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I got the latest version of Microsoft Office (2008) for my Mac on Monday.

Having used it for the last couple of days… to be blunt… what a heap of #$@%.

Apart from the fact that it took 3 weeks for them to deliver an upgrade guarantee copy that I ordered in October…

It’s slow – The previous version, 2004, was not Intel native and so was running under the Rosetta emulator. I was looking forward to 2008, in particular for MS Excel to speed up. You know, I think it’s slower. I organise my lessons through a workbook that contains multiple worksheets, lots of look-ups. It… is… slow… Far slower than the PC version. This is poor programming, because the same spreadsheet running on a less able PC responds more quickly to changes and recalculations.

There are bugs – Ok, so there’s an update coming which will hopefully fix things like this – I use column filters a lot. In Excel 2008 for Mac, once you have selected the item you want to filter by, nothing happens. You need to click anywhere in the spreadsheet for it to update. Did no-one test this stuff?

Annoyances – This new version can save files in the newer Office formats. But, I don’t want to do that, as my workplace is still running the previous version of Office. But this new version suggests that I’m going to lose stuff because I’m saving in an older version – thing is, this is a lie. Surely software should be able to work out whether anything I’ve done is not compatible, not just freak me out everytime I go to save something.
Added: And… Office 2008 doesn’t seem to know about Spaces a key feature of the latest version of OS X.