[CaseCom]

Production to start April 14; street date expected to be in third week in May.

Pre-orders accepted starting today (Tuesday)

Pricing same as for Office v. X: $399 for Standard Edition

http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/2004/04/05/office/
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald...ss/8363866.htm

What I want to know is, what are the upgrade options for owners of Office X? All I'm aware of is the "Technology Guarantee" for people who bought since Office 2004 was announced.

[MartiNZ]

Neat! I'm glad it's coming so soon, although it would be nice if they made sure it was as good as it could be.... As long as they made sure you can properly import PDFs into Word, it should be okay .

[KP*]

I'm very excited about this. I'm getting it as part of the Technology Guarantee plan. I've owned Office X for over a year, but needed to upgrade to VPC6, so I bought the upgrade to Office X Pro (or whatever the thing with VPC is called) knowing that I would then get a free upgrade to Office 2004. So basically I spent the money I would have spent upgrading to Office 2004 in advance so that I could start using VPC6 right away.

I sent in all my rebate stuff and have gotten confirmation that they approved it. Now I just have to wait for them to start shipping.

[brapper]

any beta testers with opinions as to whether it's ready?
any hints of an updated messenger?

[CaseCom]

Originally posted by CaseCom:
What I want to know is, what are the upgrade options for owners of Office X? All I'm aware of is the "Technology Guarantee" for people who bought since Office 2004 was announced.

Found it at the Apple Store:

Any one of the following Microsoft product is required to qualify for the upgrade edition - Office v.X for Mac Standard Edition, Office v.X for Mac Stand Alone Product (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), Office 2001 for Mac, Office 2001 Stand Alone Product (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), Word + Entourage 2001 Special edition, Office 98 Macintosh edition, Office Stand Alone Product (Word, Excel, PowerPoint).

I'd say "good deal" except $230 for an upgrade is not exactly cheap

[krove]

The rumor sites are reporting Unicode support across all apps. All I can say is: its about f***ing time!

The year 2004, the 21st century and it took them this long? Geez... I can't tell you how often I wish Excel would accept simple characters like alpha or sigma, etc (ironically, MacNN's character encoding will not support the display of such characters). The Window's version will allow the insertion of special characters into a spreadsheet, but the Mac version never allowed such characters.

Hopefully now we can use the character palette or at least some equivalent to insert such characters.

[voodoo]

Originally posted by krove:
The rumor sites are reporting Unicode support across all apps. All I can say is: its about f***ing time!

The year 2004, the 21st century and it took them this long? Geez... I can't tell you how often I wish Excel would accept simple characters like alpha or sigma, etc (ironically, MacNN's character encoding will not support the display of such characters). The Window's version will allow the insertion of special characters into a spreadsheet, but the Mac version never allowed such characters.

Hopefully now we can use the character palette or at least some equivalent to insert such characters.

[Simon X]

What about Services? I sure hope support is in the new version?!

[voodoo]

Originally posted by Simon X:
What about Services? I sure hope support is in the new version?!

Hold not thy breath.. I don't know though.

[Diggory Laycock]

Originally posted by krove:
The rumor sites are reporting Unicode support across all apps. All I can say is: its about f***ing time!

But Apparently Bi-Di does not work.

I hope the new VirtualPC has good USB Support.

[sanity assassin]

Originally posted by brapper:
any beta testers with opinions as to whether it's ready?
any hints of an updated messenger?

I haven't really pushed it, but it seems pretty much feature full, and stable. The new column view in Entourage is pretty damn nice.

[mishap]

Originally posted by sanity assassin:
The new column view in Entourage is pretty damn nice.

hmmmmm....

[sanity assassin]

Originally posted by mishap:
hmmmmm....

Wanna sneak peek?

edit: 1 sec, i put up the wrong pic, lol

edit 2: got it

[threestain]

yes please. I'm trying to decide on whether to dump the money into microsoft's gaping maw, or spend it on something fun. like gin.

[dru]

Originally posted by sanity assassin:
I haven't really pushed it, but it seems pretty much feature full, and stable. The new column view in Entourage is pretty damn nice.

But is it SNAPPY�?

[gorickey]

Originally posted by dru:
But is it SNAPPY�?

Not at all.

[mitchell_pgh]

While I do not like the idea of giving money to Microsoft, I will buy the education version of this application. It's a necessary evil in my opinion. If sales tank, and M$ removes Office, Apple will start to falter and potentially plunge us back in the the late 90's.

If Office and Work work a little better, then I'll be happy.

I'm a Mail.app user, and I have no plans on switching to something that chews up my e-Mail. I stopped using M$ eMail applications when they abandoned Outlook Express for Mac.

[Montanan]

So does anyone know if Office 2004 is going to require a Microsoft-generated activation key to work, the way MS's Windows apps do?

[gorickey]

Originally posted by Montanan:
So does anyone know if Office 2004 is going to require a Microsoft-generated activation key to work, the way MS's Windows apps do?

I don't believe so.

[typoon]

Originally posted by CaseCom:
Found it at the Apple Store:





I'd say "good deal" except $230 for an upgrade is not exactly cheap

And people complain about an OS X upgrade.