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?

iWork versus MS Office

We use iWork a good bit here.  In fact, I have been messing around with Keynote since it first came out as a stand alone product.  We also use Microsoft Office.  Not the Office 2008, since we have to use Excel and the 2008 version of Excel is completely worthless in a business environment.  However, that is another post.  Here I thought I would give some general impressions of iWork and compare it with Office.

There is a lot to like about iWork, but there is also a tremendous amount that could be improved.  Overall, we probably use Keynote the most.  It is clearly better than Powerpoint in so many ways, almost all of our presentations (and we do a lot) are done in Keynote.  Keynote is simply cleaner and easier to use than Powerpoint.  It takes a while to learn where everything is in the inspector, but for most presentations it is better and quicker than Powerpoint, which is bloated beyond repair.

Pages is a decent word processor.  We use it less than Keynote, but it works well for simply stuff:  letters, fax cover sheets, etc.  Because it is not cross platform and many of the features that are used in business are still rudimentary (like tracking changes) there is a lot we simply cannot do in Pages.

We play with Numbers.  We live and die with spreadsheets, so it will never replace Excel for us, but it has some nice features.  It makes nifty charts, so there is a lot that can be done with Numbers that we previously would have used something like DeltaGraph to finish.  The multiple spreadsheet in one page makes it nice for certain things, like dashboards, but it is a long way from being a real work tool.

The biggest problem iWork is that it simply does not work with most of the business world.  Folks who don't use Macs can't use iWork files.  This is less of a problem with Keynote, since when we send presentations, we almost always .pdf them before sending.

The absolute biggest problem with iWork, which makes the name sort of silly, is that it is almost impossible to email successfully an iWork file to another user--even if they have a Mac.  If I want to solicit comments on a presentation, for example, I can't just send the file around to other folks in the office.  In fact, you can't email it at all unless you have Stuffit installed.  And, the geniuses at Apple decided not to include Stuffit in OS X 10.5.  Even if you have Stuffit, it is still more trouble than it is worth to email an iWork file.  It doesn't send the file, but an archive.  This guarantees that something is always lost in translation.

The verdict? iWork is nice--very nice for some applications--but it is not really useful for business.  It is great for home use if you don't want to shell out for Office, but it is really little more than an updated Appleworks.  Until Apple makes collaboration easier with iWork, they should simply stop pretending that it is something that even a small business will find useful.

Our Software

All of our machines, except the server run on OS X 10.5. I have not gotten around to upgrading the server, but hope to find the time soon.

Like most businesses, the bulk of what we do most days occurs in MS Office. We use Office 2004. I upgraded one machine to 2008 and had to go back. We simply cannot use 2008 because the new version of Excel (which we use probably more than anything) doesn't support macros. Because of this, key functions like XIRR and XNPV do not transfer from Mac to Windows very well. Well, not at all, so we are stuck. Excel 2008 really isn't any better than Numbers. It also lacks a Solver and other pretty important features.

For word processing, we probably use Pages and Word equally, depending on the user's preference. For presentations, we are almost 100% Keynote. Powerpoint used to be a great package, but now it is just a bloated pile of fail.

Our email, contacts and calendar are in Entourage. We don't love it and are always looking for an alternative (more on that later) but there are a couple of things we really like about it, like categories for contacts. We use a hosted Exchange service and love our provider of that for their great customer service. We aren't married to Exchange, but until Apple does something with their absolutely worthless iCal, there really isn't an alternative.

Other stuff we use often: Google Earth Pro, Fastrak Schedule, Omnigraffle, iChat, Safari and Firefox. We have a couple of machines with Parallels so we can run Windows. We basically do this for two reasons: 1) to test models in Excel before sending to Windows folks; and 2) to access certain web sites that only support IE.