Review by cyharriscat

The Office 2004 Student and Teacher Edition suite that I just received forms the final link in a chain from MacWrite and MultiPlan on a Macintosh 128k to Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks on a 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo iMac, and it has amazing similarity when installed in Panther (the OS I needed it to work with) to Office 2001 for Mac Academic version that I have on the same computer in Mac OS 9. After years of having to use iWork just to get an Office suite with a decent spreadsheet that didn’t have the obfuscating UI of Office 2008’s Excel, I jumped at the chance to get Office 2004 and while I only got one key, I can say on the intended machine it makes me want to use X in a way I never had the desire to do before, namely because the Lion and later native Office 2008 screwed up Excel’s UI so badly.

To go from Excel 2004 to Excel 2008 is much more than just the lack of Visual Basic for Applications. It has to do with the UI of it, and whoever on the Excel 2008 design team thought that the Excel 2001 UI was outdated really does deserve to be fired.

As good as Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac is, I’m not into paying the same price for Office minus an email program, and while I may use Lion and later to write reviews, I do just as much general computing (mostly excluding the Internet) on the Mac OS 9 and now Panther extension paradigm.

I love Office 2004, now I see why everyone gave it such glowing reviews during the Tiger and Leopard phases of the Intel Mac era, because Office 2008 shot the wad on Excel.

Too bad I’ll still be doing computing in 9 until I upgrade my CPU and memory on the Panther computer.