What to buy: Microsoft Office 2004 or Microsoft Office v. X???

[chuck]

Not concerned about bells & whistles so much as reliability & lack of
bloat. Was all set to get Office 2004, then started hearing & reading
about problems with it.

H E L P ! ! !

Thanks,
CK

 

[Benjamin Amsaleg]

Not concerned about bells & whistles so much as reliability & lack of
bloat. Was all set to get Office 2004, then started hearing & reading
about problems with it.

H E L P ! ! !

Thanks,
CK

Ck,

My simplest answer would be to quote the migration advise we gave to our
customers:

"Migrating or deploying Office Mac:2004 is the recommended solution for all
users with one exception.

Our extensive testing found that PowerPoint 2004 is presenting text in a way
that makes text flow inconsistent enough to require manual adjustment for at
least 1 slide in every 3 presentations. This adjustment is valid in
Powerpoint 2004 and might need to be undone in all other version of
powerpoint (Mac like Win)
We recommend that you study your users Powerpoint usage before deploying
2004.
It might be better to stay on Office:vX for Powerpoint users if:
- Powerpoint is their primary tool
- Your company document naming convention does not mandate long file name
- Your end users will not need the benefit of Unicode support

Again, we recommend deploying Office 2004 for users using mostly Entourage,
Word or Excel. For user using mostly Powerpoint, we recommend that you study
their usage and tests some of their files before deciding to deploy 2004 or
stay on vX"

Note that it looks like European customers are much more prone to text heavy
presentation. I don't recall my US colleagues reporting complains about
PPT:2004


BAM

 

[chuck]

Just to clarify (I was a little FRIED at the time of my
initial post)...

I am doing this upgrade in conjunction with (finally)
upgrading to OS X.

I'm hardly a power user of Word or Excel; I use them
mainly as an adjunct to desktop publishing, also for
occasional personal use. (Currently using version 8.0
for both Word & Excel.) My only contact with PowerPoint
is once a month when a client sends me a production
calendar.

Thanks again,
CK

 

[JE McGimpsey]

Just to clarify (I was a little FRIED at the time of my
initial post)...

I am doing this upgrade in conjunction with (finally)
upgrading to OS X.

I'm hardly a power user of Word or Excel; I use them
mainly as an adjunct to desktop publishing, also for
occasional personal use. (Currently using version 8.0
for both Word & Excel.) My only contact with PowerPoint
is once a month when a client sends me a production
calendar.

Then go with Office 2004. For stability alone it's better, but having
long file names and Unicode support will make things much easier.