Microsoft Office 2008 - 12.1.9

It's interesting to see all the anti-Microsoft comments from Mac users, but my experience with Microsoft has been positive. BTW, for the past 10 years I've used Macs 99% of the time.

One reviewer suggests to "check out Apple's iWork package, which has 99.9% of the features at HALF the price." This is not accurate. I've used iWork since it came out, and Keynote before it was bundled with Pages as iWork. Prior to that I also used AppleWorks.
For me, the long-term cost of iWork has been more expensive that Office given that iWork has no upgrade path. The only iWork application that I prefer when compared to a Microsoft Office application is Keynote. I prefer Word instead of Pages, and Excel is vastly superior to Numbers.
For very basic work Pages and Numbers are sufficient, but for my needs I prefer the aforementioned Microsoft products.

Thanks to Microsoft's promotions and discounts, Office has been quite affordable. Some people got Office 2008 for Mac Special Media Edition for around $30 (thirty) dollars. Pretty good deal. I got my copy of the Special Media Edition for the price of the Student Version.
iWork is indeed cheaper, but for many power users it is not sufficient and as mentioned there's no upgrade path so after a couple of years the expense adds up.

One big downside is the lack of VBA in Office 2008. They acknowledged this issue many months before the software was released. That's why I kept a 2004 version. I've read that VBA will be incorporated again in the future, hopefully as a free update.

Regarding problems with Entourage, I use it to check 5 email accounts. I have not had any problems after the upgrade. Launch time is about 10 seconds on a Dual 2GHz PPC G5, OS X 10.5.7, with 160active fonts.

Although I still prefer Entourage, I admit that Apple's Mail has gotten better with each release.

I've said this before but it may be worth repeating. I did have problems with Office originally, until I did a complete clean installation of Leopard. Many of the problems I was experiencing were due to Leopard. The problems were not limited to Office, but to many other applications as well. I finally began using Leopard regularly after 10.5.3 or 10.5.4. Initial releases were extremely buggy.

The Automatic Updater found the available updates and downloaded them. The update installation failed because "the required software version was not found". I have e-mailed Microsoft Support a complete report (I had still two free support e-mail requests, because I had never used any till now),
There is something untoward: the current version (in my system) is 12.1.7, whereas the available update is 12.1.9. Sounds like there should be 12.1.8 somewhere?
Microsoft...
I am not overly worried. Version 12.1.7 is running satisfactorily (somehow) and I have always Open Office and NeoOffice (always updated without problems) to use instead.