[X4U] MS Office 2008 delayed

[Randy B. Singer]

On Aug 4, 2007, at 6:32 PM, Zane H. Healy wrote:

> Thanks Randy, that actually makes me feel *slightly* less  
> apprehensive about the upcoming Office 2008.

I'm sure that like every past release of Word, it will be a mixed bag  
of fixes/updates and bugs/unchanged features.

>
> I'm curious, has anything been said about font handling and using  
> it with Adobe InDesign?

Other that articles about the new document format, and the new user  
interface, I've heard very little about what will be in the new  
version of Office.  There is a MS Mac Business Unit blog here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/macmojo/

Also see:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/jan07/01-09MacworldPR.mspx

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/110403.asp

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/01/10/ 
quick_and_dirty_snapshots_of_microsoft_office_2008_for_mac.html

> These are the two areas I'm most concerned with, along with spell  
> checking and grammar checking.

That's interesting.  What would you like to see improved about spell  
checking and grammar checking?

I don't care for Word's grammar checker myself, but I'm not sure that  
I would find any grammar checker to be useful.  I really like Word's  
inline spell checking, my only complaint is that it sometimes forgets  
about my custom dictionaries and I have to remind the program to use  
them.

> I would really like to seen the font handling improved.  The sad  
> thing is, this is one area where MS Word 2004 blows anything else  
> I've tried away.

How would you like to see it improved?

> What really gets me is that Apple Pages doesn't even seem to be  
> able to handle OpenType fonts!

I strongly suspect that when Leopard is released we will see a vastly  
upgraded version of Pages.  Though I don't expect it to get anywhere  
close to being a competitor for Word.  However it might be a strong  
competitor for Nisus Pro.

___________________________________________
Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html
___________________________________________