Back to 10.4 and Office 2004. Life is Good

[what4]

For a New Year's present, I'd like to have Word 5.1 and PageMill ported over to Leopard.

Any givers?

[tortoise]

The obvious missing element to this discussion is what type machine are you running, Intel or PPC because that makes a big difference. I had held onto Office 2004 since purchasing my new MacPro based on the negative reviews so prevelant on Office 2008. However after several months of frequent crashes related mostly to Entourage 2004 I figured it could not be any worse and installed Office 2008 and frankly I love it. Lightening fast, have not had a single crash in over a month of use and I even find the interface to be much better than 2004. So the bottom line is if you have Intel machine office 2008 is Intel native and runs great in my experience. I realize it is stylish to bash all MS products here but sometimes it is just a lame position based on incomplete information. The other possibility is your machine is too much of a mess to run anything properly.

Leopard 10.5.6 and Office 2008 running better here than Tiger 10.4 and Office 2004 ever dreamed of doing. Granted Tiger is not even an option on my MacPro but Office 2004 was a total dog.

[Mike Sellers]

N-OS X-tasy! wrote: After running both Office X and 2008, the only one I can come up with is 2008's support for file names more than 32 characters long (also available in 2004, IIRC).

Yeah, I could never go back to Office X just because of the way Entourage truncates the attachment file names.

[Bimwad]

what4 wrote:
For a New Year's present, I'd like to have Word 5.1 and PageMill ported over to Leopard.

So would I. Word peaked with 5.1a.

[sekker]

You should be able to run word 5 via sheepsaver

Would be fun to try

I'll see if I can get it to go

[Don C]

I've not found Excel 2008 to be faster on my Intel PB than Excel 2004. In fact copy and paste is much slower in 2008 on both my G4 and the PB, as in tens of minutes for 2008 and a minute or two in 2004. I have come to using 2008 when I need the extra rows but switching to 2004 as soon as possible for file manipulation, calculations, and charting. Both 2004 and 2008 are subject to quitting in the middle of writing a formula and I typically now start all formulas with a double equal sign, taking the extra one out before hitting ENTER.

Entourage 2008 is working fine on the G4 though I don't see any differences one way or another from the 2004 version.

[Doc]

> I've not found Excel 2008 to be faster on my Intel PB than Excel 2004.

PB's don't have Intel chips.

Do you have a PB or do you have a MB?

As far as copy and paste go, how much data are you copying and pasting? What else are you running ? How much free RAM have you got? How much hard drive space have you got?

I have zero lag copying a 20 page document (all text) to the clipboard from Word 2004 or Word 2008 on both my old G4 tower and on my G4 PB.


> Both 2004 and 2008 are subject to quitting in the middle of writing a formula...

What else is crashing/quitting on you? 'Seems like you've got something else -- maybe bad RAM, bad fonts or an Input Manager -- screwing with your Mac. Word 2008 is very stable and up-to-date versions of Word 2004 are rock solid.

[Carthaigh]

I love these threads. They make me laugh hard.

" 'Remember When' is the lowest form of conversation." - Tony Soprano

[Robert M]

Tort,

I agree with you wholeheartedly. On my PPC machines, Office '04 was good and worked well. Office '08 is a tad slower but just as good and works well. On our office MacBooks and my Mac Pro, there is no comparison. I moved to Office '08 and will not go back to 04 (or any other older version of Office). The difference is that significant.

A thread like this tends to make me think there are other things going on with the machines contributing to the problems and that it isn't just an OS 10.x or Office (whatever version) issue.

Robert

[tortoise]

Hi Robert
Glad to hear your experience is similar to mine. I am a computer consultant and therefore see many common misconceptions and frequent condemnations of good products that have been improperly installed or installed on sick computers that are in need of professional care. I am surprised that I let the negative rants against Office 2008 hold me back for several months only to find it was a lot of hot air or inept users.