Running Office 2004 and Office 2008

As mentioned previously, we bailed on Office 2008 for the Mac when it was apparent that Excel did not include functions that are essential for a business environment.  They are adding back the Solver, but the lack of VBA support, which makes it impossible to share Excel files with Windows users, is a non-starter.

Still, I was interested in trying to use the other pieces of the Office suite, particularly to see if they would not be such memory leaking RAM hogs as Office 2004.  I re-installed Office 2008 to give it a whirl.

The thing I like about it is that Entourage does not seem to have the same memory leak problem in 2008 as in 2004.  I suspected that running natively on Intel chips might make it better and it appears to have done so.  If I run Entourage 2008, I don't have to quit it by the afternoon to free up memory.  Word and the others don't seem to leak, but they hog the RAM from the get go.

Using both or either is not a big problem.  I can still run Entourage 2004 when I get tired of looking at the horrible purple colors with Entourage 2008.  I suspect this is because we use an Exchange server so it creates an identity for each.  If you did not do this, I have heard of problems trying to share the same identity.

I don't like the fact that I can't select which version is the default to open a file when double-clicked.  It defaults to Office 2008.  Not a problem with Word or PowerPoint, but the opposite of what I want with Excel.  I could trash Excel 2008 or uninstall all of Office 2008 and reinstall only Entourage, Word and PowerPoint.  When I get a second, I will try that and post results.

Bottom line is that you can run them both.  I will use them a little longer and give my thoughts on whether it is even worth it.  I suspect I will conclude that it isn't worth the cost, but who knows?

iPhone Update

Well, I have been using the iPhone 3G for about a month now and thought I would update my thoughts.

Overall, I like it, but don't love it.  There are things that I really like about it--web browsing, Google maps, cool apps, etc., but some of the things that I don't like are so bad, it colors my overall perception.

First off, as a phone it has worked well.  I have not had any issues with dropped calls, although it now appears that the problems folks are having are AT&T problems, not iPhone problems, since the same issue is cropping up no non-iPhone 3G phones with AT&T.  Different chips, same problems.  I am glad I am immune so far, but it underscores my biggest issue with trying one:  AT&T is just a bad cell phone provider.

My biggest gripes are emails.  It is a heck of a lot slower to manage email on an iPhone than on a Treo or BlackBerry.  The keyboard is slow.  The general interface is not designed for efficiency.  It is bad and needs an update with some keyboard shortcuts or something with the next version.

The thing I hate.  Absolutely hate, is the autotext.  Apple's is bad beyond description.  First off, it is random.  Frequently used words do not get suggestions, but others do.  There is no way to turn it off or edit it.  It is particularly vexing since it wants to suggest something stupid for a person's name in our organization.  Every time, I have to try to cancel the thing.  At the very least, the default should be that hitting space cancels the suggestion while you need to do something to accept it.  It is almost always wrong, so why should we have to cancel it?  Why can Treo, BlackBerry and even Microsoft do this fairly well, but Apple can't?

Apparently, you can fix this by jailbreaking the iPhone, but I am reluctant to do that.  If one of you clever apps developers will write something to fix this problem, you will have a very happy customer.