I went to the Apple Store Saturday and played with Office 2008 on a nice MBP. It was pretty slick, till it crashed after about 30 seconds of usage-I was flipping through templates and it just got confused and died. I expect it will improve with a 'service pack' MS is famous for. I didn't find it particularly slow, but not really noticeably faster than Office 2004 in emulation, which is a little sad. Again, the app is pretty tolerable, but I wish they would make a nice lightweight editing program that was fast, rather than 'taking advantage of the latest computer speeds' and making it even more of a resource hog. Click to expand.Microsoft could care less about the Mac community. I spoke to one of the managers on the design team at Macworld about the missing VB Macros support and she said it was due to Apple switching over to Intel and Microsoft ran short on time so in order to get it out in time for Macworld they could not include it.

That's such BS because there are a lot of new (Mac Only) things in Office 2008 that many people don't need like the Expression Media Pack. They had time to make that but not include VB Macros support? We need this for compatibility with the Windows version.

Sometimes I could just smack Bill Gates. Microsoft could care less about the Mac community. I spoke to one of the managers on the design team at Macworld about the missing VB Macros support and she said it was due to Apple switching over to Intel and Microsoft ran short on time so in order to get it out in time for Macworld they could not include it. That's such BS because there are a lot of new (Mac Only) things in Office 2008 that many people don't need like the Expression Media Pack.

They had time to make that but not include VB Macros support? We need this for compatibility with the Windows version. Sometimes I could just smack Bill Gates. Click to expand.Bill Gates has little to do with it anymore. The VB stuff is not so huge, I am glad they replaced it with AppleScript. I don't think 2008 is as big a problem for MS as 2007-It's their Windows users they should be afraid of alienating.

As for 2008, I thought the UI design was very nice by comparison with 2007 and 2004. I am hoping they will correct some of the performance issues and stability issues in the relatively near future. Let's not forget that Leopard itself isn't necessarily all that stable yet, though it is performing well. I've installed Office for Mac 2008 but so far I have yet to really test out any of the apps as i keep using iWork instead. I figured I will use it only when people send me a.doc or.xls. Or.ppt file, which technically I can open in iWork. But for quality assurance purpose I rather work in Office to be safe, especially Powerpoint.

A lot of the fancy stuff does not translate into the Windows version at all- i.e. Drop shadows in Office for Mac 2004 does not look anywhere near how it should look in Windows. I'm actually wondering if the ridiculously low load speed on the Office 2008 Suite Applications has something to do with font activation. I run Suitcase on my MacBookPro (don't all creatives?) and I notice that when Word 2008 is attempting to load (it takes it over a minute and a half on my machine - which has over 4000 fonts stored on it) Suitcase pops up a cautionary error which tells me that I have a font that 'might' be corrupt. When I check the error dialog to see which font it is (always the same one) it is listing a font in a directory that Suitcase has NOT been given to manage.

However this feature can only be accessed by the administrator. Atf cleaner exe. Another important feature is the cleaning of the Java cache. The Java cache memory usually contains lots of malware that need to be cleaned on regular basis for keeping the computer safe.

In fact, it is a font in a directory which contains nothing but copied data from an old machine that I sent off for repair a while ago, and have not had time to reinstate yet. So something in Word is causing it to push Suitcase into activating fonts that I've never told Suitcase even exist. No other application does this. Right now Suitcase runs a 'standard' set of System fonts. I also noticed this, which reinforces my view on this.

When Word DOES eventually load, and the load time is something akind to what I might expect if an application were trying to load 4000+ typefaces. I can click ANY of the menus in Word 2008 and they come up straight away. The Word 2008 FONT menu, however, will not highlight immediately and just the act of hovering over it causes the little Apple ticking clock 'I'm thinking about doing what you've asked.' Icon as the mouse pointer.

It takes in excess of 20 seconds for this menu to load and appear, AND I've got WYSIWYG font face menu display turned OFF, and Word has gained access to FAR MORE fonts than are activated in Suitcase or resident in the System Font folder. This would appear to be the root of the problem. Office is cacheing more fonts than the system is offering as being 'activated'.

Between them, Office and Apple's Font Book appear to have taken ALL the fonts on the computer, and inserted them into the SystemFonts folder. So when Word activates, it is literally loading everything that Font Book has seen - and moved - by way of fonts. I can find no way to deactivate or uninstall FontBook so that only Suitcase is in control. Working on using my machine as a test solution to this hunch.

It seems that whenever Suitcase has loaded a font, FontBook has recognised it and somehow felt the need to keep it permanently in the System Fonts directory. Theory confirmed, resolution effected. Here's how I fixed this problem, and bear in mind, Excel took over a minute to load before hand. Word took a minute and a half. I use Suitcase, so in FontBook I deactivated EVERY option in the Preferences pertaining to 'automatic' activation.

Now Suitcase controls ALL my fonts. I moved all my Suitcase controlled fonts to a directory which was NOT named 'Fonts' (it was before) and called it instead 'Font Collections' I deleted all my former font sets in suitcase and reloaded them from the new 'Font Collections' directory.

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I went in to UserLibraryFonts and deleted every swine font in there, noticing that there were over 1400 that should NOT have been there (it appears to have been using FontBook which caused them to move there). Then I restarted the computer. I did not open any more font applications, just let Suitcase do it's work with the basic 'system' font set from the computer system root directory.

Word2008 loaded in less than 5-7 seconds. Excel loaded in 3 seconds. Hopefully using Suitcase for all font management will KEEP the problem sorted, but until I prove otherwise, I'm as happy as a pig in mud because Office 2008 runs faster on my Mac than it does on my PC (which is the way it should be). I think if you start looking logically at fonts and how they are activated on your Mac, you'll be close to chasing a solution like I have. Theory confirmed, resolution effected. Here's how I fixed this problem, and bear in mind, Excel took over a minute to load before hand.

Word took a minute and a half. I use Suitcase, so in FontBook I deactivated EVERY option in the Preferences pertaining to 'automatic' activation. Now Suitcase controls ALL my fonts.

I moved all my Suitcase controlled fonts to a directory which was NOT named 'Fonts' (it was before) and called it instead 'Font Collections' I deleted all my former font sets in suitcase and reloaded them from the new 'Font Collections' directory. I went in to UserLibraryFonts and deleted every swine font in there, noticing that there were over 1400 that should NOT have been there (it appears to have been using FontBook which caused them to move there). Then I restarted the computer. I did not open any more font applications, just let Suitcase do it's work with the basic 'system' font set from the computer system root directory.

Word2008 loaded in less than 5-7 seconds. Excel loaded in 3 seconds. Hopefully using Suitcase for all font management will KEEP the problem sorted, but until I prove otherwise, I'm as happy as a pig in mud because Office 2008 runs faster on my Mac than it does on my PC (which is the way it should be). I think if you start looking logically at fonts and how they are activated on your Mac, you'll be close to chasing a solution like I have.

By The Word 2008 for Mac thesaurus offers alternative word choices and is one of Word’s most useful writing tools. The thesaurus works just like a printed thesaurus, but it’s even better because it’s faster than leafing through pages, and it’s always just a couple of clicks away when you’re using any of the Office applications. To display a list of suggested synonyms, right-click or Control+click a word for which you want to replace and then choose Synonyms from the pop-up menu that appears. Then click the word you want to use instead from the list of suggestions.

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Another way to look up synonyms is through the Toolbox’s Reference Tools pane. To open it, either.

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Choose Thesaurus from the pop-up Synonyms submenu. Choose View→Reference Tools and then click the triangle to the left of the word Thesaurus to open the Thesaurus panel, if it’s not already open. Press Command+Option+R and then click the triangle to the left of the word Thesaurus to open the Thesaurus panel, if it’s not already open. The Reference Tools pane of the Toolbox appears with the Thesaurus panel expanded. Click the Insert button to place the word selected in the Synonyms list in your document at the insertion point or click the Look Up button to see synonyms for that word. To find synonyms for another word, type it in the search field at the top of the window and then press Return or Enter.

Word keeps track of your recent searches for you. To see a pop-up menu displaying all the words you’ve typed in the search field recently, click the little triangle next to the magnifying glass icon. Choose a word from this menu, and Word looks it up immediately; you don’t have to press Return or Enter.