Product Description

Office 2004 Professional takes advantage of the powerful Mac OS X system, offering animated buttons, sheets, dialogue boxes & more. Getting your important work done is easy as clicking and going! Features the latest versions of Outlook, Powerpoint, and Word - with great new Mac-only features. New Presenter Tools for Powerpoint - tools like the on-screen clock, notes pane and thumbnail viewer make changes and adjustments simple Entourage 2004 offers improved junk e-mail protection, better Exchange support, advanced Three Columns and more -- get through your inbox faster than before Compatibility Reports determine compatibility between projects in Windows and Mac formats Stay in touch with MSN Messenger for Mac Work with any native Windows application with Virtual PC for Mac Version 7

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2418 in Software
• Brand: Microsoft
• Model: Y15-00001
• Released on: 2004-09-27
• Platform: Macintosh
• Format: CD-ROM
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 2.40" h x 7.80" w x 9.50" l, 1.30 pounds

Features

• A productivity suite with a host of ground-breaking new features
• Easily share ideas across platforms and around the globe
• Confidently create stunning documents with impressive new tools
• Spend less time managing info and more time using it
• Includes Microsoft Virtual PC for Mac Version 7

From the Manufacturer
There's time for fun and time to focus. When you’re ready to get down to business, Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac* provides the intuitive, intelligent tools you need to transform your ideas and opportunities into action. Whether you use your Mac for home, school, or business, Office 2004 offers full versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage 2004 designed exclusively for Mac OS X. The Professional Edition also comes with Virtual PC Version 7 for those who need to access PC-only files or applications.

*Note: Office 2004 for Mac (and Office v. X for Mac) are both compatible with Mac OS X Tiger.

Work with Tools That Work Like You

Innovators cross-pollinate ideas and information, and so should their tools. The new features in Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac are designed to give you access to your ideas and information from every program in the suite. Thanks to input from thousands of Mac users, Office 2004 contains tools that are more integrated and intuitive than ever.

New Features:

• Project Center: manage your projects more efficiently by accessing all of your project-related e-mail messages, files, notes, contacts, and schedules in one convenient place.
• Toolbox: quickly access Compatibility Reports, your Scrapbook, and the Project Palette from Word, Excel, or PowerPoint 2004.
• Compatibility Reports: Seamlessly share files and project information with almost anyone on a Mac or PC. Now you can quickly identify and resolve version- and platform-related compatibility issues.
• Project Gallery: quickly find the documents you’ve worked on recently in the gallery, and use the new Learn tab to find instructive sample documents.

Additional Features:

• Unicode support: now you can display most non-Roman fonts with ease and take advantage of the long file-name capabilities built into Mac OS X.
• Save image to file: save embedded graphics to a separate graphics file in GIF, JPEG, JPEG 2000, PNG, PSD, or AppleWorks Graphic format.
• Formatting palette transparency: make the Formatting Palette translucent so that it no longer obscures your underlying document.
• Error reporting: automatically generate and send an error report to Microsoft for analysis if an Office 2004 application crashes.

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Customer Reviews

Great Program
Great program. Received the item on time. Great price. Thank you.

The Only Office Suite for a Mac, and Better than Windows
Oddly, Microsoft made a better version of Office for Mac than they did for Windows. Excel has more database features. Word has a few more formatting options. And, of course, PowerPoint was originally written for the Mac, so it is very much at home. These three are five star products. They work well and do just what you expect. They do the things a full-blown office suite is expected to do. If all you need is a text editor, then use TextEdit, or maybe Open Office. But if you need to do some serious office work, this is pretty much the only game in town, especially if you are working on a laptop and don't always have access to an Internet connection.

Virtual PC is a two star product. It runs much too slowly on a G4 Mac. You can expect some compatibility issues. Of course, it will not run at all on an Intel Mac, nor would you want it to. You are better off with Boot Camp or Parallels. But, for the most part, it does exactly what it claims to do.

Most users have a love/hate relationship with Entourage. It is bulky. It stores everything in a huge file where you cannot get at it. If somebody sends you a PC virus it gets stuck in that huge file until it is archived and/or deleted. Granted, it will not hurt the Mac, but it is annoying to have it in there. Entourage will not sync with Pocket Windows devices without additional software not available from either Apple or Microsoft (but check out PocketMac Pro). Entourage's news reader is a joke; it will not even show threaded discussions. Even Microsoft's free Outlook Express for Windows is far better. On the plus side, Entourage has a nice calendar. The address book is very good. And the mail utility will work with web-based mail services such as Hotmail, something that Mail cannot do.

Microsoft is cutting support for Virtual PC, Explorer for OS X, and a few other products, but the rest of Office will be around for a long time. Microsoft claims to be working on a Universal version of Microsoft Office, but given their product development cycle I would not expect release of the next version before sometime in 2008.

Acceptable product, a bit overpriced, watch out for font issues. Don't buy for Intel Macs!
First: Product is pricey. Avoid it unless you absolutely need it.
Second: Bad interoperability between Mac and Windows versions. If you use the grab utility to copy/paste screenshots into Word, etc. and expect the document you created to open on a PC, better have Quicktime and TIFF decompressor. (Who had that bright idea?)
Third: Virtual PC DOES NOT WORK on Intel Macs. Best platform is PPC G4/G5. It's a CPU hog on G3, even if you max out your RAM.
Fourth: Here's the kicker. Better get a hold of software like Font Doctor and make sure you're running OS X 10.4+. Corrupt fonts will cause Office apps to crash and burn. Recommend removing all fonts except OS-provided fonts, run font doctor and repair all fixable fonts, then use the Font Book supplied by OS X Tiger (10.4) to bring them back in. Don't forget to reboot between removing fonts and re-adding them. You'll save a world of trouble in doing this.