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I really really wanted to like Word Office 2008 – I really did. I’ve been using it ever since it came out, even a bit earlier than that from some betas I managed to get my hands on. I thought I would not write anything good/bad about it until I had used it for a while and could objectively judge the most important things when it comes to Microsoft Word: features and performance.

Let’s start with what I like. On my Intel MacBook Pro, Word 2008 is fast – not blazingly fast, but faster than its PPC predecessor. That being said, there are times when I open the application that I can count 20 dock bounces (which in Mac application terminology is quite a bit). I also like the fact that they fixed the most annoying issue with previous versions of Word when you pasted images into documents. You would see them in the document, but when you send it to a Windows user and they opened it, they would see their images replaced by a red X with a message that displayed “Quicktime Decompressor Required”. Now wasn’t that nice? Word for Office 2008 also added support for some templates for TOC, cover pages, headers, footers, and the ability to create and read docx files, which is the default type in which docs are now created in Office 2007 for Windows.

So what’s wrong with Office 2008 for Mac OS X? The Ribbon. What’s wrong with it? It’s NOT there!!!!

Office 2007’s ribbon for all if its products is one of the most brilliant user interfaces I have ever seen:

Not only is it sexy and good looking (can’t believe I actually used those terms) but it really makes using any of these applications a more natural process. When you use the ribbon for the first time, you will be lost and will hate it. After mere days, you will be wondering how did you manage to live without it.

Now, feature-wise, I think that Word 2008 for the Mac has feature parity with Word 2007, but we are stuck with the old interface:

It’s slightly attractive at best, and if you want to get more functionality then you have to invoke the Toolbox button and scavenge through drop down menus to get things done that would otherwise take seconds a 2 clicks with the ribbon.

Is this Microsoft’s fault? I don’t think so, they are trying to please Mac users, which – especially for Microsoft, is a daunting task. A high percentage of Mac users simply hate Microsoft without any reason, and if Microsoft released Office 2008 with a ribbon interface, there would be millions of rants from Mac users telling them how dare them try to impose this. Point in case are the rants form the Tech Help Videos site:

“…Take it from a confirmed Mac user: WE DON’T WANT THE BLASTED RIBBON!!!I want a drop down menu with plainly typed WORDS for commands, no confusing cartoons, and no inflated boxes running across my work window!!…”

The question that remains to be answered is: Would it have killed them to include an optional ribbon interface?

In conclusion, yes – it’s nice to have docx support, see the pasted image bug gone, see the cool galleries; but none of these compensate the fatal flaw of not letting us Mac users have the ribbon.