However, I have found that NeoOffice is quite capable of opening Word/Excel/Powerpoint files and resaving them as Office documents. I have a 2GHz 2GB ram Macbook Duo_core.

The Neooffice site states at http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/features.php

Handles Most Excel VBA Macros NeoOffice includes the Excel macro support developed by Novell’s ooo-build project. The ooo-build project is an open source project that continually develops feature enhancements to OpenOffice.org.

And its free too. I urge you to download it with the latest patches and try it. Set its preferences to save as Office format instead of its own format.

Anyway to be in on an early release? We’ll sign an NDA… Thanks! -doug

1. Visio: There is a very good alternatives in Mac, but they are not binary compatibles with Visio. If port visio is too complicated or expensive, at least consider to create a convertion tool form the binary form to the xml form that run on Mac OS (Universal please)
2. Project: There are good alternatives to Project, but nothing that integrates with Project Server. Even you have a very good compatibility with the binary files, but if you work with Project Server… sorry, no macs allowed. (The web interface requires Internet Explorer, probably because of some activeX controls). At least consider create a web interface wich runs with safari and Firefox….

thanks.

clemare

If we truly have to wait until 2010, 2011, or beyond, what have you been doing in Redmond? Remember when Apple revealed that Mac OS X would run on Intel chip sets? Three operating systems later, when they made the strategic announcement to switch from Motorola/IBM sets, they had ALREADY wrote Mac OS X to work on the Intel set. Now how come the MacBU of Microsoft couldn’t have thought the same way. Oh, yeah, you’re Microsoft not Apple. But really, you mean to tell everyone that VBA will still be years away? Honestly? You don’t have a group of programmers locked-up in a hole and are ready to release it with Office 2008 SP2??? It must be incredibly awkward to show up to work every day and feel like you’re making a contribution to the world of computing!

Sorry for the harshness but after being treated like black americans (in the computer OS sense) for so long, you must understand. We Mac users wouldn’t feel this way if you didn’t jerk us around. We’d be happy to use Office if it behaved just like it does on Windows so we can use the product at work AS WELL AS AT HOME AND SCHOOL. Face it, Apple’s Mac OS is not going away so you had better figure this out.

Oh, and your triple shipping numbers relative to Office 2004…guess which operation system continues to grow at about the same rate over the 2004 - 2008 time frame. So, stoke-up the monkeys in the basement and finish the VBA programming for Office 2008 SP2 to have even a chance of being in the game come 2010, 2011, or beyond.

Here’s an idea. How about porting Outlook to run on OS-X? What an amazing idea if I may say so myself. Entourage is a pos.

Get with it MacBU! Give us the real apps: OUTLOOK with TLS/SSL

Entourage is crap.

But is there any way, when both are installed, to keep Office 2004 apps as the default when double-clicking on documents?

Yes, and please add mouse wheel scrolling to the IDE code window, while you’re on it.

Great to hear it’s coming back, our users will stick with MacOffice 2004 until then.

What I missed before deciding to buy was the lack of Solver as well. No, lack of VBA and Solver both makes Excel worthless for finance. Take into account the performance issues, and I’m down to using Pages for word processing and Excel 2004 for number-crunching. I uninstalled Office 2008 with more than a hint of spite.

I’ve been an early adopter of Office since version 5, but Office 2008 killed my enthusiasm for the product line. I wish you and your team the best, but I’m not planning on buying the next iteration unless reviews of the product are thoroughly positive and guarantee it won’t be another waste of money.

I actually teach a course in Industrial Engineering focused on building applications in VBA. Most MBA programs involve spreadsheet-based courses. With few exceptions, the use of VBA is a big part of these courses.

I am now one of those that run both 2004 and 2008 on the same machine, and the new Excel in the Parallels environment.

The MAC version MUST be as good as the PC version. Any lessening of the product, such as the decision made for the MAC 2008 will for good reason support the conspiracy theory, which you denied, but I can’t help but believe holds some truth to it.

Bottom line: Return FULL functionality to the MAC office suite. For VBA in Excel, that includes support and the intellisence capabilities.

- Please bring the VBA IDE in MacWord to the quality it has in WinWord. Though we do most of our VBA programming in WinWord, we always had and expect to have to solve some cross platform compatibility problems on the Mac side, which used to be a real pain in w98, 2001 and 2004 with their very poor IDE.
- A good macro recorder can give a useful starting point and speed up the implementation of new ideas to a great extent, even for the most experienced VBA programmer.

- more consistency in formatting between 2007 and 2008. Sadly, even my basic CV .docx doesn’t convert correctly between the Mac and Windows versions of Office.

- the same “theme” support that Office 2007 has–font themes, and most importantly, colour themes. The colours in my Office 2007 .xlsx files never come across correctly (most come across as grey), and it is the cause of much pain and cursing

- the gallery elements animate too slowly. I actually find myself clicking on “charts” and waiting for it to finish animating so i can choose an option on the right-hand side of the list..

thanks!

-b

and

A key combination to automatically type a date.