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Office 2008 for Mac, Home and Student Edition (Mac) | 
 enlarge | From: Microsoft
Category: Software
List Price: £106.99
Buy New: £75.00
You Save: £31.99 (30%)
New (12) from £75.00
Rating:  22 reviews
Format: Dvd-rom
Platforms: Macintosh, Mac Os X
ESRB: Mature
Media: DVD-ROM
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Operating System: Mac OS X
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3
Dimensions (in): 19.7 x 19.7 x 19.7
MPN: GZA-00006
Model: GZA-00006
UPC: 882224526302
EAN: 0882224526302
ASIN: B000X86ZAS
Release Date: January 16, 2008
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: New, in box, no longer needed for college course. Please read the student edition t&c's.
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Product Description
Priced for home and school these Office basics help you achievemore for less. Whether your projects are around the house or in the classroom thereinvented Office 2008 for Mac experience makes it easier than everto create professional-looking work.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Migrating from Windows? Treat Office 2008 with caution. January 17, 2008
Benjamin Woolley (London, UK)
33 out of 36 found this review helpful
After years with PCs, I finally migrated to the Mac this Christmas. The whole experience has been remarkably painless. Everything worked, the software is for the most part beautifully designed, and I felt I had found a comfortable new home. Then I got Office 2008 Home and Student Edition, principally for Word and Entourage, so I could access all my Office 2007 files...and found myself back in the Windows world.
Word 2008 looks pretty, but is flaky. It sometimes freezes, and there's an odd problem with the document window sometimes refusing to overlay other windows that are open on the desktop. Also, the interface is different from Office 2003 and 2007, and in my opinion not as good.
Maybe I'll get used to these foibles, but the instability of the software is worrying. Worse, Office 2008 isn't fully compatible with Office 2007. Word will read documents written using earlier versions. But Entourage does not read Outlook pst files AT ALL. Migrating Outlook to Entourage is awkward to impossible without making big compromises and wasting lots of time and effort. Microsoft created an add-on for Entourage 2004 that apparently works with Outlook 2001 pst files, but there's no information from Microsoft on converting Outlook 2003 or 2007 files. There are other solutions for converting pst files, but I can find none that are simple and seamless (or free). And once they're in Entourage format, I notice that there's no way of exporting them to other email programs.
To add to the sense of a fundamental misfit between Microsoft and Apple, Microsoft's support pages for mac don't seem to work with Safari (but do with Firefox). In retrospect, I wish I hadn't tried this half-way house between the Windows and Mac worlds, but just started afresh.
Disappointing January 17, 2008
C. M. Harvey (Loughborough, UK)
14 out of 17 found this review helpful
The lack of a decent equation editor, like the one that comes with Office 2007 is very, very disappointing. For me it's such a big issue that it almost wasn't worth the upgrade. You are stuck with Microsoft Equation Editor 3.0 from olden times, and compatibility with MathType seems to have been taken away. Nothing I can do can Word to recognise it. Maybe there'll be a fix for this in the future - I hope so anyway.
I hoped the interface would be similar to Office 2007, which I was very impressed with and got to grips with immediately, despite being initially a little dubious. Instead everything remains the same as 2004, except for the elements gallery which has nothing particularly useful in there and as far as I can see can't be turned off. It just sits in the way, taking up space on your screen and you'll probably not use it at all unless you're going to apply a pre-built background to your document, or something like that. Excel does keep its chart types in there though.
The toolbox stills exists. It is jam-packed with tiny icons, and arrows, that you have to hunt through, click to expand and then scroll through to find the right style. Not user-friendly at all in my opinion.
The positives: It's a universal application, so no more Rosetta! That said, it's not any quicker loading, although once loaded it's is noticeably faster and more stable. It's supposed to be 100% compatible with Word 2007. I take work between Mac and PC all the time and had many problems with Word 2003 and Word 2004. I'm still not sure how it handles equations: hopefully it doesn't convert Word 2007 equations into images, like it does for other versions. I haven't checked this yet, but I can't really see what else it could do without the new equation editor.
Overall, in my opinion it's nothing more than a Universal version of Office 2004 with a few new gimmicks for those who like desktop publishing and prettiness. For a technical user, such as myself it's disappointing and in some ways a downgrade. I'm keeping it though because I want to be sure of compatibility with Office 2007 and like the fact it's universal.
 Excellent upgrade, thoroughly recommended. January 15, 2008
Jay Soul (London, UK)
9 out of 13 found this review helpful
Office 2008 has finally arrived, and it is similar in execution to Office 2007 for Windows - but obviously adapted to brings out a Mac's strength. It will take some getting used to, as the interface is redesigned, but once you've used it for a day, you'll realise it is naturally more intuitive. Put simply, it makes more sense.
Once you put a bit of time and effort into realising all of the amazing things you can do with Office 2008, you will be knocking out much more detailed - and attractive - documents with ease. Word is excellent and universally compatible, Excel solid as ever, and PowerPoint links so easily with iPhoto that you can make a top-notch slideshow in 10 minutes flat.
At this price point - with a license for 3 computers - it is an absolute bargain!
 Office needs to downsize a few departments. February 10, 2008
N. Cochrane (Glasgow, UK)
8 out of 10 found this review helpful
I switched to the Mac three years ago and in that time had managed OK with apple's own iWork suite. It was fine but when I started university and had to sling files around that were almost exclusively in the .doc format iWork was missing or not formatting things correctly.
First good thing is the price point, bearing in mind you get three software licences. The next is Word - the notebook view is great for sorting notes. That said, I find that the fact that all settings are held in the 'toolbox' - a floating pallet filled with collapsing menus - is a little bit too complicated.
Although Powerpoint is better than before but still looks very tired. If you've ever used Apple's Keynote it leaves much to be desired. The Entourage application loses it one star. Can anyone explain the point of this application? If you use iCal, Address Book and Mail already you might think merging the three into one app would help. You'd be wrong. It's a paranoid little app that gets over exciting at every email, makes irritating noises (you'll want to turn off) right away. I don't see why this is included at all. I can't really comment on Excel as it's not something I use very often but it seems slow to start up and it's crashed a few times.
A software update will go a long way to improving Office and deleting Entourage would give you back about 45MB of space straight away.
Bit of a disappointment March 17, 2008
L. J. Emmerson
8 out of 10 found this review helpful
Having used office 2008 for a month or so, I must admit to being a bit underwhelmed. Its been a long time since the last release of MS office and the 2004 version was starting to look old. This version has been given a facelift and now runs natively on an intel mac but... thats about it. Whilst the apps themselves are superb, they haven't changed dramatically in years and it would have been nice to see some genuine innovation from Microsoft here. Look at applications like Scrivener for word processing and Apple's own Numbers spreadsheet and you'll see some compelling ways of doing things which show some real insight into how people work. After 4 years, I would have hoped that Office would see some similar innovations but as far as I can tell, this version mainly offers cosmetic changes. I know they had to port their codebase from Codewarrior to Xcode but surely they had time to come up with something better than this?
Another concern is that the Windows and Mac versions are diverging in terms of both interface and functionality. This version has an interface which has more in common with Office 2004 than with Office 2007 and does not use the "ribbon" toolbar of the latter. Also, the omission of VBA scripting in this version is unforgivable.
In terms of speed, I was expecting a speed boost now that the suite is not running under Rosetta on my Macbook. As far as I can see, things run at pretty much the same speed and all the individual apps take quite a while to open. I've also experienced frequent crashes, particularly in Word and Excel.
Overall, despite the above criticisms, the individual applications are all excellent but for the average home user, much of the functionality of Office 2008 is superfluous and there are cheaper alternatives available
The good: Looks nice, universal binary
The bad: No obvious speed boost, frequent crashes, lack of VBA scripting, different interface to Office 2007, elements gallery can't be disabled and uses a lot of vertical screen space, brings nothing new to the table, poor value compared to Windows version which includes VBA scripting and MS access for a lower price.
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