Office v.X versus Office 2004

[colin]

I need to decide between installing the original Office v.X or the
newer Office 2004 on my PowerBook.

My university is now a member of a Microsoft campus program and I will
be able to download both versions of Office once my registration is
confirmed next week. Anyway... I've heard that Office v.X uses less RAM
and runs significantly faster than Office 2004, especially on previous
generation machines. So I'm considering installing Office v.X plus all
of the updates for it.

Are there any known bugs that will cause problems for me if I try to
run Office v.X on Mac OS X 10.3.7? I will only be working with simple
Word .doc and Excel .xls files. No macros and no fancy formatting. I
would like to save as much RAM, disk space, and CPU performance as
possible. So does Office v.X sound like the right choice? Or are there
reasons why I should just use the newer Office 2004?

(As a historical note, back in the days of Mac OS 8 and 9, my school
started off with the wonderful Office 98, then upgraded to Office 2001,
then downgraded back to Office 98 again for performance reasons. I
really don't want to repeat those same steps).

 

[super64]

I'm currently running Office v X on a Powerbook Ti 1GHz w/ 768MB of RAM
and Mac OS X 10.3.7.
Office v.X runs great, I have not tried 2004. (I don't want to spend
the money now to upgrade)

 

[Fredrik Wahlgren]

Office 2004 contains some bug fixes (such as the bug that prevented you
from saving your Word document) and lifts some restrictions (such as the
size limit that prevented you from accessing your Entourage database).
It also introduces some new features (the new features of Word are
surveyed in my Take Control ebook about Word, so you can read about
them). If none of the new features matter to you, then I'd say that if
*cost* is a factor (e.g. you already have Office X and are thinking of
upgrading) then you might want to stick with the older version. But if
cost is no object, and if your machine meets the system requirements for
using the latest version, then I think it's silly not to use the latest
version, because it is the one that is actively being supported and
developed. m.

I think Excel 2004 isn't recordable using AppleScript.

/ Fredrik

 

[JE McGimpsey]

I think Excel 2004 isn't recordable using AppleScript.

True.

The ability to record VBA and translate to AppleScript, however, is far
more complete than previous recordings, AFAICT. It's still a stop-gap
way of coding either VBA or Applescript, since the VBA recorder relies
on the Selection object rather than on range objects, but it's generally
easy to get a good start.

In addition, the Excel Applescript reference makes writing good
Applescript directly a bit easier than just recording.