Microsoft Office 2008 - 12.0.1

Maybe the big feature of Word 2008 was that it was Intel-native, but apparently they forgot to optimize it for PowerPC as well. It takes forever to scroll through a complex document using a 2.0GHz PowerMac G5. Also, text lags noticably when typing, i.e. I have to type, then wait for the system to catch up. The new file format takes longer to save and open, and sometimes produces larger files than the doc format despite the zip compression. Using QuickLook is hit or miss with the new file format, sometimes you can get a preview, but once your document gets bigger and more complex it gives up and does not offer any preview. If you have your scrollbars setup in System Preferences to "Jump to here" instead of "Jump to the next page", Word will instead ignore any attempts to click in the scroll bar to scroll. (It will still move the scroller, but the page will not scroll.) This is unbelievably annoying.

On the plus side, keeping the toolbars in the document window is a better interface, and is more maclike, though I would have preferred the Word 2007 interface that let you display two pages side by side. Also, I have not had any crashes yet, which is more than I could say about the old Office.

Basically, the new Office is as slow on my desktop as the old Office was on my MacBook. I am considering going back to 2004 on my desktop at least.

The vast majority of my older version of Word documents that have anything more in them than just plain text have issues. Word 2004 displays these documents just fine - Word 2008 butchers them. I even tried saving the documents in Word 2004 as varying formats and Word 2008 still mangled them upon import. Diagrams that I created outside of the M$ universe and then pasted into Word now either don't show up at all or have annoying artifacts. Equations that worked just fine before are now replaced by the word 'Error!'. In short, a completely useless upgrade for me. I can't believe I gave those guys my money. Oh yea, even though I purchased Office 2008 as a brand new package, if you have any issues it'll cost you $50 per incident to deal with THEIR bugs. Now that's classic Microsoft service for a new customer who just plonked down a few hundred dollars!