter spacing of fonts as well as line spacing for wrapped text. Everything is bigger by 10-30%. This doesn't seem to be a problem at first, especially if you are only entering single words or short strings into individual cells. However, I have dozens of forms that were laid out in Excel X that include wrapped text in merged cells. If I open these documents in Excel 2004, the font spacing is all screwed up, requiring complete readjustment of each form. Even worse, Excel 2004 is not WYSIWYG. The screen layout isn't the same as what gets printed. I find this wholly unacceptable for a major business suite, especially when it worked OK in the previous version. Don't be fooled by Microsoft's promise of bug fixes in their recently released Service Pack 1 for Office 2004. They may have fixed a few bugs but not the major ones I have issues with. Check out the comments by users at Macintouch.com, under Office 2004. As for me, I intend to uninstall Office 2004 if possible and reinstall Office X.
Rating: 
Summary: No choice
Review: I bought this because Office is the industry standard and I am still a student, so I need the file sharing capability between PC and Mac. Anyway, Word in Mac is still not very stable, it crashes as frequently as the PC version. Transfering graphics (i.e. graphs/drawings) from Excel/Powerpoint to Word is very problematic. "Shading" and "patterns" do not transfer well at all.
Rating:
Summary: A bit bloated, but full of useful functionality too
Review: I bought this upgrade mostly for its improvements to "Track Changes" and its improved handling of Unicode vis a vis Office X. The other changes and improvements haven't been so important to me, though there are a few nice features in here. One thing that is very important to me in my work is the abilty to easily exchange (mostly Word) files with Windows machines. This version is better than Office X in that regard.
Some other reviewers have reported crash problems. I haven't had that (it was a minor problem for me in Office X, and this version is definitely working better), though sometimes Word or Excel won't quit when I want it to, and I have to resort to "Force Quit". But that's easy enough to do. I haven't lost any data using these programs (touch wood). I might note that I have 1MB of RAM on my G4 machine. With a memory hog like this, more RAM is going to help avoid crashes and other such problems.
One last note - a number of reviewers have gone off on anti-Microsoft rants which seem to me to be somewhat pointless, especially in the context of these reviews. Yes, there are a number of other office suties (and the various components) for the Mac. Some of them are pretty good. But for a lot of people, it's important to be able to share files seamlessly with people using Word, Excel, and Powerpoint on Windows machines. This software will let you do that, with only the occasional hassle.
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