Office 2008 for Mac - Great strides or big empty?

I've been using Office 2008 for Mac off-and-on at home, and I must say that I'm sorely disappointed with how badly Microsoft missed the boat on this one. Save your money. There's just not a whole lot to recommend it at this point. Coupla notes, short of writing a full review:

• Yes it's written as a Universal app, so in theory it should be able to leverage those spiffy intel processors you're running if you have a newer Mac. But it feels not one iota faster than Office 2004, which runs in Rosetta emulation.
• Word and Excel have slightly nicer interfaces. I don't know about you, but when I'm typing a proposal, I'm really keeping things simple and the "ribbon" or whatnot is the last thing I'm concerned with.
• Oh, and Office 2008 drops VBA support. I'm not sure what that is in the first place, but I've heard a lot of people clamoring for Microsoft to put it back in. I think it has to do with running special functions and whatnot in Excel. Somebody smarter about that than me can post a reply here (Andy H.,wink, wink).
• Support for Exchange mail servers is gone from the home and student edition. This is a curious choice, considering that many college students use Entourage with their schools' mail systems.
• The "My Day" thingie is clumsy, poorly-executed. And for crying out loud, why didn't they leverage the operating system by making this a widget?!
  
• The new templates for desktop publishing and Powerpoint are nicer, but they still don't hold a candle to Keynote.
• There are a few new fonts that I really like. I'm using them in my other applications. Thanks, MS!

The most unforgivable thing of all, however, is how this new release brings very little love to Entourage. It still uses a monolithic database file that's prone to corruption, hard to backup, and interferes with Time Machine. It still uses a cobbled-together IMAP implementation to talk to Exchange. What exciting new feature has MS touted? You can now set Out of Office replies for your Exchange account right in Entourage. Oh, wow.

Also, be careful if you upgrade to 2008 - you can keep your 2004 applications, but somehow Entourage 2008 takes over your Mail Identities and screws everything up for going back to Entourage 2004. Backup, please.

The Web site behind Office 2008 is a complete joke. Ugly and sparse of real information. The blog has turned into a shouting match, where mostly it's dissatisfied Office for Mac users shouting at Microsoft's Mac developers. Here's one reason why: A Microsoft blogger was trying to be clever with her post, and wrote this as the subject:

"Office 2008 is out in the field, and we're carefully watching the early data. Yes, that's right, we're watching what you're doing."

Ummm....stop trying to be cute. Boy, is that statement a turn-off.

Well, there it is. My recommendation? If you already have Office 2004 for Mac, stick with it. But if you insist on upgrading to keep the giant MS machine rolling by supporting bad software, you can buy it here. Notice, however, the two-and-a-half star reviews.

If you don't have any version of Office, you're pretty much limited to the latest offering from Microsoft, OR you can try Apple's Pages program, park of iWork. Pages is a good word processor with an eye towards design, and comes with some nice templates and styles. It can open Word documents (and its counterpart Numbers can open Excel files), and can even save to those formats with a few extra clicks. And you can easily send your Pages files to Windows-using friends and coworkers as PDF files. Pages also has a compatibility checker to find any areas which your Pages-generated Word file might not be 100% compatible.

For most casual users, Pages will be just fine (and it's a lot cheaper, too). And you can download a 30 day demo. Not so with Office 2008. But if you simply must have 100% Office for Windows compatibility, then you're kinda stuck buying Office 2008.

I won't go into this OpenOffice software the reaaaaallly nerdy people on the forums are always recommending. I tried it. Once. And. It. Sucked. Yeah, it's totally free. But some things are worth paying for.