Office for Mac 2008

[Danny]

Is there much improvement in the software application Office for Mac 2008.
I purchased a copy of Office 2004 but now have the opportunity to purchase 2008 at a good price.
Is it worth the upgrade.

[IanMcD]

Depending on what you are doing there may be some advancement in Office 2008.

If you use Entourage with Microsoft Exchange there is a lot of back end features added and would advise upgrading to Entourage 2008.

Other than that you get better templates and 3D graphics in Excel and Powerpoint.

[Ric Willmot]

I have the full version on my new (December 07) 17" MacBook Pro.
When I went to the demo night, it looked great.
But now I have it home; I cannot work out how to do any of the nice stuff I saw.
It is just a glorified typewriter for me.

[glenidol]

I haven't upgraded Office as haven't found the need just yet.
What exactly are you trying to do in Office - or what was it in the presentation you viewed that you wanted to do ? Maybe I can help.

I use Powerpoint a lot, I don't do a lot of word processing, but I have used Word to lay out stuff. There are some useful how-to on Mactopia and templates. http://www.mactopia.com

Sign up for the newsletter - http://www.microsoft.com/mac/newsletter.mspx

There are loads of how-to for all office programs - here's the link for the Word ones -
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/help.mspx?target=998a9fbe-7608-4485-8abb-109381bf32a81033&clr=99-4-0&MODE=ct&CTT=Search&ep=8&rtype=2&pos=1&quid=1f53d37b-6318-4529-89fe-ccd06ec460c3&locale=en-US&usid=4700c70e-d2a8-4a14-a0dc-c51f01cb5f05

Some courses here
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/courses.mspx

Too much info maybe
Regards

Jude

[Ric Willmot]

Thanks, Jude.
I will take a peak.
Really looking for some templates to create professional looking E-Books and brochures and seminar registration forms.
Most of the templates in the program are cheap and tawdry.
Rgds,
Ric

[glenidol]

Don't think you meant cheap and tawdry But certainly not as jazzy modern as for instance "Pages" templates.

Depending on how much work you are going to do you it's possible you'll be needing something like Adobe InDesign to do layout work. Alternative is the open source program Scribus (you need X11 installed off system disks with it)
http://www.scribus.net/

Have you tried using Apple's iWork - Pages? Pages gives a very smooth finish I have to say to the graphics. The newsletter templates are excellent and can be easily changed to suit your own purposes. There's a iWork Community group at http://www.iworkcommunity.com with a few templates up there for various tasks.

Must admit laying out in Word is not easy but working in Tables for layout works for me.

Jude