[X4U] MS Office 2004 Feedback

[eleventhvolume]

> I am thinking about ordering Microsoft Office 2004 and was interested in
> feedback from those who are using it. I remember some comments some time
> back that it was slow and had other problems.
> 
> Is it worth using now? Thanks.
I haven't had problems with speed since installing. To be honest though I
can't see anything that makes the upgrade particularly worth the money. It
seems more like a point release. I should say this observation is really
only based on use of Entourage and Word.

For example, I haven't found occasion to use Word's Notebook View, nor the
project options. The revised 'track changes' function is annoying and on my
Powerbook 15" the unresizable width of the new dictionary/thesaurus window
hogs too much of the screen. The only thing that makes Word more useful for
me is that you can now save longer file names, but this doesn't make the
expenditure worthwhile.

With Entourage I found myself turning off the 'View messages by Groups'
pretty quickly followed by my reverting to viewing the preview pane below
rather than alongside the email list. And quite a lot more spam emails seem
to get through with the new version than the old one (and things haven't
improved over time to the point where I'm now trying out a demo version of
Spam Sieve to deal with the problem). I'm not sure but if this version is
newly compatible with an Outlook server then that would be a selling point.

Others' usage will vary from mine I'm sure, but I'm very glad my work paid
for this upgrade.

All the best, Colin.