Cheap Microsoft Office v. X for Mac (Software) (Macintosh) Price

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Customer Reviews of Microsoft Office v. X for Mac

Entourage is the worst of the programs in this suite. The freebie Mac Mail program has the most incredible junk mail filter I've yet used. It does nearly everything that Entourage does as far as making it easy to drop pictures or attachments into email. No, it doesn't have its own Calendar, but I don't use one of those things anyway. The Entourage calendar is a pain to deal with, anyway. It doesn't lay out well, and it doesn't account for schedules like mine. I have no use for it. Entourage also doesn't have a feature to just receive mail. No, one must send AND receive, at the same time, or just Send. Maybe I don't want to send mail just yet. Sheesh. Even MacMail lets you just Get Mail, without sending.

In Newsgroups, Entourage doesn't offer a preference to view only subscribed newsgroups for a particular server. No, I must go to the server, then go to View--Subscribed only. What a pain.

Where Entourage really messes up is its junk mail filter. It consistently lists valid mail as Junk Mail. Much of the time, anything from Apple comes in as Junk Mail. If Mac Mail mistakenly attributes an email after its "learning" phase, correcting it is a breeze: Click on Junk/Not Junk. The program REMEMBERS how to classify mail from the sender after that. To make the same change in Entourage, you have to add the sender to your address book. Maybe I don't want Apple in my address book, hogging up useless space. Why can't Entourage just REMEMBER that mail from that address isn't junk mail??? If I can ever get Mac Mail to connect to my college newsgroups (it's being temperamental about this ONE thing), Entourage is HISTORY.

If that's not bad enough, Entourage [alters] information I cut and paste into its standard text window from Word. Information I get from PC Outlook Express users who cut and paste from Word likewise gets jumbled when it gets to me. This program is a horrible mess.

Word has its quirks as well. Several times, I've been working on a document, I try to save it, then the Save window DISAPPEARS. I can't do anything with the document after that. I can't close it. I can't cut and paste the info into a new document. The doc window just sits there, taking up space. I usually have to quit or force quit to get rid of it. Sometimes, I'm lucky and autosave/autorecover save all my changes to a doc...but sometimes I'm not lucky. Sometimes I lose whole paragraphs of data. Most annoying, and Microsoft tech help is no help at all, as usual.

Word also has a nasty habit of changing the format of whole selections of text when cutting and pasting. I'll format all of a document to say, Verdana 12, and here comes a pasted selection in TimesRoman 12, or 10 or who knows what. I've changed my styles, font preferences, everything that remotely refers to fonts in any preference window anywhere--and it still does this.

Typical of all MS products, this monster known as Office has a really hard time remembering personal preferences for any of the programs, especially font settings in PowerPoint. I keep setting certain things, and Office blithely resets it to what it wants me to have, not what I want. This is like living with my mother.

Finding how to make certain settings in Office is a chore in itself. I don't like it when Word uses AutoType to input information from my address book for me, or when it tries to input a date. My work isn't oriented toward that, so this is most annoying. The place to set this preference isn't under Finder-->Preferences (where it logically belongs), it's under Tools-->Auto Correct-->AutoType. Brilliant. If I turn off my computer, my setting for this changes, according to Microsoft's whim.

If I could, I would junk this program.

Great Product!!
Really Great! Microsoft did it. Feature rich software. It really works well than its Windoze counterpart. Price is a bit high, but once you start using it, you won't regret for that. A must have product for Mac fans.

Does the job with some nice features
Like almost everyone on the planet, I've used Office for Windows extensively and initially I was a bit put off by Mac Office as it does look and feel different (what the hell is Entourage anyway?).

However on working with it more you get used to it, and it has some nice features that the Windows version doesn't.

3+
Entourage - I have really come to like the app - I use it as a replacement for Palm Desktop (Memos), Address Book (it is a little 'richer'), and Mail (it does hotmail as well as POP & IMAP), and everything integrates well.
Ability to mark a doc for followup - Office will give you a reminder, even when it's not running.
It's Office, right? It does almost everything.

3-
While docs are compatible with Windows versions, I have had problems with complex spreadsheets, so I do not think it is 100% perfect.
It is a little sluggish (800mhz G4 iMac, Panther, 512mb).
Entourage's calendar management isn't as good as iCal - can't publish/subscribe, or even import/export data. More generally, Entourage isn't very 'open' - it shares data well with other parts of the app, but not other apps.

Overall, it does what you expect and let's face it, it's the de facto standard for a reason. Expensive thought!