Existing users, 
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.
Microsoft Office 2008
Entourage, PowerPoint, Excel, Word suite.
Version: 12.2.3
Review after updating
Feedback Type: Review
Contributed by: epc Wednesday, June 10 2009 @ 01:38 PM PDT
Product Platform: MacOSX
Used Product For: Over One Year
Recommend Product: YES
Overall Rating:
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Features:
Quality / Stability:
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Comments
Review after updating - epc
I've read that any database is prone to corruption. Fortunately for me the last time I had a corrupted Entourage database was probably under OS 9, but it certainly happens. I'm sorry to hear about your experience.I try to keep a clean database. That is, I regularly back up my emails and remove them from Entourage. I use EEAX, and keep my full backup in ProVUE's Panorama.
Just in case, these links may be useful:
http://www.entourage.mvps.org/database/
http://www.entourage.mvps.org/database/rebuild.html
Wednesday, June 10 2009 @ 11:02 PM PDT
Review after updating - kerbylane
I am surprised to read that you feel that MS Excel is superior. I have spent the last week fighting with Excel 2008 because of its horrible performance on a relatively small data set (13000 points of data). After creating a chart nearly any action leads to the spinning beachball which shows up for long periods of time. I have found many people complaining of this and other performance problems with the 2008 version. There are also many hacky attempts to resolve this. But I have not found any that help. I should also say that manipulating this data set in Excel on a Windows box is great.Monday, June 29 2009 @ 10:45 AM PDT
Review after updating - epc
Don't be surprised :-)Even Rob Griffiths -who has criticized Excel and praised Numbers- wrote that "Excel is still the best spreadsheet app on the Mac, by far" on his review of Microsoft Excel 2008 (Macworld).
I haven't done any charting recently in Excel. I never liked the bloat this created, and as you mention Excel can become unresponsive.
I will sometimes create simple charts in Excel but more commonly I will use an additional application. I haven't used Chartsmith recently ( http://www.blacksmith.com/ ) but I used it with great results to do the charts for a workbook with multiple worksheets, linked calculations and "mega-formulas." I have not worked with large data sets with Excel 2008 yet. I've been trying some stuff using ProVUE Panorama, but eventually will work with Excel 2008 and larger sets.
I am intrigued by Quantrix as well. Still, compared to Numbers I do feel that Excel is superior.
Out of curiosity I just downloaded a large data set. A 31.6 MB text file which became a 35.3 MB xlsx file. Eight columns and almost one million rows (990,823 excluding header). I picked a column and formatted the cells as numbers. Excel was a bit slow, but still responded to formulas such as average, median, sum, etc. I was able to create 4 charts very quickly. I just sorted the data and picked a few numbers to create some Column and Bar Charts.
On the other hand Numbers could not import the complete text file, resulting in "Import Warning - Tables with more than 255 columns and 65,533 rows aren’t supported. Columns 256 and higher and rows 65,534 and higher were removed.) Trying to import the xlsx file yielded a couple of additional error messages.
It's unrealistic to expect people to use such data sets, but still Excel showed its capabilities and Numbers showed its limitations.
For tips on optimizing Excel's performance you may want to check out some of the work by John Walkenbach http://spreadsheetpage.com/ or http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa730921.aspx which is focused on Excel 2007 but may have ideas applicable to the Mac version. I have not read it so I don't know.
In case you're interested, the file is nonemp07co.zip from the US Census.
I hope this clarifies my comment.
Monday, July 20 2009 @ 06:38 PM PDT
Review after updating - sevensirens
This is a fair review. I've had my share of frustrations with both iWork apps and MS Office -- Office never fails to corrupt my Entourage database after a few months of decent performance and iWork, unfortunately, doesn't offer the seamless compatibility with MS products that Apple is so quick to boast about.Power Users need to have both installed suites to get any work done.
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Wednesday, June 10 2009 @ 05:31 PM PDT